Yeah! I think I sprained my finger holding the mouse button down Seriously, I must be a "no one" since I actually did look through the data (and I always apprectiate someone willing to provide it to support their point). The problem with summaries and opinions is that you have to trust someone you don't know to figure out whether there is real value. In this case, I do have a question about the data presented. I see the average data of an attacker (1,0,0) against a defender (0,0,0) is about 0.5. Is the game guide in error? If the attacker can only roll a 1 and the defender can only "roll" a 0, would the average not be 1? I am a n00b and perhaps am missing something obvious to the rest of you. In any case, thanks for your willingness to share statistical data. It is a dying art with a lot of power for those who are willing to do the math......

Glad somebody found it useful

The manual is indeed in error. After asking and waiting and asking and waiting, it was finally posted by Stardock that attack and defense roll 0 to max.

It's been pointed out by someone else that the real value of defense is in a many-on-one scenario, though really, it's more a case where defense is valuable in a strong versus weak scenario. If a 4/0 ship (A) goes against an 8/0 ship (B), A will average 2 points of damage per round compared to B's 4 points per round - so B wins by a ratio of 2:1.

If a 4/0 ship (A) attacks a 4/4 ship (C), A will average about 0.8/round versus C's 2/round - so C wins by a ratio of 5:2.

Smaller ships should avoid defense, but the greater the size difference between your ships and enemy ships, the more valuable defense becomes.

If I'm going to be fighting near a military starbase, every single one of my ships will have a point of defense to get the starbase bonuses. The final result is three points of defense vs any attack, and four points vs the type your defense protects against. That is well worth it. If my ships are unsupported by a starbase, tiny hulls go all offense while larger ships get a mix.

Pure offense is cheaper, but you don't get an experienced military because your ships die all the time. I tend to shift the balance between offense and defense based on my plans for military research in the future. If I'm going to be using the same equipment for a while, I'll make more defensive ships so I can get the most out of them and watch them become even more powerful as they gain levels. If I'm going to be doing some hard research on weapons or defenses, I don't want to have a huge fleet of third-rate ships sitting around, so I don't care if I lose ships; they were going to be obsolete in a few turns anyway. This will probably change depending on how easy it is to upgrade ships in the 1.1 patch.

This discussion is really interesting and quite important when you want to pick your winning strategies.

There has been a lot of discussion regarding the actual battle algoritm used, so I decided that rather than use Excel sheets or Battle simulators I wanted to test this in the actual game.

So I set up a cheat game i release 1.1 - with 2 races as equal as possible (basically selected the custom race and gave it the same characteristics as the one it was playing against (Drengin)).

After the game started I could change between races more or less at will, research all technologies for both races and design ships for this experiment!

SO

I set up a battle between 2 Fleets.
Fleet A had 3 small hulls (HP 21) with attack 222 and defence 000 (so 2 in each attack tech)
Fleet B had 3 small hulls (HP 20) with attach 111 and defence 111 (so 1 in each technology for both attack and defence)

The initial hitpoints were not equal for these ships (I guess I didn't pick the races exactly equal after all) so Fleet A started out with 17HP while Fleet B had 20. I quickly set it up so that fleet A could kill some single ships and after this it had 21HP.

In spite of this advantage in HP, Fleet A lost every single time I ran the battle - regardless of who attacked first!
Fleet B with less guns but more defence would consistently cause 3 damage per ship per round while Fleet A with much better guns would cause somewhere from 0 to 4 damage per ship per round - with an average between 1 and 2.

This lead to a pretty consistent result that Fleet B would win with 2 ships left - one of which had some damage.

Even when I increased the HP on Fleet A further it still lost.

So in conclusion:
Defence is far from useless. It can be more important than who attacks first!

So in conclusion: Defence is far from useless. It can be more important than who attacks first!

Thanks for doing the experiment, but I don't think your results can generalize.

One problem is, that despite assurances that ships roll 0-to-rating for attack, a ship will never roll a zero against a defenceless foe. They appear to roll 1-to-rating, or there is some special code that causes minimum potential damage of 1. This throws off damage comparisons at low attack values, as a 2-0 ship does an average of 1.5 damage, while a 1-0 ship does an average of 1 damage. The first attack point is twice the value for the money.

The other factor is that at low attack values, the off-type defences contribute very significantly. This also doesn't scale at higher levels.

Defense is more for larger ships. That is where it becomes gold. I have used both swarm tactic with all offensive ship and the capital tactics with defense big ships. Only tactic that is gimoped is the mix strategy because your smalls warm ships will always die while your capital ships will not even get fired upon so the defense is worthless. In those cases I think I might use defense on the small ships and pure offense on the large, so I'll see.

In those cases I think I might use defense on the small ships and pure offense on the large, so I'll see.

It won't work. The enemy will simply target the large ships first in that scenario.

In practice, it seems like the defense roll really does start at 1.

