I'm at about Turn 110 now and in a pitched war with one of the other factions. The other faction now has a Medium ship (a Coordinator), while I'm still running fleets of Small ships. My problem is, it's taken out 2 of my fleets with barely a scratch to them and I can't figure out why, even though I'm using the Range advantage and the combat stats say we're matched 45/55. Am I simply that outgunned? Or do they have fleet shields up that prevent me from making a dent on them?

If you share a save file, I can have a look at it and tell you what happens

PANCZASU wrote:

If you share a save file, I can have a look at it and tell you what happens

Here you go. It's the enemy fleet attacking Zuben; it's slaughtered 2 other full fleets so far.

AutoSave 111.zip

Alright, this gets weirder. I had full fleets of Titanium-upgraded ships (Shields, Short Range Lasers) getting throttled by a single Medium-sized Coordinator (with optimal range Medium). But the moment I bring out cheaper fleets filled with the same hull, just optimized for Medium range instead of Short, they're throwing up a good fight (much closer to the results I expected). This feels completely off to me because the combat that Short-range has an advantage over Medium-range. Am I missing something? Are my Short-range ships lacking the Speed to get into range before they're obliterated by Medium guns?

This battle goes very well for you - the reason the other two pirate ships aren't damaged is because the enemy split into 2 flotillas. Your ships have short range so they were only able to focus on one of them.

Now, this may sound surprising, but this battle also went well for you.

For starters, you had 3 basic, unupgraded attack ships, an unupgraded hero ship and one upgraded defence ship. The enemy had a large tech advantage going into this fight; sure their Shield was also unupgraded but it's an era 2 ship - it has tier 2 weapons by default, while your ships had tier 1.

Additionally, as you noticed, the enemy ship was optimised for medium range and partially effective at long range. By the time your ships were finally able to fire their first shots, they already took heavy damage from enemy bombardment.

However, if you had similar tech level as your enemy in that fight, you'd have won

So focus on Engines + Shields for short range ships, then?

And yeah, I didn't upgrade my Hero ship at all; the Dust costs were too high. I would've spent as much Dust upgrading its Engines as I would've spent building an Outpost. Hopefully next patch the prices will drop.