Discovered a massive stuffup in the way combat works during my game since posting above...

Now i ended up with 12 fully upgraded military starbases (ship assist wise), and i was building timy hulled ships with +1 attack and defence. I was using maximum logistics to confront enemy Drengin fleets which is like 30 odd tiny ships. Now with the starbase support, my tiny hulled fleet was getting massive overall readings, total defence and attack was dwarfing the Drengin fleets but with each battle, the Drengin fleet will win?? They have 1 ship left with just 1 hitpoint each time.

So i tried an experiment, instead of using 30 ships in my fleet, i cut it down to just five ships and guess what, same result! Drengin fleet wins with 1 ship left on 1 hitpoint!! I find it astounding that i can get the same combat outcome if i use five ships or if i use 30 ships!! seriously absurd

Similar thing happened with my cargo hull vessels - only at least by then i knew the anomaly wass present in the game so i made sure i saved before testing. I attacked a Drengin fleet with 10 cargo hull vessels heavily armed and the Drengin fleet wone with 1 ship left with 1 hitpoint. I reloaded and reduced my fleet to just 3 cargo hull ships and got exactly the same outcome!! Amazing, anyway, that was handy for me because then what i did was..... i went around and hit Drengin fleet with a couple of cargo hulls then finished of the last ship with one of my powerful ships. This strategy was extremely devestating to the Drengin and before i knew it, they were finished as a superpower in the game. Talk about a serious backfire on the cheating combat result mechanism!!! mmmwwwwaahahaha

Anyway, this is a serious exploit which is able to happen because maximum weapons technology is way too powerful compared to maximum tech defences. I should not be able to come along with cargo hull ships and use them to steamroll all enemies!! The only way to fix this is to add a few more defensive techs..... but on the tech tree they should be branched off from the weapons side, so people cannot get overly powerful defences too early in the game.

Yea i understand the logic behind it, as you say, this has long been known and i have heard it before. I just did not realise how truely massive an impact it can have where 30 or 5 fighters can get the same combat outcome!! But now that i understand this is the way it is, i am fine with it. But none of this changes the fact that the game definately needs better defences to prevent the player from decimating powerful enemy fleets with a couple of cargo hulls!

Well the fighters in question have +1 attack and +1 defence, but backed up with 12 military starbases at maximum... all the defence values are in the 900+ range and all the attacks are off the chart each category. That is for a full fleet which will be forced to loose to a much weaker Drengin fleet because of the magic rule. It just means i need to cut the number of attacking fighters down to minimum, enough to leave 1 Drengin ship with low hitpoints. Then one of my powerful ships can take advantage of the no mutual distruction rule to take it out in 1 on 1 combat.

Same trick works away from starbases using cargo hull ships. My cargo hull ships register 400+ mass drivers each and Drengin ships currently focus on missile defence. So i may confront a Drengin fleet with a mass driver attack rating off the charts and i can bring it to its knees with just 3 or 4 cargo hull ships then use my powerful ship to pick off the serviving Drengin ship using the 1 on 1 no mutual distruction rule.

I also discovered i can pair up 1 cargo hull with 1 powerful ship of mine to take out a lone Drengin powerful ship which is at full strength. Without the cargo hull ship, there is a chance i will loose my powerful ship, but with the cargo hull ship included, there is no chance of me loosing my good ship!

Conclusion - I do not need to loose any expensive ships at all, even when the enemy has more powerful ships!!

I would agree that military starbases are an exploit except for one thing.... money! When the AI can build factories on all his worlds and afford heaps of research and afford to support 10 times more ships than me while i have to build stock markets everywhare and be content with piss poor production in comparison and barely have enough funds to keep up in reseach..... Obviously i am going to need to make the most out of whatever number of ships the piss poor stingy finances of DA will let me support!!! Military Starbases, bring em on!

Perhaps? For me, the main part of the game is all about the ships, ship configurations and how they perform. Once there is no longer any powerful race to challenge me, i get bored and quit..... what is the point of my lovingly developed ships if there is no one worthy to fight??

