Thanks for the explanation. I'm annoyed that I got hit with a cheesey move, but better of knowing why.

So...why not simply have the display reflect this fact? I went into the combat, not having memorized the behind the scenes combat math (and I've played a lot of tabletop war games, something like this would be lunacy) and expected my fleet of four ships with beam weapons attacking a ship without any beam defenses to win. Instead they got completely annihilated. Apparently by a some game rule in the back of the book in page 219.

My biggest problem is that the combat ran completely counter to what the statistics that the game presented me with, and I had no real explanation why.

This may have been the first time I'd ever encountered an AI ship with armor that high, actually. An easy way to fix this is instead of showing "0/0/81" for defenses, why not show "(9)/(9)/81". This would say "effective armor of 9".

A fair and balanced combat system is something that this game has over...well...every Civ game...ever. No more defending against a battleship with a phalanx and winning!

But my recent combat experiences were more like that. And quite honestly, that really annoyed me. I quite literally was convinced the computer was cheating and immediately quit the game.

However, the problem with these "rules" is that is seems to skew the combat a bit. These makes a big dent in the supposed penalty for specializing in one area. Instead of being rewarded for building balanced ships, you are rewarded in skewing towards specializing in one area.

I used to put a few points in other two two areas to help protect the ship. But instead of doing that, I'm just going to pile more armor on the ship. It's more efficient.

Oh, and one last thing, a Dread Lord ship taking advantage of this, by placing a single Doom Ray and filling the ship up with armor would make it pretty much invincible, right?

How can a single ship fare so well against a fleet of equal power or greater power? I am new at the game, but I did see a single medium-sized ship hold off a fleet of heavily armed battle-cruisers the other day. How is this?

Well, almost
The defenses of the single ship (and the fleet) will be recharged after every ship has fired all its weapons. At least that is how I understand it.

I kinda like Dread Lords right now. Don't have DA... just bought it because I haven't played a video game in a while and the aspect of "creating" your own ship was intriguing. The ship creator I've seen offers a lot of creativity, but, TBH, it takes a lot of tweaking to get anywhere near some of the awesome designs, although I understand they are using the upgraded version of the game....

If I got another game any time soon, however, I think it would be Sins.... it looks awesome, but I don't think it would let you customize your ship the same way. Am I wrong? I mean, its also real time... and I don't want to be designing my ship while the enemy is producing a massive battle fleet.... However, its probably a lot like the stronghold games (albeit, stronghold doesn't use space ships). I only played the original strong hold briefly and played the heck out of Stronghold Crusader.. never played the later ones though... at any point, I'm rambling at this point.

Done!

What I'm after is a reasonable representation of the forces in question. I would like the combined fleet stats to represent the...combined fleet in question. Preferably accurately. So if a ship has a stat line that does not match it's actual stats...it would seem to invalidate the stats in the first place.