Combat Questions

from Stardock Forums
I looked at the online game manual and was curious about a few things regarding combat, which at first glance looks extremely simplistic. Let me preface my questions by stating that I am *not* looking for tactical combat in any way. I am probably one of the few that liked the way RFTS implemented combat.

1) How is combat was related to technology? Do you get bonuses for having tech improvements?

2) Do you have any ability to customize ships?

3) I thought I'd read where you can have multiple ships in a location, thus having a fleet. How does fleet combat work?

4) If you can customize ships, or if tech bonuses apply, is combat always as simple as rolling dice for attack and defense and then applying the numbers? Do certain ships, weapons, or techs have different advantages over others?

Thanks!
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
1) You can research different technologies that will give you new designs for ships and technologies that will give a bonus to all of your ships, even if they were built before you researched the tech. There are also social improvements that you can build that will give your ships bonuses when they are built from that planet. Ships that have the survey ability can enter anomalies to gain bonuses as well (or get tossed across the galaxy by an uncontrolled wormhole). You can also build starbases with modules that will give bonuses to ships while they are in the same sector as the starbases. There are even a few events that will give bonuses to your ships.

2) You can't customize a specific ship. But you will be able to design your own ships. Right now you have to do it by editing the ship definition files, but we are planning on releasing a utility that will make it easier. But be warned: the AI will be able to use the ship as well. :)

3) Once you have a group of ships in one spot, you can hit a button or a hot key and group them into a fleet. They then move as one unit, limited to the speed of the slowest ship. When you use a fleet to attack another ship, they all attack the ship at once. So it's a good idea to check the stats of the target ship before you attack, so that you know if you need more ships in your fleet to take out the target. Other ships attacking your fleet have to try to take out the most powerful ships first. So if you make a fleet with a transport in it, the enemy ship will have to take out all the other ships before it can try to attack the transport. This is also resolved all at once, so that you don't have to watch a battle involving a fleet of 20 starfighters and a transport against a battleship.

4) Different ships have different base hitpoints, attack and defense values. The bonuses that you can apply that I mentioned in my response to question 1 raise these values from their base levels. So when the damage calculations are done, it's using the effective levels. The randomness is limited by these levels, so that a ship that is grossly outmatched won't beat its opponent.

There is a really good fan website made by one of our beta testers that you might find interesting.

http://webpages.charter.net/trevorpowdrell/