Defence too powerful!! (perhaps)

defence is too weak in the sense that it no longer provides the same level of strategic intrigue between the three weapon/defence types.

You don't understand the new model. Yes, each weapon is being fired individually... but for every point defense blocks, that defense is decreased for the rest of the round. So, if you have a 5 attack weapon and you hit someone with 20 defense (and you both get perfect rolls) all the damage will be absorbed... but, when the next shot fires, the defender will only be able to roll from 0-15.

Lets take a defender with 30 defense, and stick him in a fight against four ships with 20 attack. On average, each ship will deal 10 damage, unless they have a high luck modifier. Now, on the first turn, lets assume that every defensive roll you make is perfect:
Attacker one fires, does ten damage. Defense absorbs it, amd now you're rolling from 0-20
Attacker two fires, does ten damage. Defense absorbs it, and now you're rolling from 0-10
Attacker three fires, does ten damage. Defense absorbs it and, whoops, you have no defense left!
Attacker four fires, and there are no defenses to stop his ten damage from hitting your HP.

If you were dominating with high defense ships in the dark avatar expansion pack, then I'm willing to bet that you were already well ahead of your opposition technologically. Otherwise, the fact that defenses are damn expensive and don't provide the same kind of longevity they did in Dread Lords means that a high attack ship, with it's ability to kill multiple enemy ships in a single turn at a much cheaper cost, is more cost effective.

thats a good explanation.

i think this shows how an attempt to make the game more difficult has simply translated into making defence pointless. Which is a shame because allot of work has gone into developing defences.

It sounds like they just need to rebalance defense. It used to cost so much because of just how powerful it could be. But now that it decreases, I dont see why it should cost as much as it does, essentially, its "extra" hp now. Useful, but just feels like its not worth the cost.

Perhaps defense could be rethought all together...put in absorbing defenses (like hp, but recharged every battle), blocking defenses (stops X amount of damage of every attack, effective but expensive), and evasive defenses (Decreases the attack damage rolls maximium potential). Problem there being that they'd then have to recalibrate the AI, which sounds like an awful lot of work. hehe

Starstriker1, try your example again with a ship that has 50 defense. It will survive a round of combat with defense left over, at which point, the defense recharges to full. One ship with 50 defense is nearly invulnerable to a fleet with 80 attack. The 50 defense ship is expensive, but it can take on entire fleets by itself.

Yes, Nullspace is correct.

Once you get to 50, 75, 100 or more defence your ships are amazing.

Defence might seem like a waste early on, but once you get enough defence the ships are unstoppable.

I am playing a Gigantic map on Suicidal. Nothing can stop me. The AI just keeps putting more weapons on their ships. And that doesn't work.

If the AI wants to beat me it has to put on an equal amount of defence.

I am pretty confident that I could defeat the entire galaxy with just 20 ships. I am not going to do it because it would take forever.

Think what you like about defence, but it is very, very effective right now.

Next time you play put a lot of BC into defence research and build some ships with a lot of defence... at least 50 defence, and then see what happens.

My new capital ships (before military bonues from miltary resources) have 80 defence out of the ship yard. These ships almost never take any damage. They are worth the BC since they last forever.

The only time you will have a fair fight is if the enemy ships also have a lot of defence.

Early on defence isn't that helpful, but once you get enough it is very, very powerful.

With the current revisions, defence is fairly expensive for what it does. In the early game, it also takes up too much space to make it into any workable ship designs.

Attack on the other hand has become more useful. For example, having different weapon types allows for another target to be acquired if the first one is destroyed by the first weapon to fire. This creates a pressure to add a second weapon type instead of a defence component to a ship design.

Once you get a lot of defence it starts to pay off.

Here is an example.

My capital ship.

142 HP
65 Beam damage
36 Mass Driver damage
163 Mass Driver defence

vs.

enemy fleet of 8 ships
231 HP (fleet total)
178 Mass Driver damage (fleet total)
172 Mass Driver defence (fleet total)

I destroy the fleet and take 15 damage.

If I didn't have the Beam damage I would have lost (luckily I almost always use 2 kinds of attack).

This means this one ship could destroy roughly 10 fleets of this same size. That is pretty damn good for one ship.

As a test I went crazy and just started attacking everything.

My ships are not in fleets.

They can be killed, but only if I don't have the right defence for their attack, or if they simply have a LOT of damage on their ships.

There was one really funny battle where this same ship took on a fleet that had over 500 damage. My ship was destroyed but so was their fleet. It was funny as both just disappeared.

