I'm sorry. But it does matter.

If a non-matching weapon only reduces armor by squareroot (abbreviated sqrt) of the value minus the damage, then matching weapons are actually MORE effective against armor than non matching.

That is armor-damage value > sqrt(armor-damage value)
What we think should happen is sqrt(armor) - damage value, that is a big difference.

To put in real numbers again, it goes like this:

144 - 12 = 132. That is a measurable loss that matching weapons have against matching defense.

The question is do non-matching weapons work one of two ways:
sqrt(144)-damvalue or sqrt(144-damvalue). If damvalue is outside of the parenthesis, than you get 12-12 = 0, and armor gets shot away at the right rate by non matching weapons. If, on the other hand, damvalue is in the parenthesis then you get sqrt(144-12) or after hitting an armor value of 12 with an attack of 12, it is reduced to sqrt(132) or 11.... basically you only are knocking one point off instead of 12.

If your attack damage on the off weapon is already >144, you wouldn't be able to tell if armor is reduced at the right rate, because it is gone right away anyway.

The next game I play I will set research to very slow and try and test low fleet attack values against non-matching armor, see if I can't get some hard numbers on this. It would be an easy bug to have crept into the code, just misplacing the closing parenthesis would do it.

It may well be that in order to punch through the overall defence value and cause damage in a combat round, you'll need to wear down the strong defences with a saturation attack. Even if you don't actually break through, you've lowered the value that is square rooted, making it easier for the rest of your weaponry to score a hit.

If that's right, fleet combat has a whole new level to it.

Heh, it was a round about, tounge in cheek compliment, just so theres no misunderstanding. Brad's arcane game systems baffle me...but my brain is small and I'm easily distracted by small shiny objects.

I really support your ideas. I think more depth in ship equipement could do the job and stop all the discussions about tic-tac-toe battles, imbalance between defense and attack,...



Is it? I still think there could be something like tactical ship design WITHOUT true tactical combat.




These are good idea, too.

thanks estafazero. Also, if you read one of my replies here you'll find other ideas, some pretty similar to the ones i expressed in this topic, some regarding the other big missing thing during the battles in the game: territory. Some improvements in this direction would give the possibility to bring few tactic also during the combats. It's not necessary to give control of the ship to the player but if there would be bonuses (or maluses) depending on "where" you fight (in your territory, close to your planets or asteroid fields etc., in open space etc., warp battles/impulse battles) i think we'll have even more fun.

richard

Well, I read the whole thread, and from what I saw, there's another point missing. Maybe it's not this way anymore, I just bought the Gold edition this week, so I haven't really played much. yet, great game though. However, in the manual, it says that for defense, you have to roll the value. It seems like everyone so far has been assuming that you always get full value for the defense. If you're using shields for lasers, you would roll between 1-max value of your shields vs 1-max number of their lasers, whereas if you only have armor, you would roll between 1-sqrt(max value of your shields) vs the same. So even if you have 28 pts of shields defense for 28 pts of laser offense, you won't necessarily block it all anyway. My question is what if the ship has more than one kind of defense? Does it use all of them, or only the appropriate defense if it's there?

I may be wrong, just my opinion.

Here is the combat as I understand it:

https://forums.galciv2.com/?forumid=421&aid=139395#1104735

@Wyndstar

I thought defence was rolled just like attack. Is it really static? I'm sure that's not right.

The only point I'm confused on is whether it's correct that an attack can be from 0-max while defence is from 1-max. Anyone know for sure?

The reason we often assume that defences will block twice their rating in weapons is because defences roll as a whole for the ship, while weapons roll individually.

Say I have a ship with 10 beams, each with 10 attack for 100 total beam attack. It is attacking a ship with 100 total shields.

The first beam will roll 0-10 against 0-100 for the shields. On average, the beam will do 5 damage and will be entirely blocked about 96% of the time. So say the beam did 5 damage. Next weapon rolls 0-10 against 0-95 for the shields. Again, the beam will do 5 damage on average and will be entirely blocked about 94% of the time.

Individual weapons don't have a good chance to penetrate until the defences are worn down to rolling in the same range. To wear down that 100 shields to the 0-10 range will take 90 points of damage, which requires about 18 0-10 rolls on average. So only towards the tail end of the *second* 100-beam attack ship can we expect to actually see a bit of damage.

This is why, to a good approximation, defences stop 2x their rating of weapons. The actual value depends on the actual defence rating versus individual weapon damage. For ships with little defence, it can be as low as 1x, on average. For ships with lots of defence, it approach 2x, but is usually probably 1.9 or 1.95x.

One caveat for the above: for some strange reason, 'bonus' damage from weapons is gathered into the first shot from a ship, rather than distributed across it's weapons. So if you have a ship with 10 guns, each doing 0-5, but you have a 100% weapons bonus, your ship will read that it has 100 beam attack. It's not 10 attacks of 0-10, it's 1 attack of 0-55 and 9 attacks of 0-5. So if you are fighting a race with an especially high weapons bonus, they might do more damage than you would think, because the above configuration has a much better chance of penetrating shields than ten 0-10 attack, even though they have the same total.

