The reasoning behind nerfing defense?

Rataan

Join Date 01/2007

The reasoning behind nerfing defense?

I'm wondering if anyone can explain the reasoning behind nerfing defense in DA. I don't really have an opinion yet either way. It seems that the majority opinion on defense in DL was that by and large it wasn't worth the cost, especially late game when attack values became ridiculously high. Since I play with tech trading off, my DL games have never lasted to the point where anyone has attained the best weapons. So my experience has been that ships with good defense dominate the AI's high attack, zero defense, small hull strategy in the critical mid-late game period when the first war is being decided and the probable game winner emerges.

I wasn't aware of the changes to defense when I started playing DA, so I kept the same strategy with what seemed at first to be about the same results. But I noticed that fleets that would have been almost invincible in DL were suffering attrition. That's really a good thing as challenge has increased.

But that leaves me to wonder what place defense has in DA. The dominance of defense has been nerfed in mid game, but it will be more useless than ever in late game wars with ultra high attack values. I think the discrepancy boils down to a few design peculiarities.

1. Attack and defense are random, so an unlucky roll means damage taken even with high defense.

2. Hit points don't scale, except for the fact that a few larger hulls become available as time goes by, and a few techs and one trade good increases it. But hit points don't increase nearly as much as weapon damage.

3. In fleet battles, one ship is targeted until it is destroyed. In DL this meant that in a four ship vs. four ship fleet battle a ship with defense equal to the individual attack values of enemy ships would shrug off most damage. In DA, a ship would need more than twice as much defense for the same effect. More than twice as much because on the second attack the defense value will be on average half its value in the first attack, assuming equal attack and defense values.

4. Even in DL the effectiveness of defense decreased as attack values went up even if defense values kept the same pace. That's because no matter what the defense value, the average damage taken is always greater than zero. The defender always takes damage when attack exceeds defense, but is never healed when defense exceeds attack. As attack values go up, this average residual damage goes up too.

As I see it, this has a few interesting consequences:

1. Attack, which has always had the computational edge over defense is further strengthened in DA by a huge margin.

2. Fleets got a big boost and the larger the fleet the better. Logistics got a big promotion. Gone are the days when a single large hull with good defense could take out a huge fleet of small fighters.

3. One on one battles and one ship vs. fleet battles aren't affected by the changes. They will play out exactly as they did in DL as far as I can see.

It looks to me like the changes are on the whole bad news for the AI and benefit the human player much more. The human player's ability to use mobile fleets for planet defense will be a greater advantage than ever. And the AI's poor use of engines in the current version of DA will make them even less effective at mounting a really threatening assault on player planets.

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Given the way sizemod works, thats the effect you'd EXPECT... as it is, its pretty nonsensical that an equally effective laser takes up MORE space on a battleship than on a fighter.

I'd prefer that the sizemod wasn't a factor on weapons, to be honest.

It would be interesting to have weapons components that would only fit on larger hull sizes, like a railgun the scale of the MAC guns of the Halo universe. If they could hold massive single shot weapons.. that'd have an interesting effect on gameplay. On one hand, thats a helluva big bullet. On the other, it's a single gun, so you're hitting one target with it only. A ship with the weapon would be great at smacking big ships, but not so much at hitting the smaller ones.

It'd also be interesting to have the reverse be true... like, for instance, the size of engines drastically increasing over hull sizes, or even better, defenses! Then you'd have the interesting setup where putting enough defenses on a large ship would be cost prohibitive, but putting them on a small fighter is much more efficient.

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How do you mod galciv to change these things? I used to make balanced defence ships and I'd always worry about if I had the right defence against my enemy's chosen weapon type. I thougth this was important, but when I abandoned defence research all together, I found I won a lot more, it made me sad!

So what's an easy tweek we can add to fix this?

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Well, do all of you realize that you can mod all this? (well, part of)

I would be very interesting to have a "fan-balanced" mod...