If I fleet my ships all hell breaks loose.

It is VERY important to have the right defence for the right weapons.

It appears to me that this change is actually very good.

Capital ships are now very good, they rule space.

A tiny army of ships really has no chance against a well defended capital ship.

By the time my game is over some fleets will have well over 1,000 damage so it will be interesting to see how my defence ships work then.

I will certainly have to put them in fleets to take on the larger fleets, as their is a limit to how much defence I can get on just one ship.

- Livonya

However if they research a new weapon type your defence will fall to 13. Then you may have a problem.

Is the real problem here that defense resets after each round of battle, instead of after each battle?

I can't imagine your ships would be so effective if it didn't...

Hi!

That's really funny. Low tech defences are next to useless, high tech defences make ships, that can afford them, "uber" powerfull.

I doubt that was what Stardock intended with the change.

BR, Iztok

It's too bad people start these threads and present anecdotes as proof of mistaken beliefs. Defense is a lousy way to spend your bc's in its current implementation. There may be situations where it seems to pay off, but overall, it is way too expensive for what it does. Just look at the cost of defense compared to the cost of hulls and weapons. The cost of defenses on a ship may well cost more than another of the same hull with the same weapons. If the defense is higher than attack, it may be that you can buy three ships with the same hull and same attack. That's a lot more firepower and flexibility for the same price. Sure you may lose a few more, but is easier to afford. Gaining experience and hit points is great, but it is a stone cold fact that this will happen far less frequently in DA than in DL. Yet even if a few ships do get obscene experience, it doesn't follow that you made a good bargain compared to having more ships. Besides that, high experience ships still face becoming obsolete. If your enemy's attack numbers continue to grow, you will start to lose them unless you can afford to invest in expensive upgrades.

Livonya, I really do admire your success playing at suicidal. I'm currently playing at crippling with one AI set to the equivalent of masochistic, and I'm winning with ease. But I truly believe attributing your winning ways to defense is quite mistaken. For one thing, your ship meets the criterion for the one case where defense actually does become worth the astronomical cost: when your one ship defense equals the attack value of the entire opposing fleet. This was explained in detail by another poster in one of these recent defense threads. Also, you clearly are fielding large or better hulls against fleets of small hulls and this has always been a big advantage. The AI's strategy of producing endless numbers of small hulls in war is a poor one and is part of the reason why it does so poorly in prolonged struggles. The bottom line is that you earned your dominating position, whether it was through a lead in tech and economy, strategy, or just a weak effort by the AI, and your superior ships are evidence of that.

Battle in DA are reasonably easy to predict and on average will work about like this:

Combine the defense and hit points of an individual ship in your fleet. If this value is equal to or greater than half the total attack value of your opposing fleet, on average it will survive one round if it is the one being fire on. What happens in the second round depends on what is left. If the ship that was fired on in the first round survives a fleet battle with three or more opponents, then it probably has a big advantage in tech or hull size, unless everything was spent on defense and it isn't doing significant damage in return.

In any given round, defense is about equal, on average, to hit points. However, defense is quite expensive compared to the hit points of a new hull. In fact it is as much as 10 times as expensive in the early game and dwindles to a little more than three times as expensive at the end of the defense tree. It is hard to imagine how defense could be considered worthwhile in the early game, and only a somewhat better bargain in the late game.

Defense comes into its own if the ship being fired upon survives that combat round, because in the second round all the defense is back, whereas hit points will diminish. But if you accomplish that, then you almost certainly went in with a big advantage. Then there is the strong possibility that the defense isn't optimal, in which case its cost compared to hull hit points is multiplied by a huge amount. Defense also has the negative effect of taking up space, whereas spending your bc's for new hulls gains space.

I know that when you are winning it and you are using defense it is easy to attribute your success to defense. I used to be a strong believer in defense myself, but the numbers don't lie. You get a much, much better return on your investment buying more hulls instead of over priced defense.

That's basically what i noticed as well. and the new system makes protecting yourself against more than one weapon type and spreading out deffence types suicidal. You can no longer effectivly protect your ships against two weapon types.

All in all the news ystem seems better for balancing big ships against small ships especially with the new cost of hulls. On the other hand, defence costs, especially for high level defences, should maybe be lowered a little. Low level defences should maybe also take up a little less space. That would balance defence against attack a little better.