The problem with this is that you can get an infinite loop where both side cannot damage each other and the battle goes on forever.

For example a ship with 1 attach and 1 (or more) defence against another ship of the same configuration.

I would like to add my input that from my trials with the 1.1 beta (not sure about early version), both attack rolls and defense rolls appear to be 1-n. If you use the battle window, it shows a blow by blow description of each shot fired. I took one example where I had a fleet of three 3/1 heavy fighters against an opponent's 5 3/0 fighters. I then paused it after every round to see how the damage was calculated. My attack numbers were ALWAYS between 1 and 3 for every shot. His were ALWAYS between 0 and 2 --- so a point of damage was always being deducted due to my 1 defense. By the way, I won the fight with the loss of just one of my fighters...

There is probably a special case for 1/1 fighting 1/1 --- you are right that otherwise it would be a stalemate.

Interesting, in a 1 on 1 battle (at least with the second Beta) the rolls seem to be 0-based, as mentioned before. Maybe fleet battles are 1-based and individual battles are 0-based??

Thanks, Nostromo, but if what you observed is not an anomalous outlier, then the ship combat mechanics once again become unknown. It looks like there are special cases somewhere, but you can't find or precisely identify all the special cases with black-box testing, so it looks like all my statistics are invalid, and there's no way to know which ship will win in any given case (without testing in-game).

Saber Cherry, your model showed 2-2-2/0-0-0 beating 1-1-1/1-1-1? That would be somewhat surprising even if attack rolled 0-n. Keep in mind that the second type has at least 2 defence to every attack, and possibly 3 defence, depending on exactly how off-type defences are calculated.

Entropy Avatar said: Saber Cherry, your model showed 2-2-2/0-0-0 beating 1-1-1/1-1-1? That would be somewhat surprising even if attack rolled 0-n. Keep in mind that the second type has at least 2 defence to every attack, and possibly 3 defence, depending on exactly how off-type defences are calculated.

Ahh... oops I was thinking 1-1-1 after combining the defenses, not 1-1-1 before combining, which is 3-3-3 after combining them. So indeed, the effectively 1-1-1, 3-3-3 ships should win. However, I was more concerned with this:

Fleet B with less guns but more defence would consistently cause 3 damage per ship per round

...which directly contradicts what Shrapnel posted on the forum, namely, that both attack and defense roll 0-max.

...which directly contradicts what Shrapnel posted on the forum, namely, that both attack and defense roll 0-max.

Yeah, something doesn't add up. I have never seen a ship do zero damage to a target with zero defence. Maybe they should just post the relevant snippets of code. It's crazy that we still have confusion over this most basic combat rule.

eh, i'd rather drop the armor/shield/emc and get engines and sensors so i can get first strike.

eh, i'd rather drop the armor/shield/emc and get engines and sensors so i can get first strike.

Even when your ship is guarding a planet? Or.... no, not then

Hi!

I have never seen a ship do zero damage to a target with zero defence. Maybe they should just post the relevant snippets of code.

I go with the simple rule: weapons roll from 1 to max damage, defences roll from 0 to max.
Enough for me, and in practice I've seen both low and high values happen in combat (2 lasers going full through 4 shields, 11 missiles blocked by 1 shield... OFC seing such things happen to my ships made me unhappy (mildly said )
BR, Iztok

Well, IMO it depends on what stage in the game you are. Early game, when all defences are one, (square root of 1 is 1) By using one of each defense type you get a defense of 3, which works really well with only 1 attack, and is still less than 200bc. Mid game, it seems the game is about switching between attack types to best defeat your enemy, and defense is still good but not brilliant. When you get large and huge hulls, defense absolutely rules. There is nothing better than seeing one ship, with an attack of about ten, just destroy an entire FLEET of enemy ships without taking damage. It's wonderful

Ever since the 1.1B2 patch, i've started using defense. I can tell you that defended ships perform MUCH better than undefended ones.

I started to use heavy weapons small defense strategy. Since I usually play as a "Good" race I get the really awesome defenses like Telepathic Defense and so forth. A fleet of ships with defenses lasts a LOT longer than one without.

I have lost 4 ships in my most recent game. I have destroyed probably 300 or so (Stupid Arceans thought they could pick on me because they had more ships... idiots). Defenses are definitely a bonus.

I'm still thinking about this one, but leaving play styles aside, holding ship hulls constant, adjusting for initiative and assuming "correct" defenses applied, I think the only case in which an "n" attack / 0 defense ship beats or equals an "n/2" attack / "n/2" defense ship is in the 1 on 1 scenario.

I think, on initial thought, that the defensive ships will always outperform the pure attack ships in any other situation (e.g. 3 ships vs. 2 ships; 1 ships vs. 3 ships, etc.). This isn't saying that the defensively oriented ship will win, but it will cause more relative damage to the attacking ships that the attacking ships will do to it. Or, maybe a better way to put this is that a defensive ship will always fare better than a similar attack oriented ship would have fared in its place.

