Editing Dropfleet Commander/Tactics/Shaltari (section)

==Tactics==
With less hull and armor than everyone else, Shaltari need to be smart if they want to survive. One of the most important aspects of this is knowing when to raise shields and when to lower them. With their save working even against critical hits, shields offer even better protection than PHR armor, but at the cost of a massive increase to signature and the complete loss of Point Defense. Knowing when to make this trade-off is entirely situational, but you should usually raise shields if you expect to be shot at either way. Even with your top-tier Point Defense, shields usually offer better protection against a dedicated close action assault or large bomber wave (the only exception to that rule are the super-heavies which have truly ridiculous PD). Your main consideration should be if the extra signature will allow enemies to shoot at you that wouldn't be able to otherwise.

With all of your Particle weapons now having Fusillade, you now have a bunch of F(N) weapons that want to be fired on Weapons Free. Actually getting an enemy in arc to do this is easier said than done. There are two basic strategies to accomplish this. One is the classic last-first activation. You activate the Particle ships last on one turn and first on the next while targeting an enemy with a higher SR. You get to line up your shot and then take it before they get to act. The other is to give your opponent something else to worry about so that they can't be bothered by a couple of cruisers trying to line up F(N) shots. Simply having a dreadnought on the table may be enough to accomplish this, but if your opponent is familiar with Shaltari you may have to be trickier.

Your teleportation shenanigans can give you some serious advantages over other factions, but they also require you to have motherships which can't hide in the atmosphere. If your opponent is smart (or just not stupid), they'll try pretty hard to kill these motherships. You'll need to do everything that you can to keep them safe. Hiding behind, or even inside of, debris fields is one way to accomplish that. With shields raised, you should take less than one damage per turn from the debris. The Emerald can withstand that easily enough, and even the Cobalt would rather take some rocks in the face than face down a swarm of angry Djinn.