Oh by the way, my cargo hull ship strategy turned out to be a mistake, The Drengin even on 'Godlike' setting completely flopped within the space of about 20 turns!! Because what happened, the Drengin were so powerful they had started wars with a number of races all at once. Then when i came along with my cargo hull strategy and started wiping out there powerful fleets, the other AI races came down HARD on them!! The game is ruined now, no worthy opponent is left.

Hi!

From the wiki https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Ship_combat, paragraph "DA combat changes" the strongest ship is

sqrt( ( 2 * Attack ) + Defense + ( Current HP / 2 ) ).

BR,  Iztok

Well, the AI seems unable to cope well with late game situations, as a general rule.

Actually, let me be a bit more general myself.  The AI seems to be optimized for a game that is in the middle in all respects.  That is, just as a gauge reads best in the middle of the display range so, too, does the AI seem to do best with all conditions in mid-range, whether it be early or mid-game or late, or small or medium or immense galaxy, etc.

In the larger galaxies, especially abundant ones, the AI does not seem to properly prioritize colonization choices.

With research victory turned off, the AI does not know to build over research buildings when the researching phase is done.

When wars get big, the AI has poor operational behavior, letting the human take planets with their defenders fighting one-at-a-time.  A human can create defensive fleets and could even park them at the nexi of multiple speed-assist equipped starbases.

I do not say this game needs multiplayer capability to be a good game.  What I do say, though, is that to have a tough opponent under all conditions, there is still no substitute for playing other humans.

I have won at Suicidal several times now, and using 3 different strategies, butonly in the largest galaxies with research victory tunrned off.  I have not been able to win Suicidal yet in a medium galaxy, with all victory conditions enabled, max AIs.  The game is faster, the AIs beat me down the research trees, they transition out of Colony Rush and into war faster, etc.

Well, in support of the whole ridiculously powerful weapon thing, if you think about it, it does mimic real life to an extent.  I mean, is there really any defense against nuclear weapons?  Maybe you could have other missiles intercept them, but that seems like it would be of only limited effectiveness at best.  In addition, even the body armor worn by modern soldiers is only really useful for shrapnel and the like, if someone wearing a bullet proof vest gets hit with any sort of high quality bullet, he's going down. 

So, while the max weapon tech can be lame from a strategy point of view, it does mimic the modern day tendency for offense to be blow apart defense. 

If you want to minimize that, you could try setting your tech rate to slow.  That would make it take longer to reach the later weapon techs, and defense is certainly quite valuable against earlier weapon techs, though this might generate a problem with the AI not researching weapon techs at all ...

Whats really cool is you can have the rebel alliance only use tiny and medium sizes if you make them a new ship style!

unfortunately, I don't use the mod folders to add in new data. I just replace the existing file to avoid a couple of annoying crash to desktop problems I have had with the current version of modding tools.

Modding the game this way makes it difficult to disperse it to others which isn't a problem because you me and son of sam's hole dwelling advisors are the only ones still hoping for the library to work. You can't really set up different AI variants unless you have a mod for each map type/size. For that matter I have never played a game on anything smaller than gigantic, I just decrease planet totals so I keep space big.

As an addendum to this, weapons and defense bonuses only apply to the ship's base values-so it wouldn't help the original poster's original ships, which were 1/1's supported by MSBs.  Basically, you'd need "real" weapons on your ships to take advantage of it.

All you have to do is research enough to get the NLC, go Neutral and build a bunch of them, research econ to pay for them, and then get ahead of everyone else. Those econ resources help a lot.

The proper application of research will win the game every time. It will also make getting those max techs all the easier.

But you have to do it early in the game for the best bang for your buck, because the techs get more expensive as the game progresses.

It could also be adressed that most end-tier labs/facs are really pointless in that they are waaaaaay too expensive to build or to buy. Actually, they distract a player from researching techs or building ships - you'll need to focus on SP alot or waste bcs that could have been otherwise spent. Of course there are exeptions to this, as when you free tiles are scarce, but if tiles are there - imagine how many Research Centers you could buy from the money of a single NLC - needless to say those RC will have *by far* more RPs.