one, or few, versus many ship combat

I don't remember only being able to attack once. Is it perhaps just a detail combat glitch you are seeing only one shot, yet the dmgs will continue.

I've played since DL at one point or another and haven't seen this restriction.

In DA a large ship can attack multiple ships at once, as damage is calculated per-weapon and not per-ship as in DL.

As of DA, once your target is destroyed, your ship(s) bring unfired weapons to bear on the next target, and so on, until all weapons are fired.

First a short run-down of how combat works:

1) Every ship will target an enemy and fire its weapons one by one. If it destroys its target, it will fire any unused weapons on its next target and so on. This means a big ship with many weapons may engage and destroy several ships at once.

2) Defenses now recharge per round rather than per attack. This means that one ship will have its defenses tested against every enemy in the opposing fleet. If it manages to survive the round, the defenses are recharged before the next firing cycle begins.

3) Unless you have the super-warrior ability, there is return-fire provided from defending ships that got destroyed. In DL, 'getting the charge' was very important because any ship you knocked out didn't get a chance to fire back. Now it can.

4) In case of a draw (both ships/fleets get destroyed), the side with the most starting hp wins.


How this affects conventional wisdom:

1) Combats get a lot bloodier. Whereas in DL a ships attack value was matched against the other's defense value this is now the fleet's attack value against one ships defense value. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that as logistic capabilities go up, so will casualties.

2) Defenses aren't so much used to keep a ship whole as to slow down the rate of destruction for your fleet. In DL I used defenses when I out-teched my opponent or when the general level of tech was low (low attack/defense versus hp ratio). In DA I use exclusively all-attack ships. Some use other rules but the bottom line is, defenses are optional, not necessary.

3) Logistics aren't necessarily a good thing. If you are facing very big fleets with a high attack power it may not be a good idea to send in a whole fleet of your own. Perhaps an example will make this clear:

- The enemy has 5 frigates (20 hp) with 70 attack and 0 defense each. These are typical ships the AI builds on Tough.
- You have 3 dreadnoughts (110 hp) with 300 attack and 0 defense.

Supposing for each that each scores maximum power you will see that both fleets would be wiped out.
Suppose you would send in your dreadnoughts one at a time. One ship would wipe out the opposing fleet with attack to spare. In the return fire, only that one ship would bite the dust instead of two.


Conclusions:

The changes in the combat system has led to players using the system in unintended ways. Defenses are optional and logistics can turn against you.

Obviously this is just my opinion and this wouldn't be a forum if there wouldn't be someone around who thinks otherwise.

This is one thing that realy annoys me about the the combat system.
Small ships with masive offence and no defence taking out a fleet of Huge ships.
Its just not right.
Small ships should not be able to house the destructive power of the latter weapons. They should be limited to larger ship hulls.

I have attempted to adjust this (although i am not adept at modding) by increasing the size, size mod, cost and power of some of the more powerfull weapons. Thus making it impossible to fit powerful weapons onto small hulls.

This has the added side affect of large hulled ships with powerfull weapons having less firing solutions.
Small to medium hulls can have lots of weapons but limited fire power.

I am about to start a new game to test if this is a good idea or not.

I'm not sure whether this will change anything but the balance between small ship and larger ones. It won't necessarily encourage balanced ships in either size category.

One possible way to alleviate this could be to have a HP tech tree (in my humble, amateur opinion). One of the reasons defenses become less useful is because at high attack/defense versus HP ratios, a slight discrepancy will get your ships blasted out of space anyway. More HPs means a bad defense roll can be cushioned a bit and hence combat become less of a one-shot roll. Still, given the change in combat system, it has only nudged the balance more to an obliterating offense and denying return fire by just having not too many ships in your fleet.

Still, considering ship combat is being shrouded in silence in the beta, I'm guessing the devs consider the way it works good enough to suit the game's needs.