I'll see if I can come up with examples, but so far this is making sense in my head...

Basically, the only time the pure attack ship seems to have an advantage is when it can come in and clear out all opposing ships before they return fire. The longer a battle gets drawn out, the more advantage the defensive ships have.

I looked into the offense vs. defense issue using Kryo's ship battle simulator. Generally, I was hard pressed to find any case of two fleets of equal cost where one with defense was better off than a pure offense fleet (see caveats below).

Here's a typical example:

Each side has medium-sized hulls, and has Laser V / Shields tech (equal distance down each path).

Player 1 is pure offense and his ships carry 9 lasers (9 attack, 0 defense). Each ship costs 305.
Player 2 is mixed and carries 5 lasers and 2 shields (5 attack 4 defense). Each ship also costs 305.

For the simulation I used fleets of 4 ships (shown as 9/0x4 and 5/4x4). I ran each simulation 16 times and added up the total number of survivors.

9/0x4 attacks 5/4x4: Attacker had 26 surviving ships vs. defender's 4.
5/4x4 attacks 9/0x4: Attacker had 22 surviving ships vs. defender's 10.
9/0x4 attacks 9/0x4: Attacker had 23 surviving ships vs. defender's 13.

The most obvious lesson is that first-strike is important. But it also seems clear that given the choice between these two ship configurations, you're better off with the 9/0. Even if you're being attacked, your expected survival rate is higher with the pure offense ships.

This is exacerbated by the fact that you don't always have the optimum defense for the attack, plus there's one more tech tree to research/trade for.

Two caveats:

1. In reality you should always put at least 1 point of defense on your ships. This is because starbase assist won't kick in until you have 1 point (in any category). Once you have that one point, your fleet can stand inside the defense perimeter and have amazing defense values for the cost of 1 application of titanum. If you see the enemy switching weapons, just add the right defense module to the starbase and you're covered.

2. In uneven battles, such as a huge ship being attacked by many smaller ships, the huge ship may see some cost benefit from defense because the big ship can only kill one small ship at a time, no matter how big its guns.

Player 2 is mixed and carries 5 lasers and 2 shields (5 attack 4 defense). Each ship also costs 305.

What does this mean? 5 lasers and 2 shields yield 5 attack 2 defense. Or are you using 2X level-2 shields?

What does this mean? 5 lasers and 2 shields yield 5 attack 2 defense. Or are you using 2X level-2 shields?

Shields provide 2 defense each, you're probably thinking of deflectors which provide only 1. Shields are the same distance down the laser defense line as Laser V is down the laser offense line, so I decided that was a good tech level to give the "mixed class" ships.

I think nullspace got the point here. Whenever you are outnumbered defense becomes more effective as it works against every single attacker.

5 x 5/0 a 10 HP vs 1 x 20/0 a 20 HP will result in the destruction of the one ship with little chances to fire back more than once before beeing destroyed. It will not kill more than 1 or maybe 2 attackers.

5 x 5/0 a 10 HP vs 1 x 10/10 a 20 HP dramatically changes odds, since the 10 Defense have good chances of sucking up nearly all the damage done by the enemy fleet. This fight more certain than not will result in the defeat of all 5 attackers.

It's exactly as I said... My Large 30/22 just ate 3 Fleets of Small and Medium Drengin-Ships.

It took 18 Damge in all these fights.

The combined attack of the enemies was like 70 but the single ships had around 20 and less.

My ship would not even have survived the first fleet, if it had 52/0 instead of 30/22!

I wouldn't mind seeing some bonuses to defense, but if its too much you'd end up with some incredibly long battles if you like to watch them. That being said, I think it comes mainly down to style of play and the timeline of the game you are playing.

I use a basic amount of defense on all my ships, I don't like the extent to which it is randomized during battle, but 1-2 in each category have proven quite benefinical. I prefer not to lose ships so that I don't have to re-produce them all the time. I usually have a strong economy so I can easily pay for upgrades to my current ones so that they can climb to high levels and get lots of HP.

-Early on I take the first few defense techs and make use of them.
-Right after I am able to achieve Eyes of the universe I often switch to an attack and speed heavy setup.
-During late game extended battles with worth foes, or if I'm just messing around, I get creative.

I'm experimenting with manipulating the attack / defense ratios so that I can push my enemys' fire to a large dreadnaut that has plenty of HP and defense, but a higher attack / defense ratio than my accompanying smaller ships. It definately works although the rate of repair is slow. Sometimes I have to keep back up damage absorbing ships to swap in and out of the fleet. When you don't have a strong advantage, I find this system to be very useful in leveling up my ships.

Again, I don't like to lose ships in battle. If you don't mind and just want to fire off suicide ships like zerglings into the fray, I know it's quite effective. Personally, I like to name my battle fleets, micromanage their orders and watch them grow.