Maybe the AI should be less willing to hand over defence technologies if the player has already developed or acquired different-type defence technology? In other words 'You can have your monopoly, we'll have ours, thank you.'

Ok, I thought you were playing these in-game, in which case the Korath weapons bonus would have an effect. I was allowing for some leak-through damage in my 7-10 range, it's just that 11.5 was a bit higher than I expected from my seat-of-the-pants estimate.

However, I don't think you can conclude that an all-attack fleet is winning just because it does more damage on average in the first round. As both fleets get smaller the advantage can swing to the defensive fleet. Does your spreadsheet consider multiple rounds of combat? I really should revive that combat-simulator code...

But if you are content to trade ships, then defense is irrelevant. In fact, you can often manage to not lose ships even if you don't have any defense at all, simply by choosing your battles such that your opponent's attack values are less than twice your hit points.

I had a brutal (and fun) war with the Drengin at crippling difficulty pre-patch. They won the colony rush and were better than me in every category and were running away. Being Drengin, I was at war with them in as soon as the colony rush was over, and it looked like they were going hurt me...bad. We both built all attack ships, although theirs were much better than mine. Still, I was able with Eyes of the Universe and better speed to muster as much force as I needed to stop their transports, which were always heavily escorted, and I never lost a planet.

I couldn't keep up with their weapons for a long time, but what I did better was to concentrate on larger hulls. We went to mediums at about the same time, but I switched to large and turned the tide of the war. By the time they were building significant numbers of large hulls, it was too late. I was starting to roll over them. They had lots of medium ships with 140+ attack, but that wasn't enough to take out a large hull in one round in most cases. Even if it was a tie, the 1 hp rule would usually be in my favor. But my large hull could take out two medium hulls in one round. I battled several fleets with 350+ attack, but it wasn't enough to destroy a fleet of three of my large hulls. I would win with at least one survivor, usually two, even though my attack values were much lower.

If that sounds like heavy losses on my part, remember that I was taking out some very dangerous and expensive ships, and my losses were substantially smaller than theirs. And unless a ship has very high experience, it is usually better to build a new one than upgrade an old one. Newer ships are often cheaper to build and maintain in additon to being more powerful. This was a good use for aging designs that didn't have much experience.

No, it doesn't do multiple rounds. I would need to do programming for that, and I figure somebody will beat me to it and do it better than I can. It may be true that greater damage doesn't always predict the winner, but that is where it gets complicated. The odds for the defense ships will increase as fleet numbers are whittled down, but since they will (most likely) lose the first ship, it gets worse for them before it gets better.

I assume your code is different from Kryo's fleet simulator? I was kind of wondering when somebody would give us a replacement for that. You have my full virtual support if you should choose to update your code and make it available. It would make these discussions a little less lively.

Frogboy, you noticed our little conversation!



Of course, the mass driver only does 0-1 damage, so 1-20 is plenty
Even lots and lots (say hundreds) of mass drivers don't really do much... at least right now under 1.5x2.



Yes! I agree, that is how defense should work. I'm so happy you see it this way too. Long live r/s/p



Does this mean we can look forward to the AI valuing defensive techs higher in trade? Even at Tough (which apparently is the benchmark level for people). That would take away adding in minors with tech trading on as an exploit, minors LOVE to sit there researching defense all game.

Love your work! Can't wait to see more.

Making them value defensive techs like they do military techs (IE, these are top secret and extremely valuable...) would be a nice change.

Upgrading the value of defense techs would certainly be a step in the right direction. However, if all we're doing with the new algorithms is try to approximate the old, why have to change the algorithm at all? As Rataan attests (and most people will suppport, I'm sure) Smalls and Tinies still won't win wars against larger hulls.

Mediums won't win against Larges, intentionally mixed fleets don't make a whole lot of sense.

It's the DL situation all over again, so what's the point?

