Roxlimn Roxlimn

Defence now IS too powerful

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Defence now IS too powerful

from GalCiv2 Forums
After the 1.5X patch, I've noticed that it's relatively trivial to make invulnerable ships. The cost is more than reasonable, given that they're invincible, and you don't need to make fleets of them - just one or two.

The research cost is defrayed by letting AIs research much of the needed tech for you, and then trading them for relatively cheap tech (they're usually valued much less than offensive technology). Then you just research the last few bits and shield your patrol ships to the teeth.

The cost is so light and research so effective that you can do this even with Medium sized ships at a relative technology disadvantage. As long as you never take on a fleet (and most AI planets aren't defended by fleets), you can usually take on any ship the AI builds and win.

This makes defensive ships a great deal to make, even if your main fleet is purely offensive. A defense-oriented ship can patrol to take out pesky raiders and small fleets, and then turn around and deplete enemy planet garrisons for cheap. In fact, it makes sense to send out just one defensive ship per target planet with lots of Transports to conquer the galaxy while your offensive ships and fleets maintain space superiority.

I don't think that defense should be this good.
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Reply #76 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
1) Yor are extremely frightening in battle. Their luck bonus combines with their miniturization bonus to give them quite an edge. If you want to be invulnerable to their 70 attack ship/fleet, you'll need to field in at least 140 defense.

The mini bonus ensures that you'll probably have a hard time meeting Yor with a defense strategy, though it's still possible. Outproducing Yor with Attack Mediums AND lots of manufacturing proves a good strat for me, at least until I can get enough tech to get my defenses up to the point where the Defense Ships start to function as they should.

Not all races are the Yor.

2) Draw battles favor the one with more attack. This means that fielding an invincible ship isn't always a sure thing. You have to make sure that your fleet also has enough attack to kill the enemy in 50 rounds.

Similar concerns also need to be looked at when you use all-attack shis, unless you like losing ships even when you don't need to.
Reply #77 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
2) Draw battles favor the one with more attack. This means that fielding an invincible ship isn't always a sure thing. You have to make sure that your fleet also has enough attack to kill the enemy in 50 rounds.


Yeah, Roxlimn is exactly right here. The more I field high def ships, the more I am seeing them die if I can't wipe out the entire enemy fleet in 50 rounds.
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Reply #78 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
1) Yor are extremely frightening in battle. Their luck bonus combines
with their miniturization bonus to give them quite an edge. If you want
to be invulnerable to their 70 attack ship/fleet, you'll need to field
in at least 140 defense.


Huh? Even with a 50% luck bonus, a 70 attack ship should only deal an average of 35*1.5 = 52.5 damage per round. So 1 on 1, 70 defences on a single ship should be pretty decent defence, not typically overwhelmed. Of course, you have to multiply that by how many you are facing in a given fleet.


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.


So in a 1 vs 1 fight, you were finding that a single 130 defence ship was taking a significant amount of damage each round from a single ship with 70 attack? I mean, if a big chunk of that 70 damage was due to weapons bonus *and* your ship had next to no weapons, so it took a lot of rounds to kill them, I guess I can see it. Luck bonus on it's own, however, doesn't come near to explaining that.

Also, if you are experiencing forced combat-ending shots against opponents with no defences, you really need to squeeze some more weapons in there. Past the point where your defence on a single ship exceeds their expected weapon damage you are getting diminishing returns from defence. If I was facing single 70/0 ships, I'd take 30/70 over 5/130 any day.
Reply #79 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hi!
if you are experiencing forced combat-ending shots

That's the point. I NEVER faced a forced ending shots. My ships had 10-20 attack, and were able to clear defence-less opposition well before turn 50.

I've heard of "super shot" (never read anythig from dev's). Could that be a case?

BR, Iztok
Reply #80 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The 'super shot' is due to the fact that all of the bonus damage from weapons bonus and (I think) starbases piles on to a ship's first weapon shot of each round.

So say an enemy had a ship with a designed attack of 60 (15x4) but due to attack bonus, it comes out at 100 attack. Not only are you facing a ship with an expected damage of 50 instead of 30 (assuming no luck bonus), the first weapon to fire on that ship does 0-44 instead of 0-4.

If you have say, 60 defences, you could be fairly confident that you enough to stand-off a 100-attack ship on average, but that first weapon shot of 0-44 has a reasonable chance of beating your 0-60 defence roll and leaking damage through. It's easy to predict the effect of a bunch of 0-4 rolls, but harder to predict a 0-44 plus a bunch of 0-4 rolls.
Reply #81 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hi!
The 'super shot' is due to the fact that all of the bonus damage from weapons bonus and (I think) starbases piles on to a ship's first weapon shot of each round

IMO that happened in my case. I've had lots of battles with Drengin this night and 've noticed a really big hit (20-50 HPs) occured sometimes (I estimate ~5% of all shots fired in 170 attack vs. 300 defense), but enough frequent I started pairning my large hulls, in order to destroy drengins' ships faster. The "dying shoot" I've seen about twice was likely just the super shot happen as the last shot.

Thank you for an explanation!

BR, Iztok
Reply #82 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
"Super Shot" phenomenon certainly makes defense and offense planning a lot more complicated and a lot less transparent - not a good thing!
Reply #83 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Has the defence bug been fixed yet?
Reply #84 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
No. And the description of the "fix" has me... concerned.

See WWW Link


Reply #85 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
If a dev says that defence degradation is going to be fixed I'm not going to doubt it because they only have a few minutes to illustrate it. However it can't hurt to send an e-mail to Stardock and ask specifically about it.
Reply #86 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hi!
No. And the description of the "fix" has me... concerned.

IMO it would be better they'd go back to the old combat model. It was significantly less flawed, and made games more interesting.

BR, Iztok
Reply #87 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I think it'll be interesting to merge the models. Have Small and Tiny Ships deplete defenses, but not Medium and above ships.

We already know that Medium + size ships are major players in warfare. Giving the firepower of smaller ships a little extra "oomph" could give them the significance they currently lack.
Reply #88 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
What I would like to know it to what degree does this defence bug effect the current game?

Should I wait for a patch?
Reply #89 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
the way the bug is works is this, defense is strong and very worth it!!! You are practically invincible with lots of defense on your ships!!
Reply #90 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The off-type defence bug apparently manifests when ships have piles of defences that are not of the same type as the weapon being used against them. When the on-type defence is being worn down by that weapon, the full value of the off-type defences must also be worn down (instead of the sqaure root of the off-type defences) before the ship is utterly defenceless against that weapon type. Of course, it is always possible for the ship to suffer hitpoint damage as a result of bleed-through (where the defence rolls less than the attack value) but when defence rolls so much higher it is infrequent.

I've read that there is a fix in the works which will address this issue. In the meantime, the best strategy is to develop weapons matching your opponent's strongest defence, so that there is comparatively little off-type resistance.