Is there any influence of stacking on combat?

From what I've seen, it's simply one at a time until one stack is no more. But to be fair, I have no way to prove that because combat happens so quickly it's impossible to take note of such details. It's quite possible there is a bonus to stacking that I haven't been quick enough to observe.

- Ash

~SDC~

So, when one stack attack another, which unit goes first for the attacker and which for the defender? And what happens next?

When you attack a square with multiple enemy units on it, the unit with the highest defense score gets hit first.

It's also possible to attack a square with a mixture of enemy and non-enemy units; the non-enemy units are ignored, until you eliminate all the enemies, in which case it asks if you want to declare war on that particular race.

How does it pick which ship does the actual attacking, though?

~SDC~

It SHOULD always make you attack the strongest defending ship in the stack, whichever that would be. I hope that is how it works anyway.

When attacking I pick which ship I want to attack with and do it manuallu just to be safe.

Methinks if you attack with a stack it picks the highest attacker rating first; and against a stack it goes against a ship with the highest defender rating.

I say this b/c I've had Battleaxes and Battleships in a stack before, and the Battleship always attacks first.

Do all attacking ships attack the highest defense defending ships, and then all defending ships fire on the highest defense attacking ship, and so on, untill they are all gone?

So its a good idea to put alot of chaff ships with high defense, like battleaxes or something, along with some corvettes and frigate type ships, so the battleaxes will absorb the first salvo and the other ships can return fire?

Whew, thats a run on sentence if I ever saw one.

~SDC~

No, combat is one on one, usually but not always to the death of one of the two ships involved.

As an important note, especially if you have a decent but not outrageous advantage over your opponent, you always want to have two or more ships of your highest defense rating in a stack. Why? I think, but can't prove, that if you have multiple ships with the same defense rating, it uses the one with the most HP. Now, if you've got one dreadnought that has a slightly better defense than 9 others, that one will get hammered until it is destroyed, without touching the rest of the stack. On the other hand, if you have 10 dreadnoughts with an equal defense, the attack will hit whichever one has the highest HP, which may knock it off the top of the list. Now, why this is important is because you're distributing the damage between more than one ship if you're taking multiple attacks, so rather than repairing damage on one ship, you're repairing more than one ship, each at the rate that you'd be repairing just the one. So, if you've got a 10-dreadnought fleet that repairs 2 HP a turn, the enemy has to do 20 HP of damage just to break even, instead of just 2 HP.