Polaron Damage

Concept · Damage and defense

In short: The damage of Polaron weapons, which hostiles carry. It skips standard mitigation, Apex Barrier, critical mitigation and shields; only Polaron Mitigation reduces it, and what gets through lands on hull.

Polaron is the damage Polaron weapons deal: a weapon subtype of its own, beside Energy and Kinetic. Polaron weapons are carried by hostiles, and players face them. It is a damage type of its own, separate from the Infusion damage your Infusion Capacitors add, with its own mitigation stat. Older CSVs call it “Focused Polaron”.

Mitigation. It skips every other defense: standard mitigation, Apex Barrier, critical mitigation and shields. Its only reduction is Polaron Mitigation: every 500 points raises the Polaron damage a ship can take by 1%, so each hit loses M / (50,000 + M). In the logs every Polaron hit put its whole post-mitigation amount into hull and nothing into shields. 37,500 mitigation cut each hit by 42.86%, and 50,000 by exactly half.

Critical hits. A Polaron weapon’s critical hit keeps the hostile’s own Critical Damage: reductions to an opponent’s critical damage do not lower it. Against a crew whose reductions took the same hostile’s standard-weapon critical hits down to no damage at all, its Polaron critical hits still dealt their full 150%.

Your cuts and delays. Nothing you do to the enemy’s weapons reaches a Polaron weapon. A cut to the enemy’s damage, such as the research Defensive Tactics’ −30%, leaves its hits at the weapon’s own roll, raised only by the hostile’s own bonuses (On Lookout’s Polaron Damage). A delay to the enemy’s next attack, such as Chang’s Dogs of War, does not hold it back: in the Polaron Prototype logs Chang held the standard weapon to rounds 1, 3 and 6, while both Polaron weapons fired all four shots every round. Against a hostile whose damage is mostly Polaron, an officer who only cuts or delays the enemy’s weapons does little; one who repairs hull or adds Polaron Mitigation does more.

Stacking Polaron Mitigation. Flat Polaron Mitigation adds up first, and a multiplying bonus scales the sum: Planetfall Kirk’s captain maneuver adds 20% of the Polaron Mitigation already there (more with its synergy), so it adds nothing without a flat source: with no flat source on the ship, none of a fight’s Polaron hits are reduced. On flat points it scales them exactly.

In the combat log. Older CSVs carry Polaron in two columns, under its first name: Focused Polaron Damage and Mitigated Focused Polaron Damage. Unlike every other damage column, the export writes Focused Polaron Damage after mitigation, so the amount before mitigation is Focused Polaron Damage + Mitigated Focused Polaron Damage. On rows where Polaron was mitigated, the export also writes the mitigated amount into Total Damage. The parser corrects both. The column has been reported as an export bug, so a later build may change it. A CSV with an “Infusion Damage” column is read in the new names, where “Polaron Damage” is this damage; see CSV Combat Logs.