Understanding combat question

In DA, weapons roll individually, but defences are degraded when they hit. 4 of their ships have about 400 missile attack in total. The defence on one of your dreadnaughts will stop about the first 190-200 of that, then start taking full damage. So I'd expect the first ship of theirs to appear to do nothing, the second attacker maybe get a couple of points in, and the 3rd and 4th attackers in a given round to do full damage. So with 200 unchecked missile attack, they would probably do 100 damage to one of your ships in the first round.

You, on the other hand, have 3*130 = 390 total missile attack, against their defence of about 12 per ship. Even your first ship attacking one of their I expect would about 50 damage past their armor, which should easily kill one. The amount of damage that carries past the first kill would only slightly harm the next ship. So that might appear like a low roll on your part. Overall, you should have enough damage to kill all four of his ships in the first round, or very close.

So, the expected outcome I think would be one of your ships severely beaten up, and all of his dead. If the pirates have a luck bonus, they would probably kill one of your ships, instead of just mauling it.

It's hard to judge from individual combat rolls, because some of the reported damage is spillover and may appear low, while other damage occurs *after* your defences have been eaten away for the round, so appears as if you don't have defences at all.

If you are losing regularly losing two of your ships, either the pirates have a really high luck bonus, or there's something I don't understand about the combat either.

I think there's a bug involving non-optimal defenses: they don't degrade. I've had some unexpected results in my own games similar to Erithtotl's story. You're using missiles against armor, which means that each weapon must roll against sqrt(150)=12 defense. The defense is supposed to be reduced by each attack roll, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Or maybe it's subtracting the attack roll from 150, rather than from 12.

As for defeating these pirates, if you can build a ship with over 200 missile defense, that should be able to take very little damage every round of combat against a 400 missile attack fleet. These ships don't need many weapons, but use the most powerful weapon you can, so they can roll a high number vs. the 12 defense.

Or you could switch to mass drivers, and build ships that are all weapons and no defense. That way, you will be able to deplete their defenses to 0 and then blast their ships.

Really? That sounds pretty bad. I wish there was a combat simulator built into the game, so we could just try it out. It can be kind of time-consuming to engineer that situation in a game.

That seems to reflect what is happening. It seems clear that the Pirates are using top-of-the-line missles in order to pack that high an attack value on a frigate, while I'm using anti-matter torps (about 9 attack rating). If I'm going against their full defense each time maybe that's why I'm seeing such low damage. Ironically it seems to mean that non-optimal defenses are preferable to optimal ones.

if this is true then it is a serious problem. Kinda destroys the tactical depth of the three weapons and defence types. May as well have just shields and forget the amor and point defence.

Agreed, I've just run into this in the DA campaign.

Dread Lord ships were hurting me bad, and had 16 missile defense. My fleets of 5 ships (each with 6 Missile attack +1 bonus) would take down 1 DL ship, and suffer 3-4 casualties.

So, I researched up lasers, and switched to equivalent strength fleet. Now, my fleet dies, landing only 1-2 hits total. It definitely seems like non-optimal defenses arent degrading during a combat round.

Major combat bug, and makes it very hard to defeat DL ships economically. Exploitable though, against any non-DL strength enemy.