Non-optimal Defenses on ships » Forum Post by Fistleaf

When you can fit it, yes.

For what it's worth, having perfect squares isn't as vital as one might think, since the value appears to be the square root of the roll rather than the roll of the square root (so for instance with 4 it's the square root of 0-4 rather than a roll of 0-2, which would be the roll of the root), but I haven't clarified that this is actually the case.

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Yes, technically having a 1 in each category would provide better protection than a 3 in any single category, especially early game where the AI has ships with single digit attack. However, those low end defenses take up a lot of hull space and cost a lot, it will be difficult to have a ship that early in the game with 1 defense in all 3 slots.

A better way to think of it is that you can have a 1 in any catergory and not have to worry about it being off-type.

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If I understand the DA combat rules correctly, an attack of 1/1/1 will do more damage on a defense of 1/0/0 than an attack of 3/0/0 (optimal defense)?

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The one defense counts as one regardless of whether it is optimal or nonoptimal. So, no. They are effectively identical.

The only question then becomes about dividing up the weapons-for our purposes it would not matter if it were 3x 1 attack beam weapons or 1x each 1 attack beam, missile, and gun. If you have a single 3 attack weapon, that is superior to either of the above scenarios, but at that tech stage you probably don't.

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But for the scenario of a 1/1/1 attack on a 1/0/0 defense, the first weapon attack will be countered by the defense (depleting it), leaving the other 2 weapons free to attack 0 defense. Whereas for the 3/0/0 attack, you could roll 0-1 and do no damage.

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It makes a lot of economic sense to over-buy on the hull and fill up the extra space with that first-level Armor. It's only 3bc, ~14 hull size. You get both the Defense and more hit points for cheap that way.

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Quoting Fistleaf,

reply 5

But for the scenario of a 1/1/1 attack on a 1/0/0 defense, the first weapon attack will be countered by the defense (depleting it), leaving the other 2 weapons free to attack 0 defense. Whereas for the 3/0/0 attack, you could roll 0-1 and do no damage.

You could also roll 0 on all three of your weapons.

If you're looking at 1+1+1/0/0 versus 1/1/1, there's no real difference, because you're firing on 1/0/0 which is (1)/(1)/(1).

If you're talking a 3 attack weapon, then you do in fact have a slightly better chance of overwhelming the defenses (at low values) with a spread of weapons, i.e. 1/1/1 as opposed to 3/0/0, but this is more than compensated for by both luck and the fact that you can fit much more attack into the same space with a 3 attack weapon than a one attack weapon.

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If you're speaking of armor plating, it's 10 + 20% of hull size, which would be 13 of your 16 space on a tiny hull, 14 of your 24 space on a small hull, or 19 of your 48 space on a medium hull. So my question to you would be-what on earth kind of games are you playing where you can afford to lose that much space? What weapons are you using? Even with enhanced miniaturization, you're only up to 30 space on a small hull, which leaves you 16 for...a single weapon.

Wouldn't it be worth your while to go the extra 260 research (base cost) to get Titanium Armor, at 12BC cost and only 6+4% of hull size?

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