Since Shield ispercentile, buying the Sunrider a meager 15 Shielding doesn't even really improve its ability to survive when off by itself by a meaningful margin. If you instead stop at 1 tile -shaving off 5000$ of the cost- the Sunrider isn't going to be consistently helping your entire fleet, and furthermore you've just spent 2500$ to increase a portion of your fleet's Shield rating by 15 points. Getting the Sunrider's shield going costs not only 1500$ to start, but if you want to expand its radius to a respectable 2 tiles you'll need to spend a further 6000$.
It's also dirt-cheap to then increase their Shield ratings twice apiece to reach 90 Shield across your entire fleet, rendering your forces borderline-immune to Laser weaponry. The thing is, the Liberty and Bianca both have a native Shield rating of 35 and a range of 1, and ideally you're going to extend their range by 1 tile apiece (For 2000$ total) no matter what you do otherwise just to ensure your entire fleet can be under a shield bubble at all time. Shield value itself acts specifically as a percentagedamage reduction on all Laser-class weaponry: at 70 Shield, a unit erases 70% of the incoming Laser attack and thenapplies their Armor to it. All units in that radius gain the Shield value of all units they're in the radius to benefit from, so that eg two sources of 35 Shield will stack to 70 Shield on any unit that's in range of both.
The Sunrider canget a shield generator, as noted, but it's basically a trap choice, which requires a bit of a mechanics explanation first.Ī unit that generates shields projects them in a radius. A shield can be purchased for 1500$, which has a base Shield value of 15 and a base range of 0. To save as much as they cost, the Sunrider would need to have 8000max HP, which is simply not happening. Note that this isn't an endorsement of the Repair Drones Order once you're into the part of the campaign where they cost 400$ a pop.
More importantly, it means that repairing your units mid-mission is a way to slightly increase your intake from a mission, which is particularly significant in the early missions when you don't have much money to go around and saving 30$ can be the difference between affording one additional, vital upgrade vs not hitting that threshold. The actual ratio is extremely generous, with every 10 HP your forces are missing costing you 1$, so it's largely an ignorable mechanic (You make hundreds of credits in early missions, thousands in the mid-game, and can easily break 10,000 on some late-game missions, while your repair costs even with catastrophic losses are generally double-digit or triple-digit), but it does mean that raising HP as a means of improving a unit's survivability is slightly counterproductive relative to other options. One wrinkle worth noting is that the game has a 'repair cost' notion, where the amount of HP your units are missing at the end of a mission subtracts some cash from what you just earned. Your other units can all die and it doesn't really matter if you manage to get to the end of the mission successfully anyway. In the Sunrider's case, it's your toughest unit by a fair margin, especially early in the game before you get the Paladin and can purchase Solar Alliance Cruisers, but this is small comfort as the Sunrider is usually your only mission-critical unit: if the Sunrider dies, you game over then and there.
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