Combat help

I feel like I must be missing something obvious, but I'm having real trouble with combat.
Here's the deal...
I'm a custom civ at war with the Krynn. They are throwing largescale ships at me with the following info:
Attack: 0/33/0
Defense: 0/159/0
HP: 60

I'm sending fleets of these medium scale ships at them (though I've tried lots of variety):
Attack: 0/0/30
Defense: 0/50/0
HP: around 22

By my calculations, I should win these battles easily--I have enough defense to rarely take any damage at all, and I should be doing moderate damage every round against their sqrt(159) defense. Yet a fleet of 3 of these gets obliterated every time and only does a few HP of damage to a single one of their ships.

I've sent those Ranger class ships I keep getting against them as well, which will have around an attack of 0/0/58 and defense of 0/0/17 and 100+ HP; these also seem like they ought to be able to outlast their ships based on the math...

What am I missing?

Thanks!

strategies

Locked Post

Advanced Search

Watch this post

Do not email me updates for this post Email me updates for this post

Successfully updated karma reason!

Wow, in my fairly long experience, I've never seen the AI build ships with defenses that high and so skewed. Usually, the AI builds heavily offensive ships.

I am in agreement with you. I would have expected that you would be winning with minimal losses. I even tried the Kryo FleetSim (is this accurate for DA?) and you should have an extremely high chance of winning.

Hmm.........

Did you look at the combat log? What happens?

Successfully updated karma reason!

Perhaps someone has luck, first strike, or other abilities that is playing a role?

Successfully updated karma reason!

Since it's Krynn, we have to assume it's Super Spy. It is possible that it has +50% luck though, if the OP let the computer pick the starting traits.

Luck is quite powerful, but is it powerful enough to negate his obvious advantage?

Hmm...sqrt(159)...so basically that is 12 defense against 30 attack coming from several ships. With +50% luck, that means the minimum role is half the max. I still wouldn't think that is enough for the Krynn ship to win with just a scratch. Then again, people do say that luck seems to play a bigger role than expected.

Oh wait a second. The medium ships...are they each 0/0/30 and 0/50/0? Or is that the total for the entire fleet? So maybe the fleet is 3 mediums with 0/0/10, 0/16/0?

If it's the total for the fleet, then it's a lot more reasonable that your fleet is losing.

Successfully updated karma reason!