It's normal that a defence ship is more costly than an equivalent all weapon ship. They tend to last longer and gain more XP (high defence ships are the last to be fired on in battle as the ai targets the ships with the most firepower compared to defence first) And you do get a better return on investment as you said with "throwable" all-attack ships but then again you have to replace them more often and it leaves you at the mercy of any economical problem that would slow down your production. Defence ships are maybe more expensive but there more reliable and long lasting which can be of strategic importance sometimes

Hi!

I strongly disagree. He found a loophole in game, that allows him to re-use the same ships(s) again and again, lowering his costs to only a small fraction of what would cost a "standard" approach, where he'd be constantly losing ships. It is true that with enough time his opponents would adapt to his huge defenses, but it that time he could gain so much advantage in form of conquered planets, that he'd become unstoppable.

BR, Iztok

My two points are

1) the ships cited above must be of the "huge" type.

2) research to get the advanced hulls takes a LONG time, therefore less time to research defenses. In the meantime, the AI is not intrsted in building big capital ships, so it researches weapons. Usually one type. There exists, therefore, a gap of time when the AI really has the advantage while you research hulls big enough to put defenses, worth putting on a ship, on.

cost effective isn't the same things as better. high attack is almost more cost effective, including in DL i'd say, at least in the short term.

however, high defense ships are more likely to live longer, and in a sense pay for themselves over time. but the thing about them is, it's hard to make enough of them to really defend your empire.



why is this a problem? it's intentional. if defenses reset only after battle, then what'd be the point of not simply having modules to increase HP?



i've heard rumors of a possible bug in the way defense rolls are calculated. this could also be the root of the OP's victories. a few people have said that 'off' defenses don't ablate. that is, if you've got 100 armor defense, but you're fired on by beams, as you all probably know you get the square root of the value as beam defense (10). but some people have said this value currently doesn't depelete each round the way properly aligned defenses do. i haven't heard much more on it, because it's not an easy thing to test. but if it's true, then mixed defenses are MUCH better (and/or broken).

My fleets become unstoppable and I'm not "constantly losing ships." I do usually put *some* defense on my ships later in the game, but they have vastly more attack than defense. When you have a significant tech and production advantage, as the OP surely does, it doesn't matter what types of ships you produce - the AIs are all but fodder at that point.

The OP also seemed to be playing defensively, or passively - ie, not going for domination/conquest. It's most likely a lot cheaper to build high attack with low/no defense ships to jack up your military rating to discourage would be attackers.

I would have to chime in here on the increased value of defense in the new patch. Defense never had it so well. The added cost might seem prohibitive, but even when you use hyper-expensive Dynamic Shields or Subspace Rebounders, or Superior Duranthium and Arnorian Battle Armor, the defense pays for itself easily.


You don't need Huge hulls to make defense pay off. You just need a threshold Logistics score matched by a like Logistics from the enemy. The secret to defense is that your ships survive rounds. Theirs don't. Taken cumulatively, at around Phasor or Plasma damage level, even a Defense oriented ship in a fleet will have enough firepower to take out a like sized ship with no defense.

Granularity counts in your favor. When the next round comes along, you have one more ship than the enemy does. That means that you ironically now have more firepower (since you have more ships surviving). As the ship numbers plummet, you have more and more firepower over your enemy because your ships die more slowly.

The point is that your Defense oriented fleet has:

1. Each ship has enough defense to survive one round.
2. Your fleet cumulatively has enough firepower to kill one enemy ship in one round (since they have no defense).

After the first round, you are a ship up and you can still kill one enemy ship that round. It snowballs from there. It doesn't matter how big your ship is. You can field in Smalls or even Tinies against larger craft and you'll still win. Of course, Tinies normally don't have enough space to pack in that much defense, but Smalls can, and still have enough space to get in two weapons.

It'll be a little more expensive than an all-attack ship, but it'll last longer through multiple battles and have a higher kill-ratio. It's classic Zero vs. Mustang or Tie vs. X-wing.

High attack ships do have their purpose. They quickly and easily take out enemy ships, but they're also quite fragile. Once your attack values come near one another, fleets can easily decimate each other to no result, or you can even suddenly find yourself without a fleet.

I don't know that Defense is too powerful, though. It's probably just right.

Several things.

1) It takes a LOT less BC to reasearch to the highest levels of defence than researching to the highest weapon levels.

Defence is expensive on a ship, but the research is pretty cheap. The ships survive so the BC cost of the defence is well worth it.


2) If I had all attack ships then I would constantly be replacing ships.

