offense/defense

Apologies is this is covered better elsewhere - you can just bash me in the head and then provide the link!

General question:

For the sake of simplicity, let's say there is only one weapon type (or perhaps your opponent is only researching one type of weapon tech, if you prefer). Is it really useful to try to counter the offensive weaponry with defense at the expense of adding offense to your ships? Is there a good rule of thumb or a formula that can suggest what balance would be optimal? It just seems to me that defense is not so useful since it comes at the expense of better offensive weaponry.

Anyone?

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Hi!
In short:
- Dark Avatar: until you can mount as much defenses (+one or two strong weapons) on your single ship as a whole fleet of your enemy has an attack power, is your ship (almost) invulnerable.
- Dread Lords: for a strong defensive ship mount about 150% defenses of the average enemy's ship attack. You'll still lose some of your ships because of bad defense rolls, but generally you'll need way less ships (20%-40%)of such a design than your enemy has theirs, to successfully beat him.

BR, Iztok

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Short answer: Yes!!!

Long answer: The defence trees are much, much quicker to research than offence, and the defences themselves are extremely cheap and take up very little hull space. A general rule of thumb I use is pack just enough offence to get over the AIs defence and then pack the rest of the ship with defence.

For example if the AI I was fighting against was building ships with 12 missile attack and 4 defence, I'd try and get about 5 offence and the rest anti missile defence.

In terms of research strategy I'll usually pick evil and research up to psyonic missile then fill out one of the defence trees entirely before focusing on weapons again. Defence also seems to benefit more from military resources than offence does.

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Yes it is better, or at least its cheaper. This has already been talked about a lot here on the forums, look through some of the oldre threads that discuss defense or offense or combat.

If you are using larger hulls, than you can try and make an invincible ship... if your defense on one ship is greater than the attack value divided by two of an entire enemy fleet. So if enemy fleets show up with around a 100 beam attack, building a large hull with a 50-60 beam defense should make it just about unstoppable.

If you are using medium hulls, defense is still cheap, and *should* lead to you having slightly less losses than your enemy.

Assuming you don't have the tech for an invincible ship, or the enemies have researched high enough on the tech tree that no ship can be invincible anymore, all offensive ships are still very useful. You will on average kill more with them, but you will take more losses. It kind of ups the ante for you and your opponent.

Hope that helps.

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