When an ability or something modifies a ship or structure, the info card often displays unintuitive modifier percentages.

For instance: the Cielo's Designate Target, when used, has the targeted ship's infocard display "Damage Reduction: 40%" (in red). For one thing, this sounds a little weird:"Damage Taken: +40%" or something would make more sense. As it is, players might think this means that the target ship will take 40% more damage, or, 1.4x normal. But is that really what it means? Is it strictly multiplicative/additive, or something else? In light of other percentage-changing abilities and effects, it's not at all clear. Gauss Rail Gun displays that, in additional to doing damage, it also affects the target "Max speed: 100%" (in red). It would be very intuitive if this meant that the target had its max speed reduced 100% (which would mean it would have a max speed of 0) but that's not what the effect really is ingame - the target actually has its max speed reduced 50%, even though the effect appears to mean otherwise. Might the percentages for "Phase Missile block" and "Damage reduction" from the Adaptive Forcefield ability also mean something somewhat different from the percentages displayed? The PJI's "Phase Jump Charge Up Rate: 700%" makes sense for the most part, and the ambiguity (jump rate +700% vs. jump rate *7) is so close to not make that much of a difference. So does Shield Projection mean that exactly 33% of the damage other ships take is transferred to the Guardian, or something else? Does Guidance's "Ability cooldown rate: 40%" in green mean that abilities take 40% of the time to cooldown/recharge (4 seconds instead of 10) or that it's reduced by 40% (6 seconds instead of 10 seconds)? Either is nice but the ability's text doesn't make it clear. Does Vertigo's "Weapon cooldown: 10%" and "Chance to hit: -10%" mean what it would appear to mean (10 sec cooldown -> 11 sec cooldown, 100% to-hit chance -> 90% to-hit chance) or might it be using the percentages the same way Gauss Rail Gun uses "Max speed: 100%"? Flux Field displays an effect of "Ability antimatter cost: -300%" (green). Since abilities can't cost negative AM, this apparently means that they cost 1/3 of the antimatter that they normally would - but if that's the case the effect should display something like "Ability antimatter cost: -67%" or something more intuitive.

The above is a nonexhaustive list of some examples.

The purpose of this post is not to get answers (most of the questions are answered in various users' threads or in the wiki, found out through modding or testing or something) but to show that quite a lot of the modifiers displayed ingame are ambiguous, especially when dealing with percentages, and especially since the red/green of the number in question does not always tell the full story of what the number actually means or could mean.

Granted, the actual gameplay effect of some of these ambiguities is minimal (eg. PJIs multiplying chargeup time by 7x or increasing chargeup time by 7x), but in a game which is already so complicated (especially for newbies trying to learn, especially given the expansions that are already out), it would be best for the effects of abilities and modifiers to be precise as possible.

I think what would be easiest would be for all of the percentages to be displayed along with an intuitive positive or negative multiplier or addition/subtraction. Eg.: Designate Target would say "Damage Taken: +40%" to mean 100 damage ->  140 damage, GRG would say "Max speed: -50%" to mean speed of 250 units instead of 500, PJIs would say "Phase Jump Charge Up Rate: x700%" to mean 42 seconds instead of 6, and so on.

No more uses of percentages like in Gauss Rail Gun or Flux Field. All effects that need it should have "+" "-" "x" "÷" in front to make the precise effect clear without having to go to the Sins forums or to the Sins wiki (neither of which many people are probably aware of). This would make understanding ingame effects significantly easier.

Although I have no idea how Sins is programmed, this just requires a few changes to a few strings of text here and there and should be easy to accomplish. I think.

Thanks.