Getting really confused with combat... help please

Is anyone out there today?

Can you give more details about all the ships involved on both sides? Fleet size, attack/defense/HP numbers?

At work, on Nyquil and dealing w/fever... but I will attempt to remember as best I can.
One AI fleet had three 'large' ships w/198 hp total, high 200's for attack, low 300's for defense, all missile weapons/defenses. I went up against this fleet with two 'lucky rangers' which combined had around 300 hp, roughly 120 mass driver attack/78 or so armor... destroyed.
Next AI fleet was similar with maybe two or three small hulls in the mix. Again, all missile tech for weapons/defenses... about 460 or so attack/high 300's defense. I went at them with four huge hulled ships w/combined attack roughly 420 or so and my defense was totally maxed out for missiles, which was the example I used above since my defense was over 999. Again I used mass drivers only, which the AI has not researched either way (weapons or defenses). I didn't even put a chink in their hulls and was trounced quite quickly.
Sorry for the lack of info Kryo, I will definitely try to get a screen shot or something since this keeps happening to me on this particular game (which btw is a meta, after updating, and which I've saved at two points... one early on and one as things are. I keep reloading after things go horribly wrong just to see if I can change events but regardless, the AI uses those missiles and point defense relentlessly, but with great success.
I've read the thread about 'unbalanced defenses' or whatever but I don't think that necessarily applies in this case because any defense I use does me no good against their missiles, period. On the flip side, every weapon type I throw at them seems to be stopped by their point defenses.
But yes, if you think it will help you guys, I will try to capture a screenshot if that is all you need. If there's anything else you could use, let me know as I am going to try the same game again tonight just to see if there's something I can come up with to defend myself.

There is a bug in the game where 'off-type' defenses can be as strong or stronger than on-type defenses. So if you were attacking with mass-drivers against strong missile defences, it's possible you were hitting that bug and your mass-driver shots would not do much damage.

On the flip side, if they were attacking you with missiles against your missile defenses, it's possible that they wore you down. If one of your single ships had say 300 defence against missiles, then it would take a *fleet* with about 600 missile attack or higher to begin hurting it. So say you had a fleet of 4 huges, with a combined missile defence of 1200, facing a fleet with about 900 missile attack. Their missile attack isn't enough to overwhelm your whole fleet, but it is enough to overwhelm one ship. So they kill one of your ships in the first round and, due to the bug, you don't do much damage to them. So then they kill another of yours, etc.

So anyway, that's one possible explanation. There is definitely a bug with off-type defenses, and it is probably contributing to your downfall here.

Ok, so I read your followup post. The off-type defense bug would be enough that you wouldn't hurt them much, but I don't have any explanation of why their missiles would ignore your missile defenses. A fleet with 460 attack shouldn't have much chance of hurting a ship with more than about 250 missile defense, and I don't see that behaviour in my own game. My missile defenses against the Drengin worked as expected in the last post-patch game.

Maybe so. I wish I had the actual numbers but trust me when I say that my attack rating was at least three times higher than their HP's, and well over their defense numbers, which was what led me to attack without fear in the first place. My defense rank was roughly double if not more their attack strength, so I 'assumed' they couldn't hurt me. Even my total HP's were double to triple their fleet's total attack damage. Like I said, I read the off-type defense bug thread and for some reason (wouldn't be the flu would it? )it didn't seem to apply in this case.
Best defense for my lack of remembering stats...
I don't pick a fight I cannot win. My numbers for HP, attack, and defense made theirs look pitiful. I had the AI fleet beat on all fronts with regards to the numbers... there is no way they should have handed me my butt on a platter. But I know you guys need info to go on, so I'll send what I can.

Well, your total attack strength is basically irrelevant when going up against strong enough off-type defenses. I had a ship with 199 mass-driver attack that could barely manage to do 5 points of damage a round against a ship with no armor.

Anyway, what are you doing at work with the flu? Considering the risk of infecting others, they should pay you to stay home.

Exactly my point. Thing was, my defense was at least 1000, hence the three asterisks instead of a defense ranking. Their attack was nowhere near this number. I haven't had any issues otherwise, except for some late game freezing, which was no big deal (think I had waaaaay too many custom ships in the folder since once I deleted them the problem went away). Who knows, maybe it's just my time to experience some bugs/issues again... damn shame too since I've got this game to run flawlessly, IMO.