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About the game is imbalance with the proposed system ...

well, the game is already imbalance as it is now, only this imbalance is against capital ship. True, the proposed system make it imbalance against smaller ship. However, between an unrealistic illogical imbalance and a realistic logical imbalance, I think I'm better off with the latter.

There is still uses for fighters, like as patrol, or as a local defense force, not to defeat but to hold of enemy until you get bigger ship on station ...etc...

However I do doubt any drastic change to revamp the system will be made through a patch though, if it wasn't fixed in the expack, it won't be fixed now. This is a SP game, so any change in gameplay meaning the AI will have to be upgrade to adapt to it.

I do think about a few minor fixes that I think feasible and won't upset the current gameplay by much while offer a better balance (I hope):

1 - Minizuration: the bonus on bigger ships should grow as a much much higher rate then in smaller ship. Like I said, the problem is from mid game, smaller ship can ignore defense since even if they have some, they can not hold off the damage any way, bigger ships can, but they'll suffer in other areas. So techniquelly, if you want to have a battleship with enough defense to hold off and fully armed frigate, then it'll have roughly the same amount of fire power as a frigate. Solution? Give the battleship more space so it can effectively do both.

2 - Hull Bonus Defense: I think this is one of the easy one to do. Does it feel strange to anyone that bigger hull doesn't come with better defense? This is a logical implementation. Bigger hulls should have a "default" bonus defense, something like this:

- Tiny/small: fragile right, so 0.
- Medium/Cargo: ok, so from 5 - 10
- Large: Good, so from 10 - 20
- Huge: Hardcore! 20 - 40

The range is to indicate a possible tech upgrade, this is to prevent the bigger ship has too big of an advantage in the beginning. But as we know, the weapon problem get worse with later tech, so maybe something to balance out. Here is what I think, if a battleship is able to reach the last tech on the defense tree, then a fighter should be at least reached 2/3 the weapon tree to have a chance to fight. The bonus defense also to encourage the player to have some incentive to put on extra defense, while a really hardcore fighter can still have a chance to give their shot.

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It would be interesting to have weapons components that would only fit on larger hull sizes, like a railgun the scale of the MAC guns of the Halo universe. If they could hold massive single shot weapons.. that'd have an interesting effect on gameplay. On one hand, thats a helluva big bullet. On the other, it's a single gun, so you're hitting one target with it only. A ship with the weapon would be great at smacking big ships, but not so much at hitting the smaller ones.

I was thinking about this today.

Probably the easiest fix for this weapon/size issue would be to just add a slider. That's it. A measly old slider, which means it couldn't be done in a mod, but by the devs.

So, here's what I thought up: add a slider for 'weapon power'. The center point of the slider would have a fixed number of points that would be GREATER than an unminiturized tiny hull, so that makes it about 20 hull points for argument sake.

I think an exponential formula would be good to calculate both damage and size. The only limit is that it must do at least 1pt of damage--this also means that all weapons and defenses and HP needs multiplied by 10 so the current 1 damage weapons can have a non-fractional damage amount with a low end of 1. I wouldn't even put an upper limit on the amount of power that can be loaded--using an exponential formula, say f(x)=x^2, would give a nice curve. Eventually the law of diminishing returns sets in as each additional point of damage is adding massive amounts of space. This seems to make sense: a more powerful weapon would need more 'stuff' (this is taking up the space) to make it more powerful. Wether this stuff is motors, generators, etc; is left to the imagination, however it is necessary to support the weapon.

So, could you create a Laser V that takes 300 hull points? Sure, why not? Go right ahead if you like, if you can fit it on your ship. The key would be the center point, 10 for lasers, 20 for plasma, etc, so a 300 hull point plasma is still going to be 2x as powerful as a 300 hull point laser weapon.

Indeed, this would allow for a limited number of hugely powerful weapons on larger ships, possibly supported by smaller 'caliber' weapons. It does bring to mind the idea the poster mentioned above, and I had the same (except I was thinking of the Aggressor-class destroyer from Forces of Corruption)...exactly what would one do vs. a ship with a cutting edge weapon super-powered to 200 or 300 hull points? Even super powered to 175 hull points and the loaded on defense? Quite an interesting problem.

