Infusion Damage

Concept · Damage and defense

In short: Damage your Infusion Capacitors add to each shot, as a share of its standard damage. It skips standard mitigation and shields; the target’s Infusion Mitigation, Apex Barrier and critical mitigation reduce it, and what gets through lands on hull.

Infusion is damage your ship adds to its shots through Infusion Capacitors. It is a damage type of its own, separate from the Polaron damage hostiles’ weapons deal, with its own mitigation stat. The game’s internal codes and older CSVs still call it “Polaron” and the capacitors “Polaron Capacitors”.

Infusion Capacitors. Every 1,000 capacitors adds Infusion damage equal to 1% of a shot’s standard weapon damage, so the Infusion share = capacitors / 100,000. Flat capacitor bonuses add together first; Infusion Capacitor Spike is the same modifier with a multiplying operation, and scales that sum: total capacitors = flat × (1 + spike). Together, Infusion share = (capacitors / 100,000) × (1 + spike). The logs match exactly: 10,000 capacitors with +10% spike gave Infusion equal to 11% of the shot’s standard damage, and 15,000 with +10% gave 16.5%.

Infusion is dealt on top of a shot’s standard damage, the way isolytic is, not taken out of it despite the “converts” wording in the ability text. The logs rule out every converted reading: Infusion is exactly the capacitor share of the full standard amount (11.00%, not the 12.4% a reduced standard would give), the target’s standard mitigation removed that full amount, and the isolytic-to-standard ratio held unchanged when the share rose from 11% to 16.5%.

Mitigation. Infusion is a damage type of its own: it never merges with standard or isolytic damage, and standard mitigation and shields do not touch it. Three things reduce it, each multiplying what is left, so their order does not change what lands: the target’s Infusion Mitigation, Apex Barrier and, on a critical hit, critical mitigation, which cuts it twice, as it does isolytic: once off the gross Infusion before Infusion Mitigation, and again after Apex Barrier. What gets past them lands on hull. Infusion Mitigation works like this: every 500 points raises the Infusion damage a ship can take by 1%, the way hull points would: incoming Infusion is divided by (1 + M / 50,000), where M is the target’s Infusion Mitigation after your reductions to it. As a share of each hit, that removes M / (50,000 + M). In the logs, 29,000 net mitigation removed 36.7% of each Infusion hit, and hull took exactly the rest, while the same shots’ isolytic remainder went to shields as usual.

Where it works. These abilities apply against Federation, Klingon and Romulan (FKR) hostiles, in specific battle types, and only while flying the U.S.S. Vengeance or a Grade 6+ FKR ship. The ability tables list each one’s own battle types; some Planetfall below deck abilities apply against armadas or outposts instead.

In the combat log. Older CSVs carry Infusion in two columns, under its first name: Polaron Damage, the amount before mitigation like every other damage column, and Mitigated Polaron Damage. The parser reads either spelling: a CSV with an “Infusion Damage” column is read in the new names, any other in the first ones, where “Polaron Damage” is Infusion. See CSV Combat Logs.

Not yet observed in a log: Infusion against a target with Apex Barrier or critical mitigation, so where the game records those cuts, and what happens when reductions push Infusion Mitigation below zero.