Good one. Pay me to 'not infect' the masses... I should use that at the next review. Actually, I believe I'm past the contagious stage, the wife hates when I get to stay home and she doesn't... and all four shepards decided they wanted to eat the garbage instead of their kibble for breakfast. This was enough to convince me that I'd get more rest at work than at home.

Sick = nice opportunity to stay home and play a Gigantic map.

Well, your total fleet defence from your 4 ships was at least 1000, but that means that each of your 4 ships was only at least 250. That score of 250 is slightly borderline against 460-500ish attack. With some bad luck on your part they could hurt you significantly in that case. Though it would be very hard to kill one of your ships in a round. But if they were doing 20-30 damage a round to you and you were only managing about 10 points a round in response I could see you losing it. Still rather unexpected, even considering the off-type bug.

Thanks for all the thought Entropy, it's appreciated. I'm going to have to try some other tricks to actually 'see' what the hell is happening here. I admit I haven't read many of the posts regarding combat and what has actually changed from DL so maybe I 'missed the memo'. Who knows, maybe tonight will be relegated to curling up with a good copy of Adobe reader and a shot or two of Nyquil. RTFM just might apply to me in this instance!

I have found that the best defence is just the minimum in all three categories...at the same time.
Anything else is just a waste of time.
As for attack. I find the best way to go is to concentrate on one type and ignore any defence on the enemy ships.

It makes the military research tree a bit pointless.

Like the earlier poster said, the defense for the fleet can be deceptive, because what really counts is the defense of the ship that is being targeted. Since in combat, everyone fires at one ship at a time.

Anyway, I haven't played much of DA yet, but even in DL, offense mattered a whole lot more than defense. In DL, I always designed my ships to the attack to defense ratio was 2:1 and so far that seems to work okay in DA.

Defense matters more now than attack. And that would be okay, except that defense doesn't work right.

Well, I´m not a big expert on this game, and I´ve playing for a week now.

Yet, even in the inteligent option on all oponents, I never had problem with combat.

As far as I know, a good offense is far better than a good defence. Every single one of my ships has at least 3 times the offense numbers than their defence numbers.

So, I do recomend you change all your ship settings to better offense and less defence values.

I think that if you get two similar ships, one with 300 offense and 100 defence, and the other with 100 offense and 300 defence, the one with the bigger offense will always win.

Entropy Avatar and Wyndstar have done tests which suggest the opposite. I personally haven't tested this, though.

Assuming the combat system is working as designed, that's true. Both of those ships are going to have a hard time penetrating each other's shields. The more offensive ship in this case would expect to do slightly more than 3x as much damage, but it would be a very long fight.

Edit: Actually, I take the above back. Assuming defenses are working properly, it would be about an even fight, because even though the attack has 3x the weapons, his chance of doing leak-through damage on each weapon strike is about 1/3 that of the other ship. So expected damage from both is the same. If both have a significant weapons bonus then the slightly longer-tailed distribution of the 'supershot' effect for the 300-attack ship could prove decisive.

However, that doesn't mean that the more offensive ship will always win. To beat your 300/100 ship, one could design a 240/160 ship. This ship has enough shields to only take leak-through damage from your 300 attack ship, but has enough firepower to do about 20 damage per round consistently through 100 defenses, plus some leak-through. Of course this would all change if the ships were in fleets, and defenses and weapons aren't equally costly in terms of space. There are too many variables to make a blanket statement that offense or defense is better.

The main thing causing the OP's experience is a bug in how off-type defenses are calculated. So in his particular situation, building more attack probably wouldn't help him very much. He would probably be better served using missiles to attack (assuming there is only one bug in play here).

Remember that 300 attack is actually thirty 10-damage weapons (or even fifty 6-damage weapons) and by the time you get to the closing shots with those weapons, more damage is likely to leak through than when you started firing because of defence degradation (assuming for the moment there isn't an off-type defence) but the downside is that with less defence, your own ship will see damage leakage sooner rather than later.

