Quick question-did you destroy him?

Second question-what's your tech level?  What guns are you on, and what lasers?

Thirdly, what shield defenses is he on?

Fourthly, are you seeing 4 per hit, or 4 per round?  These are completely different things.  If you're seeing 4 per hit and your units have greater than 3 weapons on them, this is normal.  In DA, each weapon fires separately.  If you're seeing 4 per round, there's something wrong.  (A round for our purposes is one firing of each weapon on each ship.)

Fifthly, you might be seeing your laser ship doing more damage because defense depletes during each round in DA, and is refreshed after the round.  So if your gun ship is firing first and lowering the defenses sufficiently, by not getting through, your laser ship essentially has a clear shot.

I'm not sure offhand what the mechanism is for what ship fires first in a fleet, though.

Another thing to consider is that if he has a shitload of defense (which my guess is he doesn't) then you won't really be doing damage at all, as off-type defense provides the square root of its value against weapons it doesn't technically defend against.  So 49 defense gives him 49 against lasers, or 7 against guns and missiles, etc.  But I'm not sure this applies in your case.

Let's try to break this down.

Yes, non-laser weapons will also deplete the shields (only for the round, though-as do all other weapons).  If say his shields are 9, and you do 1 point of damage, ignoring defense rolls for the moment, his roll of up to 3 trumps your 1 damage so 1 point is deducted from his defenses-but not from the square rooted value.  So he's down to 8 shields now, for the round.

Saying 3 tech 2 weapons vs. 2 tech 3 weapons is misleading; it implies that the attack ratios for all weapons are the same, and this is simply not the case-not even within a tree.

Where you have a ship with 3x4 vs. 2x6 attack, you will actually do slightly higher damage with the 3x4 attack ship, as weapons fire on a per-weapon basis.  This can be countered by sufficient defenses, though, and I believe there's a break-even point, so don't spend too much time agonizing over it.

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Singularity drivers have an attack of 2.  This means their possible rolls, without factoring luck in, are 0, 1, and 2.  Therefore, you should expect to see a 0 about 33% of the time when using singularity drivers.  When factoring in the enemy's defenses, this will probably be significantly higher in the beginning of an attack round and begin to approximate 33% as your enemy's defenses are overwhelmed for the round.

This might help, and I'm surprised I haven't linked it yet.

For what it's worth, gun weapons are actually preferable on smaller ships (medium or smaller), as opposed to lasers or missiles.  Not positive on medium, come to think of it.  There's just a phenomenon of the combat system that low tech weapons don't work very well even against low tech off-type defenses; although they obviously work somewhat better than against on-type defenses.

Alright, still a bit confused about one thing... why am I consistently seeing very high attack values, especially from my enemy, in combat.  The wiki had mentioned that sometimes you will see a high attack number due to bonuses but why am I seeing it all the time?

I don't like it when I see 0, 6, 11, 11 and such sequences when the enemy has plasma level 2 beams

I'm also getting the impression that researching another line of weapons in order to combat someone going high defense in one area isn't very effective.  When an enemy has 14+ in shield, having a tech 3 gun isn't going to make a huge difference compared to a tech 3 laser since the shield value, even rooted, still will catch most of the gun fire.  Or am I wrong in this?

Well, I am doing way more analyzing than I normally do, but I am really determined to see what's up with all of this.  Something just isn't seeming right.

If what you are saying is correct than the mechanics of the game are bad.  In your example, he is not getting a 50% bonus but actually a 250% bonus (7 is almost 300% of 2).  That would mean that he could do 0-7 damage while someone with no bonus would only do 0-2.

However, after looking through several battle numbers, what you have said can't be exactly right.  The reason being is that I have a 4% attack bonus and am attacking with beam 3 and yet am, at rare instances, getting 4,5, or 6 values.

But here is the thing... in my latest battles, we have the same amount of ships, like 3 each.  When comparing our ships and after you take into account these bonuses and all, when I get into a battle, my modified attack value is around 17 (my base is higher but he has a 41% attack bonus while I only have 4%), per ship, and is about 1 more than his and I do have beam 3s rather than his beam 2s.  His shield values are about 2.1 times mine in these battles.

So, from a statistical standpoint, since his shields, per ship, are around 21 (including his 50% defense bonus) and mine is around 10 (including my 14% defense bonus), my shields would expire in about half the time his would, as our modified attack is almost the same and we both have 3 ships each, right?  So, my values would start lower and gradually increase until his shields deplete, in which case we should be doing around the same amount of damage (although mine should be slightly higher since I'm using beam 3 and my overal attack is a little higher).  His values would also start lower but would increase more quickly to this maximum attack amount.  However, in many battles (I have attacked with about 4 similar fleets to his one fleet, since I can't destroy it), this has not been the case.

My values would start low and stay low, usually a 0,1, or 2, with an occasional 4,5, or 6.  His attacks were almost always high, usually around 7,8, or 9, with an occasional 0 - 4 or a very high 12 or something similar.  Since his attacks seem to go to these higher values after about 1 or 2 hits of a low value, I would expect mine to get through his shields, and thus start doing a similar amount of high damage, in 2 or 4 hits (since his shields are twice as powerful as mine).  But this is definitely not the case... In the last battle, I watched my units hit him 4 times each, for a total of 12 hits, and still are only doing the low amount of damage, again with a rare 4,5, or 6.  His are always scoring high and destroy my first unit after that and then it's just downhill from there... usually at the end I only end up doing 20 hit points or so of damage while he does around 160.

Any comments or explanations?

Hey Iztok,

Long time no see. Good to see you around again.