Critical Damage

Modifier · offense

In short: How much harder a critical hit lands: a 150% base, raised by bonuses that add to it and by bonuses that scale the base itself.

Percentage points on the crit multiplier, which is 1 + the ship’s base crit bonus + every bonus, summed additively. Debuffs enter the same sum as negative points. Two things sit outside it: Min Critical Damage clamps the result from below, and Hull Breach multiplies the finished multiplier by 1.5 as the last step. A hostile’s own Critical Damage written as MultiplyAdd is the exception: it scales the hostile’s base crit damage, base × (1 + bonus), so +800% on a base of 150% crits at ×13.5 rather than ×9.5; reductions on our side then come off that as points.

Canonical key: CritDamage
Game code: 10
Game name: CLIENTMODIFIERTYPE_MODCRITDAMAGE
Subsystem: offense
Badge shorthand: Crit Dmg

A critical hit multiplies the shot by the ship’s critical damage. Every weapon starts from a base of 150% (×1.5), and both damage pools of the shot, standard and isolytic, take the same multiplier.

Bonuses combine in two ways, told apart by the buff’s operation. Most critical damage bonuses add: their percentages sum onto the 150% base. A bonus that multiplies instead scales the 150% base itself: +10,000% that way adds 15,000 percentage points, not 10,000, and then the additive bonuses join on top. So a scaling bonus is worth half again its face value, whatever else is equipped.

While the target has Hull Breach, critical damage is multiplied by 1.5 on top of everything above.

Reductions to an opponent’s critical damage take percentage points off its total, and they can take it all the way to zero. A hostile cut that far still rolls its critical hits, but each one deals no damage at all: the combat log records the hit with every damage figure at 0. A Critical Damage Floor on the hostile sets the lowest the reductions can reach, so hostiles that carry one keep landing their critical hits.

A reduction that scales rather than subtracts (research that cuts an opponent’s “true” critical damage, after all other bonuses) shrinks only the part of the multiplier above ×1: a −15% cut turns a ×3.2 critical hit into ×2.87, not ×2.72. Every subtracting reduction lands before it, including one that comes and goes during the fight, such as a cut that holds only while the opponent has Hull Breach.