Veblen and I did some work on the worth of defences. We found that all-attack ship destroyed more manufacturing points than the cost. We found that defences became less useful as the ratio of HP to attack or defence power dropped. Also, defences became less reliable as a whole as power increased. Outliers and fluke rolls could impact the battle heavily while in low-tech battles, the effects were rather small. So, on small ships and with hi-tech games, defences become less useful.
So, why are defences popular with some players? (This is what we found, your own reasons may or may not fall into these categories)
- Micromanagement. When playing all-attack, you're going to lose a lot of ships and these need replacing. But for that, you need to know what fleet lost what number of ships and you need to get replacements over there. This can cause a logistical nightmare. Players may want to sacrifice efficiency over nerves.
- You're not playing a human opponent. A human opponent has better odds at making an all-attack approach work. Regardless of the impressive efforts of the developers, the AI is not advanced enough to know how to counter balanced ships with attack vessels (it is pretty hard).
- Logistics constraint. Sure, all-attack ships are cheap, but they use just as much space as any other ship. It's easier to handle one fleet thant it is handling three fleets, each with their constantly mounting losses. Also, the outnumbering bonus of the cheaper all-attack vessels are limiteed this way, but certainly not negated.
- Experience. Since the player can engage in some subtle techniques the computer can't identify. A player can retreat damaged ships and repair them, building experience and HP. As HP increase, defences become more useful.
- Might makes right. People compensate by adding massive ammounts of defensive systems. This makes the average defense roll higher than the attack roll and adds some security. In effect, extreme solutions work better than balanced ones.
- Technology edge. If you have an edge on the AI, defences become more useful since he just doesn't have the power required to destroy your ships. This means you have (virtually) no losses and can continue to increase your lead.
What solutions did we come up with?
In the financial world, risk is measured in predictability. Why would you invest in defences if they could just as well turn out to be powered by a 4 volt battery? People want some security and predictability, especially when larger ships are involved. So, if the predictability of defences (and offence) increase, defences become more useful. We do this by reducing variance.
- Give each defence and offensive system a minimum and maximum damage. This way, as more systems get added, the variance in itself doesn't increase. This means the risk doesn't increase.
- Use normally distributed randomizers. Now, every result is just as likely to turn up as any other. A normally (bell-curved) randomizer would make rolls more predicatble but would still allow for the odd lucky roll. This approach would leave the designers more freedom to what level of variance is desired.
