Getting Killed... Are Thalans invulnerable?

Their defense is of a different kind than your attack, so you could be falling victim to the dreaded off-type defense bug. I've had this happen to me, and it's tremendously frustrating.

off-type defense bug? What on earth is that? I'll check the boards...

but it seems like you're suggesting I build beam weapons to fight him with?

Depends on the version of the game you're playing. What is it? The last couple of DA builds have had this problem (maybe more, but that's what I remember at this point).

I am running the latest build (1.59[b].095) of DA.

I will have to try going at him with similar weapons

Yeah, they said the off-type defense bug was fixed in the latest build, but others have said that it's not. I've had bad experiences with it (I think) in the latest build (not beta), but I've also had times when it looked like it was fixed. So I don't know what to tell you except maybe switch defenses so that if he's getting the edge with off-type defense, you can as well. That's much faster to research than to change weapons.

Good luck!

I have a feeling that part of the "off-type defense bug" amounts to unintended consequences of weapons firing separately. Can someone outline exactly how it's supposed to work now, so I can crunch the numbers and determine whether it might be the weapons-firing-separately design that's flawed?

In the meantime, I'll add my observation that, playing as Krynn in my last 1.6 beta 2 game, all AI opponents were using primarily mass driver weapons so I relied on armor defenses, but there were some starbases with 10 beam/3 missile/3 mass driver attack, and I do recall taking more damage when fighting those starbases. So I'm not sure the bug is still present.

DoJ, like I said, it seems like it's been inconsistant for me. Then again, I haven't done a "scientific" study of it.

I think there's a thread called "off-type defense bug", or at least searching for that kind of thing should work. People have already done some studying of it, so you don't need to repeat it if you don't want to.

Don't just use laser weapons, use missile defenses. The off-type defense bug works both ways.

I am playing DL and even there i find my ships doing far less damage than i would expect when the AI has a stronger fleet.

One example is where my fleet had an overall attack of 28 and a drengin fleet had an overall attack of 32. We were both using missiles, and one of my ships had +4 missile defence while their fleet had about +4 shield defence. I lost 4 small hulled ships and one medium hulled ship (my whole fleet) while they only lost two small hulled ships and kept 3 small hulled ships. I'm there watching the battle, watching my ships pounding theirs and miraculously not doing any damage while mine dropped like flies, it was pretty freaky.

I haven't had a chance yet to try the various suggestions (using beam weapons, stocking up on missile defense, etc.) - but the offense/defense system isn't operating like I would imagine it should.

Once I give them a shot, we'll see what happens.

Let's not forget the effect of luck.
e.g., If a ship has attack strength 100 going up against 0 defense, it will score a hit between 0 and 100. If I spend 1 race point at startup for 25% luck then it scores between 25 and 100!

That's right, and it could be higher than 25% if they chose the racial ability AND the universalist political party.

Don't forget that the Thalans came from an alternative future to stop the humans from destroying the universe. They just forgot to bring all their fleets and techs... Maybe they were just trying to not look suspicious, they even joined the UP and all, hehe.
I'm JOKING!

Nobody else suggested this, so I may be totally the mark (I have been getting confused about how the attack / defense are being crunched since the recent changes involving individual weapon attack being processed seperately, etc). But your example has your three ships EACH with only 3 missile attack and 6 beam defense going against 2 Thalan ships each with something like 13 Beam attack and 9 Beam defense... maybe their defense is enough to stop your individual ships attack of 3?

Are the off-type defenses still valued at 1/3 of their on-type value, or am I living in the past?(I think this was how Dread Lords was working?) That would be giving the Thalans at least 3 defense versus your missile attacks, and if calculated individually (not stacking per combat round) then your attacks generally would not get through? Even if it is fleet totals being used, your attack of 9 versus their adjusted defense of 6 would only have a chance to damage them until your first ship is destroyed, and then you are at 6 vs 6 and not affecting them anymore. Perhaps drop the defense and make some attack-only ships to try to kamikaze thier fleets?

