Introduction

Have you ever fought a battle, where you seemed to have a bigger fleet, but your friend somehow managed to come on top and now you are losing the game? That’s probably because he read this guide before you ;)

In this guide we will talk about basic combat mechanics, ship counters, changes in Sins 2 and much more!

Understanding Defense Stats

Every ship has multiple defense stats. Smaller ships tend to have not all 6 types of defenses, with your race pick influencing what stat will be represented more. Advents unsurprisingly excel in shields, TEC in armor, and Vasari in hull regeneration. Vasari, being many millennia older than TEC or Advent will tend to utilize more defensive stats overall but usually at a higher cost.

Defenses can be divided into two categories - actual hit points (shields, armor, hull points, crippled hull) and damage reduction (durability, armor strength). To kill a ship you need to set all of the hit points to 0. The 4 types of hitpoints are not just flavors, as each hit point type has a unique feature.

Damage Reduction

We actually have to start with the damage reduction attributes, before we get to the hit points.

Durability is very akin to the old “shield mitigation” from Sins:Rebellion. It has different numbers, but the effect is pretty much the same. The benefit of this rebranding is that people will no longer assume that “shield mitigation” only applies to shields, which was wrong for Sins:Re. This means durability applies to ALL hitpoints (shields, armor, hull points, crippled hull). Durability is countered by “pierce” value of a weapon. The exact formula will be shown in a following chapter.

Armor strength is another damage reduction attribute, which however works only on armor hit points. It is NOT countered by pierce value of enemy weapons , which provides a much more reliable source of damage reduction. The formula for damage reduction for armor strength is very similar to that of durability.

Hit Point Attributes

Let’s move on to hit point attributes and start with shields. TEC frigates and cruisers do not have those until later into the game, but their capital ships have them from the start. Other races utilize shields on a more common basis. Shields’ unique feature is “shield burst”. Shield burst is triggered some time after ship’s shields get down. Basically, it’s a recharge of shield hit points after a timer. The timer depends on ship, but will be usually between 40-80 seconds. Meaning, your ship can get a spontaneous extra pool of health, should it survive a bit longer in combat. Enemies do see the timer of the shield burst, so a skilled player will try to focus fire a ship, before it is able to recharge it’s shields.

Armor is your next line of defense, once shields are down. This is also the most effective type of hit points, as armor combines damage reduction from durability and armor strength. The benefit from armor strength is actually multiplicative with durability, so this is really a tough spot on a ship.

Hull will be the last hit points pool for smaller ships. Armor strength no longer applies, so frigates and cruisers who are down to hull, will likely not see the other day. Capital ships (and titans) are another story. Those gigantic ships have an extra mechanic. Once hull reaches 0 they get a new health bar “crippled hull” which allows them to live a bit longer.

Crippled hull is really the final hit points pull for your most elite ships. It can often save lives of those valuable ships, as you get that extra life. However, if a ship enters a crippled state, it will not be able to use any abilities, weapons or components. You have to repair your ship above certain threshold before it becomes functional. Crippled hull is hidden from the UI until your capital ship has lost all other hull points, such as in screenshot below:

Finally repairing is not a hit point stat, but it contributes to the life of your ship. Each ship has individual passive repair stats. Those are however disabled during combat. Therefore they do not contribute to survivability in a single battle, but help a lot if you deal with waves of attacks. You can access those values either by pressing alt, while hovering mouse over your ship, or checking the defenses as shown in the picture:

Understanding Offense Stats

We will switch to Kol to explain the offense stats. After all, it’s the capital ship which has been greeting new players from the intro video for over a decade.

Each weapon has 4 stats shown in game. It’s quantity, type (e.g. autocannon, gauss, missiles), DPS and pierce.

The weapon type, unless it’s missiles, is mostly relevant for buffs and flavor. Buffs can come from abilities, components or technologies. Especially technologies are often limited to buff only a specific weapon type. Like this T1 technology for TEC buffs only autocannons:

Second stat is dps. This is a straight forward value of damage a weapon deals per second (before damage reduction comes into play).

NOTE: DPS shown on the card is for 1 weapon only. In case of Kol we have 2 gauss cannons, each dealing 17.3 DPS. Meaning dps of all gauss cannons is 34.6 dps. And dps of the entire ship is 99.3 at lvl 1.

Pierce is a counter value to durability. Having more pierce, than enemy has durability provides no benefit. So usually you want to match ships with high pierce against high durability ships (such as capital ships), and throw your low pierce ships against low durability ships (such as corvettes).

Base durability value for capital ships is 500. Gauss cannons on Kol have pierce of 500, making Kol a capital ship killer.

Missiles Inbound!

Well, unless you bring flak to the party.

Missiles deserve their own tiny chapter, as Sins 2 introduces a major change to how those function. Each missile is a “unit” with health bar, which can be shot down by flak weapons or abilities. They have high pierce damage, making them perfect capital ship slayers, and their dps is one of the highest in the game. So surprising your enemy with a few missiles cruisers can mean a quick end to his capital ship, unless he brings enough of flak defenses. Meanwhile, Vasari do get even deadlier missiles, as those can bypass shields.

Some capital ships have flak weapons installed on them, Sova Carrier is probably the best capital ship in this matter as it houses 9 point defense cannons, which are able to shut down fire from several Javelis frigates.