Rataan:

You only exchange the one attack ship. If you have near parity on weapons, you should be able to kill one of their ships before they kill two of yours. The point isn't to exchange ships. The point is to destroy their entire fleet while losing only one of yours - the attack ship.

Once you bring their offense low enough, you win. That's the point of using the one attack ship.

This is without researching Larger hulls. The cost of this capability could be as cheap as tech trade and then upgrades. Not cheap, but certainly not on the same level as two whole cutting edge hull techs.

There are alot of semi-useleless "super" abilities. The spying and trade abilities comes to mind. Imo the "super" abilities need to go rebalanced.

As for the original post; The reason that you can build ships that seem invincible is because of the AI. It seems incapable to recognise threats and deal with them and that is the reason your ships can have a field day with ships in orbit and weak fleets.

If the AI had some basic algorithms for combat it would always have strong fleets either attacking AND defending. Rather than just attacking and then rely on a few ships in orbit to take care of defence. There have been many times where I have been at war with the AI and while he sends his, rather powerful, attack fleets towards me he at the same time has no effort put in defence. I can take my attack fleets straight to his homeworld and conquer them with little or no effort.

Exactly why I turn off tech trading. The game is so much better without it, although diplomacy doesn't seem to be used alot. If you have superior shields, your ships should be nearly invincible. Star Trek comes to mind. 'Captain they've apdated!!" In reference to the borg. Your options when facing a ship with superior shielding is to build up your mass driver and missle tech, or hurry production of your own invunerability field or superior shielded ships, beam weapons. What would be nice though, is if you could build like a "transporter module" on your ship like in Star Trek, so during ship combat, you could beam aboard a ship and fight from within, that would be cool!

Uhm.. why? Because that's how it is in Star Trek?

For the sake of balance, nothing should make you invincible. By that I mean that any defence must have a way to be countered. So a ship may seem to be invincible if the attacker is using the wrong weapon type but once he switches then you no longer should be invincible, hence it is countered.

What I mean to say is is that if you have superior technology, you should be practically invincible. If you are equal in tech, then yes, your shields should be countered with high powered mass drivers, missles, or super beam weapons. Are we all complaining because the computer can't punch through invunerability fields with lazers???? Invunerability fields should be invincible to lazers in the same way that a M-16 is superior to a caveman's club. However, if the computer has phazors or the doom ray or whatever and can't punch occasionaly through the invunerability field, then I agree there is a problem and the game is bugged.

Ok, then I agree with you. Vastly superior technology should ofcourse give you a huge advantage. But there has to be some kind of balance where someone with ten times the larger military should have a chance against someone with superior tech.
Otherwise superior tech would trumph all and make it meaningless for someone to pursuit military might over technological superiority.

We're not talking about vastly superior technology here. We're talking about like, a one or two defense tech advantage, offset by a one or two weapons and/or logistics tech advantage on the counterside.

You can be functionally invincible without all that much investment in defense technology.

Conversely, once your defense tech is superceded, it becomes obsolete for some purposes almost immediately. This "all-or-nothing" property needs to be remedied.

Our own fleet battle testing shows that simply is not reality. I would be comfortable taking on entire fleets with only a cargo ship carrying 400 shield defense.

I agree, defense needs some fixing.

Yeah, but it only needs fixing to the point where 400 shields wouldn't do you much good against a concerted attack (or defence) with weapons other than beam weapons. After that, we're in the realm of feature additions. Nothing against new features, myself, but it will be nice to see how things work out with the fixes.

I disagree. The problems we've been discussing have nothing to do with the off-type defense bug since we don't try against off-type defenses. This means that even if the bug is fixed, it won't improve the situation.

Defense is still too all-or-nothing. The "all" of it is just as problematic as the "none" of it. Small defenses not meaning much of anything is a big problem. The sudden turn into invulnerability is also a problem.

I think it's the simplistic r/p/s system giving in. We're seeing other simplistic mechanics going the same route too. Predictable really.
I think it's pretty obvious that the game needs a more robust combat system. No sizemods, maybe no rolls. A complete overhaul, unfortunately.