Again, apologies if I am totally behind the times on how these battles are getting processed. I read these forums all the time but just don't keep up on all the technical stuff too well... Duh, I just like playin'! (and losing a lot...)

Anyhow, even though it seems blatantly obvious the Drengin fleets are cheating in my current game, it is most certainly a fun game!

They are only an average strength race using slightly more powerful missiles than me.

All my ships have point defence and theirs have none. I am amazed that my ships which have point defence can inflict only 20 hitpoints while their fleets with no defence (+1 shields) inflict 80 hitpoints (fleet combined).

Other more powerful races such as the Alterians are giving me ships in aid and even their ships with point defences get wiped away even quicker than my ships. How is it that the drengin ships are able to slaughter Alterian ships so easily when the Alterians are more powerful than the Drengin?

My race stats are as follows... Human unaversalists, ability points - maximum level of defence, hitpoints and weapons with creativity and luck.

That's scary, a similar thing happened to me just yesterday. I attacked a fleet of Thalan battleships with a fleet with very similar attack and defence values (same catagories as well). Their attacks averaged 20 dmg per shot while mine were never above 10. I won the battle, but only after suffering around 400 dmg to my 200. There is simply no way pure luck could've caused this (and i really loved that fleet too ).

It seems to be that when the AI has a slightly better fleet, they get allot more bang for their buck than what seems fair. In order to dominate, you really need to have vastly superior ships - in which case the game can become booring so all in all i don't mind if they appear to be cheating, then at least i will enjoy the challenge of building vastly superior ships and crushing the cheating basteds under the weight of my emense superiority.

I honestly haven't noticed this at all. Would you have time to do some experiments so that we could see a clear example? Whenever I've been soundly defeated by AI ships, I've been able to come up with some reason, not just that the AI must be cheating in some way. "Cheating" seems to me to be what you're driving at. If not, I apologize for the misinterpretation.

I will have to look through my saved games and see if i can grab some precise stats.

At the moment my older fleets have been routed severely so i have nothing left to experiment with. I am however about to undergo a session of rush buying a generation of new improved ships so tonight will be fun!

As for cheating, well i get that idea from watching the fleet battles... when i see my missiles pounding away at a ship with no defence and seeing little dammage while my ships with defences disintergate like confeti,,, yea the word cheating does cross my mind.

Mmm. That could very well be it I suppose... good think there. I haven't had a chance yet to go back in and play around with my armements and what not. I will post with results whenever I next get a chance to play.

Ok i got some results... i had 3 medium hulled ships in a fleet. Each ship had +7 missiles and +3 missile defence, i attacked a lone defender which had +24 missiles and +1 shield defence. The result was the defender recieved 13hp damage and was destroyed, but my ship recieved 19 hitpoints of damage. Why are they consistently able to do so much damage to my ships?

Anyway, i played on last night and rushed bought those powerful ships... the Drengin just mowed over the top of them and started taking all my worlds, that was fun hehehe.

So i reloaded from that same point of rush bying and redesigned the ships... amazingly i then slaughtered the drengin fleets which is a startling difference to what happened using the old design.

The old designs i was using was a large hulled ship with 23 missile defence and 20 missile attack. These ships i acompanied with tiny ships using 5 laser attack and 2 missile defence. I was using lasers because i wanted to reduce the firepower of the small ships so they would not be targeted first, also i wanted to discourage the drengin to develop missile defences. This strategy failed miserably and i got wiped out, also the drengin still targeted the tiny ships first!

So i reloaded the game and tried the following strategy... I simply reduced the missile defences on my large ships to 12 and got the missile attach up above 30, then i completely eliminated the missile defence on my tiny ships and got them up to 10 missile atack each. Now these tiny ships still got targeted first but to my suprise, the enemy ships evaporated nice and quick, and i didn't even have to rush buy any ships!! such a big difference just by reducing defences!!!

That's sooo wrong... reducing defenses results in a route?? Especially when you're reducing the defenses designed to counter the exact weapon your opponent is using??

when you have +4 missile defence against + 10/15 missile attack, it is time to quit and use the space for guns!