Sova Carrier can easily shoot down all missiles from a single Javelis frigate. But once it faces multiple Javelis, missiles get dangerously close even through it’s specialized defences:

As you can note on the screenshot, many PD guns are not facing the incoming missile. This is not because they are shooting down missiles from other direction, but because they cannot fire through the “bridge” of the ship. There are 4 PD guns at the rear, but only one of them is currently firing. If we were to face our rear towards Javelis frigates, bridge would be no longer in the way, and 8 of 9 PD guns would be able to provide protection.

Ship Firing Arcs

As seen in the last screenshot, firing arcs can be a life changer. Unlike Sins:Rebellion, ships do not arbitrarily fire in a 90° arc. They have ROTATING guns! Well, not all ships. Some smaller ones did not get into the cool kids club.

This makes knowing your firing arcs important. You will get a feeling of it, simply by observing your ships, but we will give a few examples here.

As we mentioned, Kol has 2 gauss cannons. Both are marked in the screenshot below:

Those are your giant slayer cannons with 500 pierce, so being able to fire from them (or avoid their fire) is very important.

Due to their position above (and below) the main hull, both cannons can rotate in 360° in 2-Dimensional space, so flying in circles around Kol will not help you avoid it’s vengeance.

However Sins is a 3-Dimensional space. So diving below or above enemy Kol, will render one of the Gauss cannons go silent, as it will not be able to rotate and fire through Kol himself. That’s -50% dps from gauss cannons, which are the real damage dealers.

Another example with Kol weaponry - on the left side of Kol you have 2 of it’s medium autocannons.

They do rotate, but only in a 180° arc (of the 2-D plane). Therefore, if you do want to maximize your damage against smaller ships, you should place your Kol not in front but in the middle of enemy formation.

There are also mounted weapons. If you were to look at a cobalt, you would notice, that it’s cannons are in fact mounted to the ship:

This means, cobalts have a very limited fire arc in front of them. And it’s not 90°, as it would have been in Sins:Re. The actual value is closer to 15°. So even flanking cobalts makes a huge difference, as they will not be able to fire back.

Ship Counters

Each race has their set of ships, with same counters for same class of ships, but with differences in the ship classes themselves. For example your light frigates (TEC: Cobalt, Vasari: Ravastra, Advent: Disciple) are the most basic frigate, and will excel against enemy flak frigates. But Vasari do not have any flak frigate, so light frigates will have a much more limited usage against them.

NOTE: Unlike Sins:Rebellion, there are no “hidden” damage multipliers. A light frigate counters flak not because it gets a hidden buff, but because the in-game stats are fine tuned to allow him excel in this role.

Light frigates are a semi-counter to corvettes. If they can catch them of course. But if facing Vasari, you should rather specialize your fleet and build own flak frigates, which counter corvettes.

NOTE: Unlike Sins:Rebellion, long range frigates are not a counter to light frigates. Instead, they are a hard counter to capital ships. Which you will notice already at the stage of colonization, as even 1 Javelis frigate will deal massive damage to your capital ship, should it lack PD guns.

Carriers allow you to fight from a far, and heavy cruisers are the ultimate non-capital ship class.

NOTE: Unlike Sins:Rebellion, anti-structure cruisers can attack other targets, but buildings, and actually are decent at killing high value targets, such as capital ships and titans.

Finally, support cruisers are countered by everything, but their role there is to support your fleet, so that’s where they excel.

Fleet Annihilation Danger

Titans and some capital ships have abilities capable of destroying entire fleets in a matter of a single button click.

Those are the AOE abilities. Some AOE abilities will require several shots (like Ragnarov titan), some will actually be a “fire and forget” (like Marza’s missile barrage). Not knowing, and more importantly, not countering those abilities will often lead to loss of an entire fleet.

This is why you should watch out for following ships:

 [UPD (ADVENT AOE SHIPS)]

Ships listed here are not meant to be “only ships you build”. Sins is all about finding a counter to your opponent. And while those ships are dangerous, this statement is true only if you try to “auto battle” them. But in truth, there are plenty of disable and support capital ships, who can counter this danger.

To come on top of your opponent, you will have to make use of both, the AOE damage dealers, and their counters.

Damage Reduction Formula

For the most hardcore players, this section will explain the math behind values of durability and armor strength.

Durability affects all 4 kinds of hit points, and is calculated BEFORE armor strength comes in for armor.

IMPORTANT: Having more pierce than durability does not increase damage.

First of all, you need to subtract pierce from durability. So if a capital ship has 500 durability, and a Javelis has 400 pierce, that’s 500-400 = 100 (effective durability)

Damage dealt to a ship is calculated as 100/(100 + effective durability) in %. So for our example that’s 100/(100+100) = 50%. Meaning a Javelis frigate deals 50% of it’s original damage to a capital ship.

A flak frigate with 0 pierce would deal only: 100/(100+500) = 16,7% of it’s original dps.

In other terms, when comparing dps between ships, keep in mind, that a Javelis frigate has 3x more effective dps, than a garda against capital ships.

Here is a graph of effective damage %, depending on effective durability:

Armor strength in fact uses the same formula, applied to effective damage AFTER it was reduced by effective durability. This means a multiplicative stacking between those 2 parameters. But keep in mind that this one applies to armor hit points only.

It would require a 3-D graph and a PhD to understand the graph, so we will simply look at a few examples in a table:

[UPD (Add 3 advent ships to the table)]