Great explanation Entropy Avatar. After a while I start to take it for granted that everyone knows how we got to the point we are at in understanding and talking about defense. Yes defense rolls, but with the law of averages working on both the attack and defense numbers (because there are many more rolls) it is much easier to predict combat outcomes.



This is weird, and leads to you losing combats you sometimes think you will win. On the other hand, it really helps take down enemy capital ships, because that first shot is going to knock off a lot of their shields, which is very helpful for all your following weapon fire.

It is also much easier to get that first shot to be super high in DA. Not only do racial bonuses to weapons stack with ability points - so you can start with a +55% to your weapons with some choices, but military starbases changed so that rather than effecting military production they now add attack and defense %. With a couple of military starbases out there it is very easy to get an attack bonus of 100-150%, and of course higher is possible with more resources.

Also, the "super shot" has the effect of helping smaller hulls and hurting larger hulls. Say I have a huge hull ship with an attack of 500, but that attack is REALLY 25 0-10 shots and a 100% weapon bonus. Then I get 1 1-260 shot, and 24 0-10 shots. I might see a fleet of 10 medium fighters (25hp each, no defense) and think to myself "ah, I can take them down in one round, my attack averages twice their hp." I will be wrong and lose, because combat will look like this:
MyHugeHull vs. Med1 176 damage... ship destroyed
MyHugeHull vs. Med2 25 damage... ship destroyed
MyHugeHull vs. Med3 25 damage... ship destroyed
MyHugeHull vs. Med4 25 damage... ship destroyed
MyHugeHull vs. Med5 25 damage... ship destroyed
MyHugeHull vs. Med6 20 damage... lives
Med6 vs. MyHugeHull 1 damage... I'm dead

And I only knocked out half their fleet in round 1. You need to be much more careful if you are always depending on the 1hp rule to lower your loses. The same "super shot" is not a problem for fleets of fighters, because each fighter gets a super shot, so the damage is much more spread out.

Looking at the comments in this thread, I decided to do a test of whether off-type defences are actually working properly. Based on the results of the test, I can say definitively that they are not.

I created a scenario where a huge ship with a mass-driver attack of 199 attacks a huge ship with 14 beam attack and a beam defence of 345. Since the second ship's defence against mass-drivers is only 18, the mass-driver ship should completely walk-over the beam defence ship, with a reasonable chance of killing it on the first round.

Instead, the beam defence ships won 8 of 9 combats! The attacker, with 199 attack rating and facing no matching defence could only do 6 points damage on average (though with a high range, sometimes doing as much as 24).

So, until this is fixed, everyone might want to consider putting the wrong type of defences on their ship.

This is all too complicated for me.  

At present I am playing a game without the patch.
I am putting no defence on my ships because it seemed to have no effect and the AI was not using it.

After the patch is defence worth bothering with ?
A simple yes or no would be   good.

Ok...so defenses block twice their rating on average. That sounds pretty damn good to me, and probably explains while I was able to shut down or survive most enemy attacks in all my games while never having to exceed a 90 defense rating , and gain a war-winning advantage with nothing more than a 30 or 40 defense rating tailored to the enemey's weapons, prior to the last patch.

The question is then...WHY did defense need buffed so profoundly...a size reduction AND a rating increase? Why did it need buffed at all?



Wait...so you mean Im not crazy (in this particular instance)? I wasnt prepared for that...I dont know how to feel...

Well, I may not put the "wrong" defense on a ship, but in theory you could go down only 1 path of defense, making it better and smaller, and probably be ok most of the time?

Yes. If you have a ship with very high defence against, say, beams, the only things that are likely to hurt it are:

1. Fleets with more than twice it's shield rating in beam attack
2. Ships that individually have a high proportion of it's shield rating in beam attack and a very high weapons bonus (due to the first weapon 'super shot').
3. Fleets using missiles or mass drivers that also have a high weapons bonus (again because the 'super shot', though in this case it doesn't have to be concentrated in single ships...)

Note that in case 3 the ship is going to get hurt, but much less than it would get hurt if off-type defences were working properly.

It is surely true if you have no luck. But I recall having read somewhere that a 0-100 roll will translate into a 25 - 100 roll if you have 25% in luck

I wrote a whole bunch here, but then my browser had a problem, so I lost it. The short version is that the value of defense in the DA system is *very* dependent on ship size and fleet composition. So it makes it very hard to balance.

People were finding that unless you coud reach the 'supership' mode, deploying even the appropriate defenses was a serious waste of money. Of course, by decreasing the cost, it makes it easier to enter the 'supership' mode. The check on that is that, theoretically, the supership has two types of kryptonite out there.

Weapons roll individually, so having luck would make a 0-10 roll into 2-10. I'm not sure if luck affects defenses, but if it did it wouldn't affect defences that much, except to make the 'trickle through' damage impossible.

As far is i know luck only affects the weapons rolls.