I think that more can be done with the system as-is. Simply changing up the numbers in the xml files would do a lot. However, a change back to the DL mode of defense for capital to capital ship fire would probably clean up the all-or-nothing problem.

I'm fine with defences being stronger in most situations than the weapon type they are designed to counter. If you are finding that shields do a good job of defending against beam weapons, then it's working as designed as far as I'm concerned.

Now, perhaps it's too easy to acquire multiple defence technologies, either because the AI gives it away or because it's too easy to research. Perhaps the AI isn't quick enough to counter your low-weapon designs with defences of it's own or a different weapon type. Those are mostly issues with the AI, as far as I'm concerned. It has all sorts of issues that make it less effective than a human in a war.



I do agree with this part. The transition in usefullness for defences is too sharp. One excellent, and very simple idea someone proposed is to reduce defence recharge to 1/4 or 1/3 of the full defence value. This would be accompanied with a further decrease in defence size and cost, though obviously not to the same level. If you drop recharge to 1/4, make defences about twice as effective for the same size and cost. Then defences are twice as useful on small ships that are going to die in one round anyway, but it's twice as hard to make a big ship that can take the fire of an enemy fleet indefinitely.

No more decreasing in size and cost!!!!

Please!!!!

It already takes forever to put suitable defenses on a Huge Ship. Increasing defense values per unit without changing cost will have mainly the same effect as making them smaller and cheaper, without the hassle of attaching 30 defense units to every ship you design.

Hah, I meant to say cost per unit. I agree you can start to run out of places to stick those shield projectors rather quickly...

Yes, you could just turn recharge to 1/4 and double the rating of all defence units.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to seperate out the functions of defence and defence regeneration into separate modules. Then the ships that aren't likely to survive a round against the opposing fleet's fire can at least be cheap to make.

I rather like the idea of a defence optimisation module too, whether it's to increase the overall strength or help with defence rolls. It might be better than simply filling up the space with as much defence modules as you can.

If targeting was purely random (like in StarChamber), defense regen could be a factor (but could also have a negligible effect). Since it's not, I don't think it'd make too much of a difference. One ship could benefit from this.



Now this is *the* interesting issue. Making some defenses useless against much higher level weapons, and conversely some weapons useless against much higher level defenses. Something like the attack/defense value of weapons/defenses be a roll modified by a constant value, depending on the "tier" (k) of the weapon/defense:
roll = rand (k , k + max_value)
Of course, this is OT because it'd require some changes in the combat system, namely a different degrad system, weapon/defense tiers, etc.

Hi!

I too supported that opinion. But after fighting Yor's and Drengin's medium & large hulls with their 70-180 missile attack I'm not so sure anymore. My game is DA 1.5x.59.

My counterdesign to those all-attack ships were medium and large hulls with 2 weapons, rest point defenses. Most of the time my ships had more defenses as theirs had attack, so I shouldn't be taking much damage, and not at all losing ships. Yet I did both. There are two distinctive ways I've seen that happen:

1) Yor had 25% luck bonus. Their ships did almost by the rule significant damage to my ships, even when I've been fighting with 130 defence against their 70 attack. I constantly had to heal my ships for quite some turns to make them again combat-ready. It was almost a relief when I turned to Drengin, depite they had much stronger ships.

2) "The dying shot" phenomena. In quite some battles I lost my reasonably healthy ship by the return shot of the AI's just destroyed ship. The amount of damage taken, the amount of my defenses and my HPs just didn't add. Like the game decided the battle should be a draw. I especially remember an event when I attacked two close planets and lost a large hull with 298 defense and 62 hit points to a medium ship with ~70 attack, after my ship already destroyed two drengin's battleships (~130 attack each), losing ~5 HPs in each battle. OFC I was immensely happy!

So even when I had right defences and a lot of them, were my ships not invincible.

BR, Iztok