As an aside, this could also be done with defense systems, alleviating the need to put 5 of this and 5 of that on a ship. Just put one of each system you want and scale up the power where you want it. Of course, it might make sense power and space wise to mount 2 medium or larged size defensive systems over a single super-sized system. In fact, it might make sense to scale defense on a linear scale which would allow a much greater amount of defense than would a similar sized offensive weapon.

Anyway...it's all pie in the sky but interesting to talk about

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I read about 2/3 of this thread, and then skipped ahead to post. I need to sleep. From my experience with other 4x games the issue is far deeper. In reality there are 2 reasons for defenses on troops. One is that replacing them costs money, and that if they can fight longer before dying you get more combat value out of them. But the other reason is one that is overlooked in pretty much every 4x game I have played. Civilians don't like it when their brother that is a soldier gets killed. There is no morale penalty for having high casualty rates. Why not send in a bunch of kamakaze ships if your population simply has no emotional response to high casualty rates? Because this isn't a feature in the game the mentallity on defense is going to be considerably different from what you would consider normal (real world), no matter how much you tweak the numbers. This doesn't mean that tweaking numbers wont help, its just that its a fundamental issue that needs to be considered. Just my two cents.

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I suppose this would eliminate the rock/paper/scissors paradigm

If a major overhaul of the entire military engine was to be done, then the logic thing to do would be to go with a standard combat system. Ships have hull points, armor protects against all attack forms, shields protect against beams (hit before armor) and PD (also before armor) protects against missiles (and fighters, if there would be such a concept in GC - not GC fighters mind you). Now, for you to actually need shields and PD, beams and missiles would have to be superior to mass drivers. Implementing range and partially getting rid of die rolls would allow you not only to solve this, but add some more flavor to weapon types. Make missiles long range weapons, their damage being a die roll with a high max damage; beams are medium range, decent fixed damage weapons; mass drivers are short range, low fixed damage weapons. Combat is processed in steps: first all missiles are fired (both sides), PD kicks in if present, armor takes damage if not; surviving ships then fire beams, shields kick in if present, armor takes damage if not; then mass drivers do the rest, with only armor to stop them.
Of course this needs the right balance, but so does any system.
There would be no need for the "check what techs your opponent has" cheese.

Indeed, but it's the size of the gun that the divisor (or multiplier) is meant to represent.

Die rolls and fractions?

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the size of engines drastically increasing over hull sizes, or even better, defenses!

Yep, brought that up already, defenses and engines are the only items that should have sizemods. None of the rest makes sense.

Does it feel strange to anyone that bigger hull doesn't come with better defense?

Not really. The thing is, the techtree is not a level-based one. If you could focus on each hull tech and increase it in level, hit points would go up. Large Hull 2 having more HPs than Large Hull 1, etc.

So, here's what I thought up: add a slider for 'weapon power'. The center point of the slider would have a fixed number of points that would be GREATER than an unminiturized tiny hull, so that makes it about 20 hull points for argument sake.

So what would be the point of having several different types of beam weapons for example? If you can scale the damage, and none of them having any special features...

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Maybe make hull sizes only mount weapons and defenses in an equivalent "tier" - tinies mount only the basic beams, smalls can mount up to lasers, etc (same for other weapons and defenses). This probably would need the techtree to be slightly restructured though.

Ok, as someone who generally likes things to make sense, be realistic, and follow a certain logic of "tidiness" (sp?), here's my take on how the Space Militarization branch of the techtree could have been made. It's not a suggestion, it's just an exercise, based on the premise that each weapon/defense type could/should be tied to a specific hull size - think of it as larger weapons not being able to fit in smaller hulls' hardpoints.