I don't know how it is, but I think it should be:

If my defense is 144/0/0 and I am attacked by a ship with an attack value of 0/24/0,
ship with attack value of 0/0/24 and ship with attack value of 300/0/0 it would go like this:

1:144/12/12. Attacker1 rolls a 12. - 0hp (main defense also reduced by 12, sqrt(132)=11)
2:132/ 0/11. Attacker2 rolls a 12. - 1hp
3:121/ 0/ 0. Attacker3 rolls a 150.-29hp
-------------------------------------------
-30Hp

if my ship would be attacked by the 300/0/0 ship first, it would be:
1:144/12/12. Attacker3 rolls a 150.- 6hp
2: 0 / 0/ 0. Attacker2 rolls a 12. -12hp
2: 0 / 0/ 0. Attacker1 rolls a 12. -12hp
-------------------------------------------
-30Hp

That could also work. Currently, off-type defences don't seem to be fully depleted, so in your first example it seems to go to 132/11/11 instead of 132/0/11 after the first attack.

Hi!

LOL really! I'm in a first sandbox masochistic 1.5x game and can say I NEVER BEFORE killed so many ships so easily with just one medium hull as I'm doing now.

My design is medium hull, single impulse III engine, 4 plasma (beam attack 8), 5 superior duranthiums (armor 15), costs ~350BC, and am fighting arceans' fleets of 4-5 small hulls 15-18 mass attacks each, no defenses. Average damage my single ship receives in such a battle is 2-3 points. With just one ship I destroyed ~8 of such fleets (a half of their attack force they sent after Humans and me).

In DL I'd neeed for such a performance a fleet of 3 mediums with ~15 attack and ~6 armors, but would need to constantly replace the usualy half-damaged ship with a spare one after most battles.

But the Arceans are easy. Korath and Drengin are flying fleets of 60 missile attack and researching Photonic torpedos.

BR, Iztok

Defense needed to be buffed for the AIs sake, and the way it uses defense.

However, I have run one test in game and got some real weird results, that I don't even know how are possible. Here was the setup:

I was Krynn, with a +100% defense boost and a +50% luck (I was universalists). I built up a starbase on my territory with the following stats: Attack 13/6/6, defense 10/10/10. Happily for me, the defense racial boost seems to apply to starbases, because I only had researched the basic starbase tech so I had 3 +5s to upgrade with. Anyway, this base was attacked by an enemy fleet with the following stats:

13 ships with missile attack, 6 attack per ship for a fleet value of 78 missile. They attacked.

In the first round of combat I took:
Attacker 1: 0 damage
Attacker 2: 4 damage
Attacker 3: 4 damage
Attackers 4-13: 0 damage!

What? Only 8 points? But it got worse. I destroyed one ship, and round 2 it went:
Attacker 1-12: 0 damage

Repeat till I destroyed all 13 ships. Took no more damage.

I left the combat taking only 8 points total. My defense against missiles should have been 10+sqrt(10)+sqrt(10) or a 16. I was fighting against a missile attack of 78, so on average that is 39 damage in the first round. I should have taken in the area of 23 damage the first round, 21 damage the second round, and so on. Do starbases work differently? Does my luck effect enemy attack roles (to decrease them 50% maybe?) Is some kind of my armor not going away - remember, 6 of those 16 points of defense were from off armor values.

Ship to ship I'm having problems setting up a test because suicidal just got a lot tougher, and I'm not able to manipulate situations to the same degree I used to be able to. I have not managed to survive long enough to get to medium hulls and a decent level of defense and attack yet (with settings on very slow research... along with the new tech trading, I mean ug!) I think I may have to try and test this on a lower difficulty level or with a faster rate of research. I'm not really playing to win, just playing to set up certain battles, and it isn't working on suicidal

The game is harder, for that I am happy. But the little I have been able to test low defense and offense numbers, like for this starbase, I've gotten some inexplicable results.

Conjecture: If non-matching defenses don't decrease at all, it is possible my starbase, after losing its point defense, had a static defense of 6 [sqrt(10shield)+sqrt(10armor)] leaving me with a def of 6 vs. an offense of 6 missile on every ship, and then luck was on my side?? Still hard for me to say exactly what happened here, but through 13 rounds of combat to only take 8 points of damage, well that is beyond a few lucky rolls. That is a law of averages result at that point. And it does point to some kind of problem, not sure what exactly though.

On a side note, are starbase attacks working right either? With three kinds of attack, I expected some spill over damage, one attack for each weapon kind. Instead, I would just destroy one fighter a round to exactly its hp total. Shouldn't starbases get 3 attacks with three kinds of weapons? Do they count as doing one multi-purpose attack? How is THAT damage figured against defense?

I RARELY use starbases to fight, so I am not very experienced with starbase combat generally. Do they have some other rules I'm not aware of? Please help.

Don't bother. Off-type defences are broken (see my above post). If you want, I can email you a save game that makes this absolutely clear.

Edit: Also, the starbases only get one attack, just like in DL. It's like Stardock is trying to make them useless but failed due to off-type defences

Hi,

Do you guys that run testbed battles really say that defence doesn't work as specified (better than it should be)??

Have fun