Using a "tank" in your fleet

The basic idea here is that the AI looks at the fastest way to remove the threat. If you have a bunch of weakly-defended ships with low HP and high attack, they will be the first targets.

It attacks your ships by a combination of weakness and lethality, and I think it favors weakness slightly.

If you do the math, it should be a very simple calcuation of "how can I reduce the damage being dished out to me the fastest." This is a pretty straightforward calculation being made by a computer. I don't think you could "trick" the AI unless there were a bug.

In my experience the best combination of forces to use against the AI are identical ships or one ship. More ships being better if you are at a disadvantage overall (they can cover more area and you can send them back for repairs without leaving the front undefended), and fewer bigger ships being better if you are an advantage. (waves of no nonsense butt kicking).

Only time to mismatch is if you have remaining logistical points.

The only way I can think of to trick the AI would be to have one or more sacrificial ships with no defenses and some moderate attack power, and one or more ships with higher attack power and much higher defense and hit points. The idea being the AI kills off the weaker ships while the heavy ship pounds the AI into the ground.

Probably not all that effective, really. That's a lot of production for little purpose other than to die.

I'm finding that combined fleets are working very well. The AI doesn't seem to know what to do. One very big ship with one or two medium and a couple of small ships. Scale down for lower logistics values. The AI seems to either attack a medium or small ship in which case the larger one is spared any damage at all and is free to dish out withering fire. I might lose a small ship but it's easy to replace. Or it targets the largest one which is still ok since it has the hp and defense to handle it with the added bonus that I don't lose any of my smaller ships.

The only way I can think of to trick the AI would be to have one or more sacrificial ships with no defenses and some moderate attack power, and one or more ships with higher attack power and much higher defense and hit points. The idea being the AI kills off the weaker ships while the heavy ship pounds the AI into the ground. Probably not all that effective, really. That's a lot of production for little purpose other than to die.

I like to do the opposite, Make one ship super powerfull per fleet so they have to target it, and then have much cheaper much less effective ships pinging away.

Like say a ranger with 24attack/17defense and 2 mediums with 3 attack and 6defense or something. I THINK that they would target the ranger first doing almost no damage to it and then your 2 cheapies would add in 6 attack.

Interesting Ideas. No tricking the AI! Hehe. Anyways having the latest defences is as important as the latest offenses. Once in a while you may not get the first shot.

It is possible, in extreme circumstances, to induce a sort of tanking effect. I have the formula (Not permission to disclose it publicly though, that I'm aware), and according to my figures there are some cases where you can cause a huge ship to be targetted before tiny ships, though both types of ships will be (and must be) viable in their own right, and definitely won't be cheap.

But in most common cases smaller hulls will be targetted first since they are so much weaker, so tanking is largely non-viable as a primary tactic.

I've tried this tactic by having weapon-only little fighters and few-weapons-many-defenses cruisers... but so far they attack the little fighters anyway and the cruiser having bad weaponry isn't that great. I then tried mixed fleet of small fighters, corvettes, cruisers, etc... and reactions are more varied which lets some of my ships survive longer and get more experience. All in all, defense is good but not if it means your ship can't attack properly.

I think the only way you can do this is to use the tiny ships as expendable tanks. Get some tiny ships that are all attack, and some big ships with just enough hitpoints and defense that the enemies target the little ships first. The little ships will be swatted like flies but it will waste some of the enemy's firepower. If an enemy does 20 damage to a ship with 6 hitpoints, 14 damage was wasted. The big ships will survive and gain experience, and once they get tough enough, you can put them all in one fleet and stop sacrificing the little guys. This would work best when fighting ships with very powerful attack (Dreadlords), but I'm not sure if it's really any better than just using all tiny ships.

Grouping a Lucky Ranger with two 2/2 heavy fighters, I won battle after battle after... well, 40+ battles. The small ships were never attacked (they would have been toasted) even though nothing short of a highly upgraded starbase could damage the Ranger.

The enemy fleets would have done WAY better with a "random" targetting algorithm. Suggestion - keep the current algorithm (or an improved version ) but have ships unilaterally choose a random target 10% of the time, to hedge your bets.

I think a tank + "missile barges" combo is a valid strategy, from my observations... you just have to design the tank carefully to ensure that it seems threatening.

Got the OK from Brad, so here it is:

Each ship in a fleet is given a rating based on the formula Attack / (Defense+HP). That's all there is to it. Teh higher the result, the earlier it will be targetted. The formula has NO weighting for attack/defense types and starbase bonuses are completely excluded.

So if you can finagle the ratios in your favor, you can make a tank. For example, I started a Battle of the Gods game for some testing. In that scneario, you have full miniturization so you can cram up ships to double capacity.

If you take advantage of that, you can create the following ships:

Huge hull, 266 attack, 10 defense, 48 HP.
Tiny hull, 66 attack, 10 defense, 6 HP.

If you run the numbers, the Huge gets a rating of about 4.6 while the Tiny gets a rating of about 4.1; the Huge will be targetted first. Feel free to use this new knowledge to figure out other values that create a tanking scenario.

Interesting. Thanks!

P.S.

I now understand why the AI does not target what I would.

The formula does not take into account whether or not the attack will be useful. For example, using the published formula, a ship with attack=1 will target a battleship with 60 defense v. all, 100 HP, and 40 attack (4:1 ratio) instead of its escorting fighters with 0 defense, 10 HP, and 2 attack (5:1 ratio), even though the escorts are much more vulnerable for their threat. In other words, defense is heavily outweighted by HP, and the algorithm is generally broken - since it makes light ships attack targets they can never scratch, while ignoring their undefended companions.

I suggest a using a precalculated table of "average damage versus defense level" to determine targetting under the current combat mechanics. There are other possible solutions, of course; but currently, small ships waste their attacks on things they will never harm.

Yep. I'm really not satisfied with it myself, but that's the way it is now. As it stands, it really only gives an honest gauge of 'destroyability' when the opponent has overwhelming damage available. In many cases though that is not the situation, and defense has a more multiplicative effect on hitpoints.

I've got a write-up on the subject in the Council forum where Brad's hopefully more likely to see it. The crux of it is I recommend the targeting sort use a more in-depth algortithm that basically boils down to rating ships based on ( Attack / ExpectedRoundsNeededToKill ). By running a quick pre-sim of the battle using average rolls, a much more useful targetin order can be obtained that properly accounts for the true value of attacks and defenses.