NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.
I actually said that out loud just now.
I'm going to quote the relevant portions of your post, Roxlimn, and explain to you just exactly why you are dead wrong.
Let's take your 84 attack two-Medium vessels. If Average Damage is taken into consideration, then they'll do 42, though given Luck and various kinds of rolling granularity, it's closer to 50. In that case, I only need a 50 Defense vessel to be more or less invulnerable to damage from your 2-Medium Psionic Ships, somthing with a single Large Hulled Dynamic Shielder ship can accomodate handily with room to spare for weapons and modules. In fact, by your own calculations, my Medium hulled Dynamic Shielding ship, with enough bonuses and Dynamic Shields, should be able to solo this fleet with good success.
That is closer to my experience. I do expect my Medium with 100 defense to take out a 168 attack fleet more often than not.
If you'll notice, I have not simply divided the attack values by two for ship combat calculations-I have divided the defense values by two as well. Rolls work both ways-both attack and defense roll from 0 to max. To effectively take no damage from an 84 attack ship, you need 84 defense. It's that simple. The difference in rolls comes from the fact that attack rolls do damage, and when they do damage, they will do on average half of their max. It is also worth considering that in DA/TA each weapon fires separately, so in actuality we're looking at 7 different rolls of 0-12 here, which are then applied to defense (which is then depleted), but that's making things needlessly complicated.
Although, as Willy has stated, a defense ship, when confronted by higher and higher weapons, has a much larger chance of being destroyed simply by getting a bad defense roll. While each weapon rolls separately, defenses roll as a whole (with the exception of different types of defenses rolling differently).
[Additionally, and just something that is not relevant to the argument as a whole, your off-type defense is rolled and then square rooted, rather than square rooted and rolled, so doing off-type defense in square numbers is not really necessary, nor as helpful as it might be.]
Your medium hulled dynamic shielding ship maxes out at (at 40% miniaturizatin) 84 (100 with defense bonuses) defense from dynamic shields, with one weapon on it. If it has no weapons, it's pointless. See previous post. This gives an average defense roll of 50, against a two-ship fleet of 84-attack psionic beams which each roll 42. 2v1, you'll lose. 2v2, using both defense ships, you'll still lose, because targeting priority doesn't change until a ship is destroyed. 168 > 100, and 84 > 50. There's no soloing going on. On average, you're taking 34 damage in the first round of combat, which means your medium dies while dealing 1 or 2 damage to one of the attack ships.
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Just to get this out of the way-your medium ship rolls from 0 to 100 on defense, while the attack ships are each rolling from 0 to 84. There are 169 possible values for how much attack the ships can roll in a round, while there are 101 possible values for how much defense you can roll in a round. Apart from the fact that of the 7,225 possible ways these 169 different damages can be made up, not all of them are the same probability, so it's actually going to average slightly higher, we can see that you have about a 5,151 out of 17,069 chance-of surviving the first round of combat. This comes to about 30%, by the way.
Again, this is somewhat simplified from how combat actually works, as each weapon will roll against a defense depleted by the last weapon, but it really ought to be close enough.
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Moreover, your postulates have me scratching my head, quite honestly. If I'm going to suicide Medium ships to only do 1st round damage, I have no particular need to form them into fleets. I can simply suidice them into an enemy fleet one at a time until such time that the enemy fleet's damage dips below the critical level for my Defensive Ship to make mincemeat out of them. That works, too, and I have used just such a tactic to great success as well.
I'm honestly surprised that you actually have a point here. This is not wrong, I just felt it was worth quoting. You are giving them a chance to level up, but if your defenses are sufficient, then their increased hp is not a concern-it just means battles will take more rounds.
Now if you're looking at fleets of more than two ships, you'll lose more ships by not fleeting (which is contrary to the general belief on fleets in DA/TA, but it may help that we're considering roughly equal techs/cost). For instance, against a fleet of three 84 attack ships, you'll lose 6 ships by suiciding them one at a time, whereas you'd only lose three if you sent in all six at once. But you'd need your logistics to be abnormally high (for this stage of the game) for that to happen.
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I'll be trading 975 BC for 1130 BC without the need to even research Enhanced Logistics, since I'll be sending in my ships essentially one at a time. Again, going by your own calculations, the enemy will be needing more than just 2 Medium hulled ships since that attack rating only goes up to an estimated 168 - not nearly enough to win against a 100 defense ship. If he has three, I'll simply send in three Particle Beam 2 ships to kill one Psionic Beam ship, then mop the remaining 2 with my Dynamic Shielding ship.
See above. Defense rolls from 0 to max just as attack does.
Why would you assume that it didn't? While I hope that was something akin to a typo or brainfart on your part, I have to question how you were able to complete your post while making that assumption several times (and not questioning it).
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However, as you're in general looking at facing off against ships with phasors or phasors II at this stage of the game (rather than psionics), your opposing attack value is 32 or 36 per ship, so somewhere in between shields III and barriers I you have sufficient defenses on a single-ship basis. And barriers III, right before dynamic shielding, gives you almost enough for a 2v1 fight.
