Gratuitous Space Battles 2 can seem a little overwhelmning at first, with its many stats, attribuiites, values and charts and the variety of different weapons and defenses to choose from. Which weapons to choose? why are my weapons doing so little damage? how do I defend against *that*? These are all valid questions. In this guide, I'll go through the basic combat mechanics of the game so you have more of an idea as to what is going on!

When you select a weapon in the GSB2 ship designer, you see a whole bunch of stats. Some are more important than others, and when it comes to working out what damage your weapon does, there are a total of six, yes SIX, stats you need to understand to make sensible choices. Don't worry, they aren't as complex as they seem at first...

The six values are:
Damage
Hull Damage
Armor Damage
Shield Damage
Shield Penetration
Armor Penetration

Lets go through each of them...

Damage, is basically exacvtly what you would expect. It's the total amount of BANG that this weapon has in a single shot. The higher the better (although be aware not all weapons have the same rate of fire...). This works as expected, so all things being equal, a weapon doing 20 damage will destroy a ship faster than one doing 10 damage. This also directly correlates to hitpoints. If a ships hull has 400 hitpoints and takes 401 damage... it's toast!

Hull Damage, is the relative strength of this weapon against a ships hull, which is basically the internal structure of the ship. If this is 100%, then if this weapon hits, and therte is nor armor or shield, it will do the expected amount of damage points as listed above. If it's 50%, it will do half that amount.

Armor Damage is the same value but describes the weapons strength against armor. You can probably guess by now that some weapons are better against armor, and some are better against hulls, and so on...

Shield Damage, is obviously the same but with shields. Note that a single shot *can* sometimes end up applying damage to more than one 'layer', if it wipes out a ships shields or armor...

Shield Penetration is where it gets interesting. This value is not relevant to the other numbers, but is compared against the shield 'resistance' of the defending ship. Shield penetration is basically the 'warhead strength' of the weapon, in other words it shows whether it has the capability to inflict any damage whatsoever on the enemy. If your weapons shield penetration is lower than the targets shield resistance, you weapon will literally bounce off and prove totally useless...

Armor penetration is the same mechanic but used for armor. This works the same way. Its possible to have high shield penetration (and to thus vaporise the enemy shields) but awful armorn penetration, in which case your shots will harmlessly bounce off the enemy armor.

The reason all those stats are required for each weapon is because of the way defenses work in GSB2. Basically ships come with three layers, and you need to peel those layers like an onion to destroy the enemy ship...

SHIELDS

First up is the shields. They may or may not be present, but they are the first line of defense. All weapons hit the shields first, and the shields have to be taken down before you can get any further. That means you MUST have some weapons capable of beating the stated 'shield resistance' of the enemy ship (determined by the higherst resistance value of its installed shield modules). But in case you would like an alternative strategy you can always 'disrupt' the shields instead...

Shield disruption weapons come in various flavors, and when they inflict enough 'damage' the enemy shield is 'disrupted', meaning it effectively gets turned off until the engineers have a chance to re-engage the projection matrix and bring the system back on line. During that time, the ship is vulnerable.

You can see this happen to your own ships in battl;e from the shield stability readout when selecting a ship...

Something worth being aware of is that shields regenerate over time, and in addition, they can be boosted by destroyers using a shield projection beam. Reducing a shield strength to 50% will not achieve much if you then pause and watch it return to 100%...


ARMOR

Armor is the next line of defense. The good news is that enemy armor does not automatically regenerate. The bad news is that it can be repaired by an armor repair module. Just as with shields, some weapons are good against armor in comparison to the other layers. Once the shields are down, you might require different weapons to wipe out the enemy armor. Once that is done it brings us to....

HULL
Hull is where hitpoints come into play. Every module you place in a ship has hitpoints and these constitute the internal structure of the vessel. Some are proprotionately higher in hit points that others (often these modules are called 'reinforced or armored'). Once all of the hitpoints are damaged by incoming fire, the ship will explode. Also be aware that individual modules take damage during battle with each hull-damaging shot. It's quite possible to have some lucky shots knock out the enemy weapons, for example.

Hull does not regenerate, but as with armor, there are repair modules that can be used to carry out mid-battle repairs. Repair systems require a brief bit of 'peace and quiet' to function, so a ship under constant bombardment will not get much use out of them. Thus it's best to have a 'cautious' order set for your repair-enabled ships so they can withdraw and lick their wounds...

If only the mechanics were that simple eh? But space war is a dirty, complicated business. The three special cases its worth pointing out are lucky shots, radiation and leaky shields...

Lucky Shots
Armor is never perfect. The engineers do their best, but frankly its minimum wage welding work, and every now and then a rivet has not been applied correctly, or a seal not welded with enthusiasm. As a result, roughly 3% of shots that impact armor somehow get through the cracks and do some damage.
This might seem so small as to be insignificant, but when three squadrons of enemy fighters are constantly raining fire upon a frigate, expect it to take damage through the armor over time...

Radiation

Radiation damage is special. The weapons that deliver the radiation 'payload' may or may not inflict damage in the conventional way, but once a radiation 'dose' hits a ships internals...it will persist there doing additional damage (slowly weakening in strength) for some time, regardless of the state of the ships armor or shield. If you ever see a ship explode that has full armor and shields, this is what happened. Pesky radiation.
There *is* radiation shielding available that defends against this, if this really troubles you...

Leaky Shields

Shields are not put together in a single blob, but in different deflector regions, meaning that sometimes part of a shield can be down, while the rest is fine. When shield damage hits a ship, it gets divided into four chunks. Each of those chunks then impacts a randomly selected shield module on that ship. With few shield modules, one may get multiple splats. Each quarter of the impact is resolved as an individual impact.
What this means in practice is that sometimes, a shot can be 90% absorbed the shield, but 10% of it might leak through to the next layer, if it happened to be the 'final straw' for a shield module which it knocks out. If you ever see a ship with armor damage which has still got shields, this is probably why...