I see where I was getting this wrong by the way. In my early cakewalk games I had some very small ships with only a single weapon, hence only one attack. Then my next games (still small maps) I fought almost all one-ship battles just the way it worked out. Somehow though this was the norm until later. When I tried my first large-map conquest-only game I noticed when I built photon torpedo ships with the Altarians that suddenly they were able to get multiple shots. Did not yet understand that was because they had multiple weapons. Also explains what I am seeing now in my current game where I am trying to figure out just how many little enemy ships one of my better ships can take out (for working out fleet sizes). Essentially if luck holds and defenses are relatively lacking it is simply the number of weapons.

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Stuff like the fleet combat simulator is broken though since it only uses fleet total attack values and takes no accout of how many weapons the fleet total attack is divided into.

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Also, it seems the concept of "fleet defense" is kind of a misnomer then? It is not like ships aid each other in defense (for that matter really "fleet attack" is the same misnomer as each weapon fires separately). But okay I can deal with that just glad t finally have it straight how it works. Now, tonight Pinky, we conquer the galaxy!

What I have found after playiing several games with the modified weapons, is that you or the AI cannot build fleet killing ships.
In a recent thread Waddawaxx stated that one ship with attack 160 beam is wiping out his fleet of 6 ships which has superior fire power.
With the moded weapons the AI may still be able to build a ship with the same fire power ( or it may not depending on hull size), but it will have less weapons (may have only one), thus it will kill less ships in the fleet.
You will now have to build a fleet to take on a fleet. More "realistic" IMO.

Any thoughts ?

Consider the situation of a fleet of (World War I) destroyers attacking a battleship. The battleship gets a 1 shot kill against the destroyers and their shells simply bounce off the battleship armor unless they survive to get close enough to launch their torpedoes. None of the weapons are particularly accurate or reliable so there is a reasonable chance that little damage gets done on either side. Fast forward 300 years and I suspect the issues of accuracy and reliability will be solved but the combat model in the game resembles WWI more closely than anything else I can think of. In this scenario, you need a lot of destroyers to have a reasonable chance one will survive long enough to score a critical hit on the battleship.

Instead, use your destroyers as commerce raiders or similar annoyances while you build fleets of battleships to fight fleets of battleships. Pity the game doesn't allow maneuvering control. It would be fun to try "crossing the T".

By increasing size, mod size, power and cost, you are effectively trying to undo/cushion what Stardock did to the combat system, namely allowing multiple firing solutions. Before the change, offensive power lied with the attack power and the number of ships in a fleet. In the current system, it's basically just fleet attack, regardless of the number of ships in that fleet.

Another effect is that you are handicapping small vessels in favor of the larger ones.

Whether this is a good thing or not depends on what you think of the combat system as it is now. If you want bigger ships to be more important, you'll want to give them better chances at taking down a larger number of small vessels or reserve the best weapons just for them.

I don't mind if large ships would be more powerful compared to small vessels if only because you need to spend research points on the larger ones. The effort should come with a bonus.

This is exactly what I am trying to acheive.



There is nothing stopping you from filling a large hull with smaller cheaper weapons to maximise firing solutions.
In fact this is exacly what I have observed the AI do in several games I have tried out.
A large ship with proper defences will withstand a fleet of small ships for several rounds.
What it has acheived so far (4 games) is the elimination of meduim hulled 'fleet killers'.  

I have had to build mixed fleets of high power few solution and meduim power multiple soultions to combat some of the fleets the AI has built.

It still needs tweeking. I will keep you posted .

Actually, the side with the higher attack wins. This is how you can build those unkillable huge hulls that spend the whole game at 1 HP toasting fleet after fleet. This is also true of the reverse tie - where both fleets survive after 50 rounds. In this case, the side with the lower attack is just deleted... even if it never took damage!



Several races in TA have hull improvement trees that both add +% to HP and give +HP ship modules. They are expensive, but small (My favorite is size 3, gives 8 hp but costs 80.... it'll be expensive, but throwing an extra 24 HP onto a cargo hull and suddenly you have an early game monster)


~ Wyndstar