I have seen a lot of questions around combat, and I've been trying to put together the pieces of how combat works. I would love people's help with some of the information.

1) Combat has 3 rounds, how many shots are fired per round?

2) I know that each round the ships are set at a certain range. How does that work based on tactics? Examples:

a) Player A uses short range tactic (aka turtle), Player B also uses short range.

b) Player A uses short range tactic, Player B uses long range.

c) Player A and B use a long range tactic.

3) How does the turtle tactics bonus apply? So lets say my current hull resistance is 20%. Turtle increases resistance by 55%, so is that .20 x (1+.55) = .31?

4) I believe that ships get a 20% damage bonus when their manpower is full, is that correct?

5) When a weapon fires, is there a normal "miss chance" (ala accuracy), or is the damage always applied?

6) Is evasion just a straight up chance to miss the target?

7) Critical Hit: Is that double damage or something else?

8) When a weapon says the number of crew killed, is that effectively manpower removal?

9) Some weapons can do damage to missiles, how exactly does this work in terms of shooting down the opponent missiles?

10) Is penalty for range a damage penalty or an accuracy penalty?

11) How are targets chosen? Do ships focus fire on a single ship?

Stalker0 wrote:

I have seen a lot of questions around combat, and I've been trying to put together the pieces of how combat works. I would love people's help with some of the information.

1) Combat has 3 rounds, how many shots are fired per round?

It's equal for short and medium but long range is a little shorter and thus fewer rounds are fired because you're out of range when you start the engagement.

5) When a weapon fires, is there a normal "miss chance" (ala accuracy), or is the damage always applied?

No miss chance unless you've been hit by a weapon that temporarily reduces your accuracy. Evasion and Range Penalty effect your accuracy though...

6) Is evasion just a straight up chance to miss the target?

Accuracy is determined by (Accuracy) - (Evasion * .6) * (Range Penalty)

So if you have 100% accuracy starting and are firing against a ship with 90% evasion and the weapon you are using has .8 range penalty it would look like this:

(100 - (90 * .6)) * .8

(100 - 54) * .8 = 36% accuracy 

Accuracy usually starts at 100% unless you've been hit by a weapon that affects your accuracy.

9) Some weapons can do damage to missiles, how exactly does this work in terms of shooting down the opponent missiles?

Missiles have health which is depleted when you fire Flak. Flak is sort of a sub weapon of the kinetic weapon. It has it's own range, damage and other stats. Flak is tied into your kinetic weapon so if that is destroyed then so too is the Flak weapon. Flak will only fire at short range. The more advanced the missile the more HP it has which makes it harder to shoot down unless you're upgrading your kinetic weapon.

11) How are targets chosen? Do ships focus fire on a single ship?

Targeting is done in part by weight. Some ships will focus fire (I think it's the attacker and hunter ships that do this) while others just go by weight and distance. Here is a link to the weights.

Gzar wrote:

2. Ships always start at longest range of both player tactics and then shorten distance by 1 each phase so

a) short->short->short

b) long->med->short

c) long->med->short

3. It multiplies your current value by 1.55 yes

4. Yes. The bonus then decreses proportionally to manpower lost.

7. Critical hits completely bypass shields/armor and do extraa damage

Thank you for the replies! Lets me dig in on a few of these answers.

2. Ok your answer makes sense for one floatilla, let me know add in floatilla complexity to ensure I understand.

So lets say there is a 2 floatilla battle, A and B. A starts at long range, and B starts at short based on the tactics chosen.

Now lets say battle A finishes in the first round (aka they have moved into medium range), and now are firing at the ships in Battle B. Would they be firing at medium range then?

Or the reverse. Battle B finishes at short range, and then fires at Battle A. Are they also firing at medium?

Does that tactical pathing actually matter for this? Fore example I have seen a floatilla firing at another seperate floatilla where based on the pathing its actually moving away from it. Does that mean the range can actually increase as the battle goes on?

3. By current value, is that the current kinetic defense value, or the current percentage of hull resistance? Does for example lets say I have a kinetic defense of 1000 which translates to 33% resistance (I know those numbers aren't right but lets just use them for the example).

So do I do 1000 x 1.55, and then recalculate the hull reistance. Or do I do .33 * 1.55? Ultimately those numbers won't be the same because kinetic defense gets incrementally weaker the higher it goes.

4. So for a regular ship with 150 manpower. If I have 100 manpower left the bonus would be .20 * 100/150 = .2 * .66 = .13 = 13% bonus to attack?

7. Do you know how much extra damage it does?

Thank you again for the assistance, there is clearly a LOT that goes behind the scences in combat.

"c) Player A and B use a long range tactic."

I've just finished doing testing for another topic and in my tests both myself and the enemy fleet picked long range and all 3 phases were at long range.

I repeated the same test and also got that answer.

Here is an interesting one I just noticed. I had a battle where my turtle was against a power to shields (PTS). I had 2 floatillas to their one.

The middle floatilla was Long Range then Medium. That makes sense as Turtle is Short and PTS is Long.

However, my extra floatilla was noted as short in both phases! It suggests that since the opponent doesn't get a tactic for that floatilla slot that my tactic (short) takes precedence...but I will need several more tests to confirm for sure.

this is a great thread

Stalker0 wrote:

However, my extra floatilla was noted as short in both phases! It suggests that since the opponent doesn't get a tactic for that floatilla slot that my tactic (short) takes precedence...but I will need several more tests to confirm for sure.

This would be really, really interesting to confirm. Short-ranged beam vessels on the flank starts to look strong if this is the case.

Could you, please, use term "range intention" in your guide so to not confuse your readers? Players should differ intention from actual range because that's how it works.

So in studying floatillas a bit more. So far it seems that once 2 fleets in the same "floatilla area" finish combat, those ships will fire at the ships in another floatilla area.

However, regardless of what the range of that floatilla area is, this combat will be at long range.

You can see it very well with short ranged only ships. If they finish a floatilla area, they will just sit there while other floatillas are fighting it out.

I have not seen any cases so far when these range gets shorter. Floatillas firing into different areas always fire at long range.

Game help forum section is where guides go.

2) I have examplified the range here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=940579911