Critical Hit

In starship combat, "critical hits" allow you to do more damage to the enemy ship. The values are displayed in yellow for critical hits versus the blue font for regular hits.

Mechanics

Critical hits are influenced by two starship statistics: Crit Rating and Crit Bonus. Crit Rating determines how likely it is that your ship scores a critical hit, while Crit Bonus determines how much extra damage your critical hits do. In general, Crit Bonus and Crit Rating do not increase with ship level. They are inherent to the ship class. Crew equipment, however, and crew abilities can grant ship bonuses that sometimes substantially increase these stats.

Crit Rating

Crit Rating determines how likely it is that your ship scores a critical hit. Your rating determines how likely it is that every shot your ship makes is a critical hit, which does extra damage based on the current Crit Bonus. The equation is set as a linear extrapolation between points emulating a curve and has a maximum probability of 50% at 10000. Because the lowest Crit Rating for a ship is the HMS Bounty at 400, the minimum possible probability for critical hits is 4%. A ship with a Crit Rating of 1000 (for instance the Sikarian Vessel) has a 13.67% chance of scoring a critical hit. The highest base odds for a ship at the time of writing is the D'Kora Krayton, which has a Crit Rating of 1400 and a probability of 18.67%. As the Crit Rating increases, so does the probability, but the slope generally lowers with increasing value. This creates a lower return on investment for additional points invested in Crit Rating when staffing Arena and Fleet Boss Battle setups. Points added to Crit Rating have the highest return on investment in the 1800-2400 range.

Crit Bonus

Crit Bonus determines how much extra damage your critical hits do. A Crit Bonus of 10,000 will result in double damage on a critical hit. Increasing your Crit Bonus will increase the amount of extra damage your attacks do when they land a critical hit. To calculate your extra damage, take your Crit Bonus and divide by 100. The resulting number is the percentage of extra damage your shots will do when they critically hit.

For example, a level 1 Prakesh has an attack power of 7525 and a Crit Bonus of 8000 (i.e. 80%), so any critical hit will inflict 6020 additional points (80% of 7525), bringing the total damage to 13545 (minus some rounding error).

Tips

Critical hits can increase the damage your ship deals by double or more, and are thus very powerful. However, it must be taken into consideration that damage is scaled with the attack skill of the crew active and then added to the ship's attack power. Current max Crit Bonus at the time of writing would be four crew with 20,000 Crit Bonus (e.g. Hollow Data). However, to get the maximum benefit, a crew with high attack boost must be active at the same time.

If one were to staff The Artifact with, in order, Hollow Data, Demo Man Scotty, President T'Rina, and another Hollow Data, the maximum active Crit Bonus achievable would be: 7500 (ship) +16000 (Scotty's bonus) +575 (Scotty's equipment bonus) +20000 x2 (Hollow Data's max bonus) +200 x2 (Hollow Data x2 equipment bonus) +20000 (President T'Rina) +75 (T'Rina equipment bonus) = 84,550. Critical damage with all crew active would then be 921,106. The Crit Rating for that setup would be 1140 (ship) + 185 (T'Rina) + 245x2 (Hollow Data x2) +240 (Scotty) = 2055 (26.55%).

Selecting crew and ships to maximize your damage potential in Arena, Skirmish, or Fleet Boss Battles involves careful planning and consideration of multiple factors. Increasing Crit Rating increases the odds to deal critical damage, which can be a deciding factor in arena battles. The critical bonus doubles the damage for every 10000. Therefore, balancing both factors in concert with the attack skill boosts can make a noticeable difference in the performance of a ship and the outcome of a battle.