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.