Once my defence ships are in place I don't have to constantly replace them. Thus I can start building much larger ships that take longer to build because I don't have an immediate need.


3) With the higher cost of engines, survivability is more important than ever before.

Since ships are moving slower it is a lot harder to constantly replace them and move them to battle. Once I have a high defence ship in the area of conflict then it stays there, doing the job. I don't have to have a steady stream of ships coming to replace my losses. I can instead work on building my economy, social infastructure, or on building even bigger ships.

in DL, i used to have a mixed approach. i'd have a few capital ships in a fleet, with lots of defense, just in case things went sour in a battle. but most of my fleets were small fighters with only weapons (and engines of course). i expected them to die off, and that i'd need to replace them. but that's okay because they were cheap.

my approach to planet use was to have one or sometimes two major production planets that could churn out capital ships like nobody's business. usually i'd pick a planet that had a ship bonus due to a colonization event. the rest of my planets built constructors most of the time, and fighters when i was at or gearing up for war.

with the new cost of engines, this doesn't work so well (relates to your point #3). now fighters form defensive fleets and are built up on boarder regions by military bases (but i don't put engines on them at all - i can get them +8 speed with 4 military bases tho, so they work for sector-wide defense). i've found offensive fleets of medium and larger ships with lots of defense to be much more effective.

Well using a balanced batch of defence and weapons seems to work better on the gigantic maps...no matter what size hull is used. Point being the Dread Lords made a surprise appearance early in my current game and decimated most of the other AI ships that used lots of weapons but no defense. The survivors all had balanced ships and/or stronger defense. On smaller maps using a balanced approach seems to take on even greater significance as even weapon ships still need to be replaced at an alarming rate which can lead to economic disaster, while strong defense leads to holes in the perimeters of your areas that can be exploited by fast moving attack fleets.  

OK, please stop adding experience as a benefit to only defensive ships. I consistently get mid range exp on attack only large and huge hulls (say levels 6-9) because of the one hp rule.

Basically if you build (cheaper) ships with an attack power that can wipe out your enemy in the first round of combat (one ship with an attack value of greater than hitpoints plus defense of the other fleet) you will always survive with at least one hp. If you gain a level, sometimes your hp will reset to full. I got a huge ship with over 550 attack to an hp of 236, no defense on the sucker.

If you don't spend any research on logistics (you don't need it) and just stick to huge/large hull weapons platforms that operate independently you will quickly dominate any AI in this game. You can fight entire wars without losing a ship, and everyone gets experience on your side. As soon as you put two ships into a fleet then you will start to take damage, so I only do this if an opponent manages to make a fleet that I can't overcome with one ship, and then I immediately disband the fleet.

The only weakness to this strategy is that at the end of your turn, your monster high exp ships will often have hp of about 1, so any attack on them would wipe them out. I try to build my ships with enough movement so that I can retreat out of the range of AI after I have done my damage. This is a pure attack strategy, there is no room for the AI ever attacking you.

I have used this strategy at multiple levels of the tech tree. In one game set to very slow research, all it took me was large hulls with an attack of 120 missle (I didn't get any military starbases in that game) - but at slow tech most of the ais were using fleets of small or medium (or tiny) ships. Five of those large ships cleared out every military in the game.
Recently I played a game with very fast research, and by year two was kicking out huge hulled ships with 574 attack. Again, almost never lost a ship, gained lots of exp, and completely wiped out the enemy.

Defense is still very valuable if you manage an economy/tech advantage to where you can build ships where defense is greater than half the attack value of entire fleets. I'm finding this is harder and harder to do with how easily weapons outpace defense. AND weapons are always cheaper. But please don't think that experience is an advantage of defense, the 1 hp rule changed that. Now experience is just an advantage to the tech superior force (def or attack)

When I was in this war with the Yor, every time I tried to take out one of their 150-attack, 1 hitpoint ships with one of my 25-attack, 10 hitpoint ships, I'd fail miserably. Half the time they still had one hitpoint left, the rest of the time they were healed to full.

So you might want to try letting a weak fleet attack your 1-hitpoint monster. You may be surprised.

Say what you want about defense, NOTHING in the game can stop this with the current rules. There are no cheats or mods for this, all of this was built within the basic game.

If you can't read it, they are speed 25, attack 2870 for the fleet, nothing else.

I think this entire discussion only reiterates one thing: There are many different strategies that will work in GCII. That hasn't changed. I haven't managed to finish my first DA game yet, so I don't have an opinion here either way. But it does give me some ideas.