Marwynn wrote: Gothic has ranged lances for shield busting
I keep seeing people mention lances for taking down shields, but why?
Shields have no armor, or at most, 25 if you're shooting an IN ship with Voss shields.
IN lances have pretty lengthy refire rates, their theoretical top damage output is low, but consistent because they treat armor as 25 and don't miss.
If you're shooting them at shields, their big advantage (armor piercing) doesn't matter, while their disadvantage (low total damage) is especially tedious when you're trying to strip a high hitpoint shield on a battleship.
Macros on the other hand have higher theoretical damage but take cuts to that because of armor mechanics. Shields have no, or barely any armor, so I generally see macros do way more damage to shields than to hull.
Especially at the mediocre IN lance ranges, a volley of macro fire tends to destroy shields much quicker than lances, in my experience.
Plus, most IN fleets have so many macro cannons in them, it kind of feels like a waste to use an upgrade slot to buff lances against shields.
Now for Chaos, where you can field lances with upgraded 15k range, that's where I'll generally invest in the shield damage upgrade, because at those ranges, macros have trouble hitting enough to strip shields due to accuracy.