A strong offence is necessary when you want to cause lots of damage. A strong defence is needed when you want to avoid damage. In bringing differing ships together as a fleet, you combine the means to win with the means to survive.

Yeah, I read through this, and there are probably a couple things going on here.

First, in a one on one, defense ships win. In a fleet on fleet, attack ships win. Its all about getting to that magic number where you can overcome the defense on one ship. Or conversly, its all about having defense on one ship greater than a fleets attack.

Evilstormbringer, you said you had a few smaller ships with guns as well. Those smaller ships may have been targeted first depending on their weapon/hp ratio, lowering YOUR offense early.

Second, even if you fight a battle where your defense makes you "invincible", you will take some damage on average, because sometimes defense will roll poorly. This is especially true the higher attack value PER weapon the other side is using (use the intelligence report). Being attacked by 120 attack from Laser V is very different from 120 attack from Psionic missiles, for instance. For the lasers, that is 120 0-1 shots (and one theory is that defense always rolls at least a 1, never a 0... not proven though) while the psionic missiles is 10 0-12 shots, and maybe better if the AI has luck. If you are not doing damage but taking damage, that is a problem.

Third, I still can't confirm it with hard data, but I agree that something seems up with non-matching defense. It is either not reducing correctly, or is not reducing to 0 (staying at 1 for instance... which will matter for all low level weapon techs). Or maybe it is all just in our heads. It generally feels to powerful against non-matching weapons though. I managed to make (at low tech levels) a starbase that was invincible with only a 10/10/10 defense, and it was taking down fleets with an offense that should have overwhelmed it in a few turns.

Fourth, don't forget about the "super shot". If the enemy has a +% to their race weapon value, all of that gets put into the first shot for each ship. This shot is very likely to do some damage, even against high defense ships. Like above but taken to a different level, there is a big difference between 10 0-22 shots and one 0-220 shot. The later has a chance to wipe out your ship in one turn if you roll poorly on defense. Also, with both def values being high, the more rounds combat is, the more chance that offense has to overcome defense. This is because when defense gets lucky, it produces no spectacular result for the defender. When offense gets lucky, it does a lot of damage which can effect the outcome of the battle.

Or maybe none of that is what is happening. Next time just try and jot down quick the numbers and I'm sure someone on here can give you better advice as to what is happening.

Oh it's definitely not in our heads. In my test, a ship with 199 attack targets a ship that *should* only have 18 defense and can barely scratch it. It's like Rutherfords experiment: firing a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and having it come back and hit you.

I meant no offense, I know we have talked about this elsewhere - and I do believe you. Yeah, I'd like to take a look at it. One question I have that doesn't require you emailing me your saved game is what is the damage range on the guns that make up that 199?

I ask because someone on these forums emailed me (in response to my starbase problem) that they were pretty sure that from tests non matching defense never went below a 1, so if you had a 10/10/10 defense, you could never go below defense 2 (maybe not below 3 even), which could stop very high attack values if the attack value was composed of lasers, mass drivers, stingers, singularity drivers and plasma guns. Even phasor/harpoon/graviton would have problems firing against a non-reducing defense of 2 (each gun rolling a 0-3 (avg 1.5) vs a def of 2 (avg 1.5 - because def rolls 1-2, not 0-2). If this were true, a low tech ship with say attack 12 or so would not scratch (on average) a ship with a def 1/1/1. The above has NOT been confirmed by me, just one theory I recieved. Defense may roll 0-value, defense may be able to go below a 1 when reducing. But it would explain a lot if this were true.

In fact, looking at this, if defense is hard coded to roll (1 to value), it would always come up a 3 if you used all three defense even if the value of defense was correctly being reduced to 0. Which would stop all the lower weapons on the tech tree.

It's a good theory, but the ship in question was using the penultimate mass-driver tech, so 0-9 damage in each shot. Also, the defending ship has only one type of defense.

However, the above is NOT stormbringers problem, he was using Neutrino Bullets. I still would like to see the actual numbers on the fleets that he was fighting with/against.

Yeah, I don't know what is going on with non-matching. Sometimes ships (and starbases) that shouldn't are coming up invincible it seems.