First, all civs should start the game with some basic techs, since they have been in space for some time now. Some have even warred among themselves, so it's rather strange that they have to research even the most basic of space weapons and defenses.
Those basic techs ("level 0") would have an attack or defense value of 1 respectively, and they'd be one-step-only items:

Particle Beam / Screen ; Space Cannon / Armor Plating ; Rockets / Chaff

Took some liberties here, namely creating Screens (basic shields), and Rockets (basic missiles). I dumped Sparrows, Stingers and Harpoons (and shifted the next techs to take their places), because this is not humans vs humans after all (even though some of the tech descriptions still assume the player is playing the humans...).

As for the techtree itself, it'd only need some reorganization to reflect the change with the basic techs. Some stats could have to be changed (including # of "steps" and/or RPs needed in each tech) to compensate for the reorganization. The connection between weapon/defense type and hull size would have to be introduced though.

So on tiny hulls you could only mount the basic techs plus the following "level 1" weapons/defenses:

Laser / Deflector ; Railgun / Titanium Armor ; Torpedo / ECM

On small hulls, same as tiny hulls plus "level 2" weapons/defenses:

Plasma / Shield ; Singularity Driver / Duranthium Armor ; Photon Torpedo / Point Defense

On medium hulls, same as small hulls plus "level 3" weapons/defenses:

Phasor / Barrier ; Graviton Driver / Tri-Strontium Armor ; Anti-Matter Torpedo / PD Combo

On large hulls, same as medium hulls plus "level 4" weapons/defenses:

Disruptor / Force Field ; Quantum Driver / Kanvium Armor ; Quantum Torpedo / Droid Sentries

On huge hulls you could mount any weapon/defense.

Again some liberties. For the sake of going with the rest I changed Kanvium to Kanvium Armor and Photonic Torpedo to simply Torpedo (also to avoid confusion with the Photon Torpedo).

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Hi!

So on tiny hulls you could only mount the basic techs plus the following "level 1" weapons/defenses:

Hummmmm... That would make ANYTHING small in late game next to useless. To alleviate this each level of weapons tech should give something to each ship class. Like: you discover Phasors, and the basic phasor would fit into any medium+ hull, but for smaller hulls you'd need to research Phasors-2 (or better called Small Phasors), with slightly smaller attack power.

BR, Iztok

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Hummmmm... That would make ANYTHING small in late game next to useless.

Again?!

Like I told Yamota in the previous page, there would have to be some form of compensation, namely miniaturization. If there was a slot limit, you could cram a lot of lasers on a tiny hull, which wouldn't be effective on a large hull (because of the slot # limitation). Like I said, there would have to be some modifications to some of the stats, low level weapons would have to "feel" smaller and high level weapons larger. (huge hulls don't really feel huge compared to tiny hulls, stats-wise)

Phasors-2 (or better called Small Phasors),

I'm not sure where the change would be with that, except for Phasor 1.
Notice that this was an exercise going with what the game already offers, no major changes required (stats mostly).

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I haven't been disappointed in defense so far. Just 8 points of Duranthium armor in a Tough game I'm playing allowed a single medium hull cruiser armed with two Nanorippers to fend of an onslaught of 15 five small ship fleets of Drengin ships. I kid you not, 15 FLEETS. The Drengin seem to have bought into a cheese strategy of high volume swarm attackers, and as a result, I now have a level 15 medium cruiser at my disposal. I run small and medium ships, primarily, averaging 4-8 points of defense and 8-13 points of attack. I split the attack between two systems, one being a missile, and the other being either railguns or beams, depending on which is better at upgrade time, and this arrangement has allowed me to stand down the Yor and the Drengin, who's fleets are each, theoretically, far superior, simply because I take defense seriously.

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Using Duranthium armor I take that your game haven't gotten very far on the technology. If you have read what we're talking so far the problem only from mid game onward and worst at the end of the tech tree. Sure, the defense is useful at the beginning, very infact, and I always use it to survive the first phase of the game (some how I can never chunk out as many ship as the tough AI).

However, later in the game techniquelly a fighter can carry the amount of fire power of a cruiser and by this point no amount of reasonable defense can hold a canlde against the other firepower.

