Regeneration of Static Defenses

The question about how many different types of shields and turrets to have in place at one time comes up regularly, and the answer involves balance and trade offs. Special situations, such as the protection of a high-level JG, or a base that has a significant percentage of your fleet, might warrant more layers of static defenses than your average base does.

Here's a summary of the PROs and CONs of multiple defenses:

PROs
-- More defenses to absorb attacks
-- Potentially smaller costs than using all high-level defenses

CONs
-- Power, Population & Space Consumption
-- Redistribution of energy from strong to weak defenses

On the one hand, the more levels of shields and turrets you have, the better the damage from each attack will be distributed across all those static defenses, lessening the damage to any specific defense, and increasing the chance that multiple waves will be needed to conquer your base.

OTOH, all those defenses take up power, population and space (rings don't take up space, but they take up lots of power, so you'll have to build lots of plants which do take up space). So you need to balance your investment in the defenses with the rewards they bring.

As long as at least one shield or turret type has not been completely destroyed during an attack, ALL of your defenses will be restored in proportion to their cost and the percentage of total defenses remaining. This is explained in this AE forum thread. The more levels of a weaker defense you add to the mix, the greater the percentage of your total defense it will represent, and the more your larger defenses will have to lose during redistribution to replenish the weaker ones.

So, if you get hit by an attack force that annihilates your Ion and Photon Turrets, but does little damage to your PRings, when they are redistributed for the next round, a portion of energy from your stronger defenses will automatically be assigned to the smaller structures. You can see the formula at work in the Defense Regeneration Calculator (tab #2).

If Ion + Photon + Disruptors represent 50% of your defenses because of their quantity, then your higher defenses, which might hardly have been touched by the attack, will be reduced to 50% each during the redistribution.

Let's take the following defensive arrangement, for example:

20/20 Ion
20/20 Photon
10/10 Disruptor
15/15 Deflection
10/10 PShield

After an attack, you end up with this:

0.0/20 Ion
0.0/20 Photon
0.0/10 Disruptor
2.4/15 Deflection
9.0/10 PShield

On the next attack (assuming it happens immediately), the remaining power (62.12%) would be distributed as follows:

12.42/20 Ion
12.42/20 Photon
 6.21/10 Disruptor
 9.32/15 Deflection
 6.21/10 PShield

You can see that the numbers are proportionate to the totals of each defensive type. Even though the PShield was barely damaged in the first attack, it gives up quite a bit of its power to the other structures for the next round. And those other structures were not able to hold up to the attack very well in the first place.

VERDICT: Adding multiple types of shields is almost always detrimental, because the redistribution adds no attack capability and reduces the overall defense capacity. Adding multiple types of turrets is generally helpful, because on regeneration they can attack more enemy fleet. It is still advisable to keep the number of levels low on the weaker defenses, so that less energy drainage takes place.

It is a balance, and you have to decide whether having more discrete targets is worth the space and energy, plus the possible loss during redistribution.