Shield Tech

Shield Tech raises the shields on everything you own. Every level adds 10% of a unit's base shield rating, on ships and on defenses alike. That is all it does. It will not make your guns hit harder or your hulls tougher, see Weapons Tech and Armor Tech for those.

Effect

Each level adds 10% of the base shield, and the levels do not compound. Level 1 gives you 110% of base, level 5 gives 150%, level 10 gives 200%. It is base plus 10% a level, not 10% on top of the last level.

It covers everything you own that has a shield: every ship, every defense, the satellites, both decoys and the Hephaestus platform. Tech belongs to your account rather than to a planet, so you pay for it once and every planet you own gets it.

You can read the boost straight off the Shipyard and Defense pages. The Base column is the plain design number and the green Current column is what you actually field with your tech. A Hades Class Battleship has 400 base shield. At Shield Tech 10 it flies with 800.

Defenses get exactly the same treatment. A Large Decoy goes from 10,000 shield to 20,000.

Why it matters in a fight

A battle runs up to six rounds. Every shot hits the shield first, and only the damage left over after the shield reaches the hull. Shields refill to full at the start of every round. Hull damage does not.

That is what makes shields good against a lot of small shots and poor against a few big ones. Enough small hits in one round grind the shield down and everything after that lands on the hull. One huge hit blows past the shield in a single shot and wastes almost none of its damage.

The 1% rule

This is the biggest thing your Shield Tech buys you. If a shot's weapon rating is 1% or less of the target's current shield rating, the shot does nothing at all. It is absorbed, the shield does not even drop, and it ends any rapid fire chain that attacker had going against that target.

The threshold is 1% of the current rating, not the base, so every level you research raises the bar an attacker has to clear.

The Large Decoy is the clearest case. It has 10,000 base shield, so with no Shield Tech at all anything hitting for 100 or less bounces straight off it. Here is what an Artemis Class Fighter needs before it can touch one.

Your Shield Tech	Large Decoy shield	Bounces any shot of	Artemis needs Weapons Tech
0	10,000	100 or less	11
2	12,000	120 or less	15
5	15,000	150 or less	21
10	20,000	200 or less	31
20	30,000	300 or less	51

Every level of Shield Tech costs the attacker about two levels of Weapons Tech. And it is all or nothing, not a small reduction. Twenty thousand Artemis on Weapons Tech 10 do not take a single point off one Large Decoy with no Shield Tech behind it. The same fleet on Weapons Tech 11 kills it in the first round.

The same rule protects Decoys, the Hephaestus platform and the Zeus, and it is why a swarm of cheap fodder is useless against a heavily shielded target. The full list of what bounces off what is on the Shield Rating page.

Cost

Shield Tech costs ore and crystal, three parts crystal to one part ore. Level 1 is 200 ore and 600 crystal, and every level after that doubles both.

You need a Research Lab at level 6 before you can start it. The other requirement, Energy Tech level 3, is already met the day you start playing, because every commander begins with Energy Tech 3. You research it on the Research page.

Level	Ore	Crystal	Shield boost	Time at Research Lab 8
1	200	600	10%	2m 40s
2	400	1,200	20%	5m 20s
3	800	2,400	30%	10m 40s
4	1,600	4,800	40%	21m 20s
5	3,200	9,600	50%	42m 40s
6	6,400	19,200	60%	1h 25m
7	12,800	38,400	70%	2h 51m
8	25,600	76,800	80%	5h 41m
9	51,200	153,600	90%	11h 23m
10	102,400	307,200	100%	22h 45m
11	204,800	614,400	110%	1d 21h 31m
12	409,600	1,228,800	120%	3d 19h 1m
13	819,200	2,457,600	130%	7d 14h 3m
14	1,638,400	4,915,200	140%	15d 4h 5m
15	3,276,800	9,830,400	150%	30d 8h 11m
16	6,553,600	19,660,800	160%	60d 16h 21m

There is no cap. The table stops at 16 because the doubling gets silly after that. Everything up to level 10 together costs 204,600 ore and 613,800 crystal, which is less than level 11 on its own.

Research time is the ore plus crystal cost times 1.8, divided by one more than the Research Lab level on the planet you start it from. A better lab is the only thing that speeds research up, and the Advanced Research Communication Network lets the labs on your other planets add their levels in as well.

What it does not do

Damage from an Interplanetary Ballistic Missile is not absorbed by shields at all. A missile strike goes straight onto the hull of the defenses it hits. Armor Tech counts against missiles, Shield Tech does not.
It does nothing for your weapons rating, your cargo or your speed.
Shields reset every round, so they do not carry damage forward the way hull does. Against a fight that runs the full six rounds, armor is doing more of the work.

Group attack and group defend

In a group attack the whole combined fleet fights on the best Shield Tech in the group, not each player's own. Group defend works the same way on the defending side, and it covers the defender's own defenses too. One well researched member lifts everybody.

Scouting it

A spy report lists the target's tech levels, Shield Tech included, but only once your espionage number on that target reaches 7. That means enough Espionage Tech and enough probes, or a Shadow Probe, which always returns the full report. Worth doing before you commit a fleet to a heavily walled planet.

Requirements

Research Lab level 6
Energy Tech level 3 (you start with this)

Things that need Shield Tech

Gauss Cannon needs level 1
Decoy needs level 2
Dionysus Class Recycler needs level 2
FTL Tech needs level 5
Large Decoy needs level 6
Hephaestus Class Attack Platform needs level 12

Tips

The early levels are pocket change. Levels 1 to 6 together cost 12,600 ore and 37,800 crystal and hand you 60% more shield on every unit you will ever build. Get them out of the way early.
Level 6 is a real target on its own, because it is what unlocks the Large Decoy. One Large Decoy per planet is the cheapest wall in the game against small ships.
Shield Tech pays best on units that already carry a lot of shield. Ten levels turn a 100 shield Pulse Cannon into 200, but they turn a Large Decoy into 20,000 and push its bounce threshold from 100 to 200.
Run it in the Calculator before you spend. Both the attacker and defender tech boxes have a Shield field, so you can see what one more level is worth against the fleet you expect.