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I'm not convinced that defense is underpowered in DA. I've used it well in all three of my suicidal wins so far. It's not better than weapons, it's just useful in different situations. Defense is expensive to build, but it is cheap to research. If you use just a little it's worse than weapons, but if you use a lot it makes a ship invincible. It's bad on small ships, but good on big ships. It isn't helpful in fleets, but it will allow a ship to win battles alone.

This is my current strategy: I use fleets of tiny ships that have nothing but weapons, and I use single big ships that have very high defense. The attack fleets are powerful and I use them against the enemy's strongest fleets. But their drawback is that even in easy battles, they'll lose several ships. These easy battles happen frequently because the AI has some fleets that aren't full to the logistic limit, some fleets are made of many obsolete ships, some planets don't have fleet managers, and if my attack fleet loses there are just a few enemies left over. Use the defense ships for the easy battles and they'll come away unscathed, which lets me keep the attack ships alive for the big battles. If you get an advantage in tech or military resources, then every battle becomes "easy", so defense ships can take out entire civilizations with no losses.

However, later in the game techniquelly a fighter can carry the amount of fire power of a cruiser and by this point no amount of reasonable defense can hold a canlde against the other firepower.

This was a problem in DL, but it isn't anymore in DA. It doesn't matter at all how much firepower a ship has in DA, because a ship's whole defense rolls against each weapon. Even the black hole eruptor does only 25 damage, and it's easy to have much more defense than that on a ship. It does matter how much firepower the entire fleet has because that can deplete defenses. If you're facing a full fleet that's loaded with nothing but black hole eruptors, then no amount of defense will save you. But that's defense's weakness, it wins in lots of other situations, and I have a different strategy for killing big attack fleets.

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Hi!

Just 8 points of Duranthium armor in a Tough game I'm playing allowed a single medium hull cruiser armed with two Nanorippers to fend of an onslaught of 15 five small ship fleets of Drengin ships.

You sure you're playing DA and not DL?

BR, Iztok

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You sure you're playing DA and not DL?

He was fighting the Drengin super-dominator corvettes. Since they only have three attack, a fleet of 5 will only do 7 or 8 damage per round. 8 armour will therefore stop almost all of the damage from the initial round, and subsequent rounds have zero chance of getting through.

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Hi!

He was fighting the Drengin super-dominator corvettes

Thanks for explanation.

However do those corvetes "scale" with the tech level of the game? I mean: at the start those could be strong, but in mid-game where ships have 20-30 attack ...

BR, Iztok

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However do those corvetes "scale" with the tech level of the game? I mean: at the start those could be strong, but in mid-game where ships have 20-30 attack ...

The ships don't get better, but they do get more of them. Eventually, their main purpose is to annoy the player with their sheer numbers.

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Or you can sell them to various AIs, they seem to think they are worth something (I don't know why). Even with a decent speed bonus and weapon bonus to your empire these things are worthless.

Congratulations, defense is worthwhile against a really bad ship. But so is offense. Super Dominator Corvettes don't come with any defense, so as long as you have one ship with an attack value that is twice the total hps of a fleet of corvettes, you are invincible.

The myth of defense being good for experience also does not hold true under the new system. I got a ship up to level 17 which had no defense thanks to the 1 hp rule. Huge hull, 574 beam attack, move 25. I would move into an area (about 10 moves), destroy 5 fleets or so, and then retreat 10 spaces (the enemy ai had moves of 6-9. Because I was only one ship, and because I destroyed entire fleets in the first round of combat, I always lived with at least 1 hp. This ship only cost me 2400bc and wiped out three entire empires single handedly.

I didn't just build one, and I eventually was fielding fleets of five that packed an attack power of 2870 beam. Take that peacekeepers. After I started building these suckers I DID research up to invulnerability field myself and then trade it to every surviving empire to gimp their militaries. Of course, it worked - every other empire started kicking out ships much slower, and they were less effective against my beam monsters (that always kill everything in the first round).

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