same. I am also interested if this is up to date.

Its been a long time since I've posted.  But I'll try to answer your questions since this was once my specialty.   The damage your defender takes is based on the length of the battle.  If your attackers are in the same lane as the enemy attackers and defenders you will find the battle takes even less time with your defender taking less damage as a result.  Ships shooting accross lanes always start at long, and they target oppossing ranges secondaraly after their own lane is destroyed.  This effect can be altered by the use of the protector/defender class as it is designed to draw more "aggro" from enemie ships.

The lane mechanics can be abused to a certain extent, like loading all to the top or bottom lanes will not engage each other with regular weapons (there are tricks to get around this like carriars.)

What your seeing is the difference in placement of your ships against the optimum enemy ranges and putting your ships at their optimum ranges as well.  Also shooting accross lanes again always starts at long.  Hope this helps, most of the battle guide stuff still holds true, although you can throw the rock paper sciccor method out the window. 

Hello again. I've just finished my first game, so I came back to testing this more

plutar wrote:

If your attackers are in the same lane as the enemy attackers and defenders you will find the battle takes even less time with your defender taking less damage as a result.

It's actually not what I observed. When I put everything on lane 2, my fleet was taking ~4k (2-3x as much) damage and defender ending up destroyed. Guess it's all about morale boost.

plutar wrote:

Ships shooting accross lanes always start at long, and they target oppossing ranges secondaraly after their own lane is destroyed.  This effect can be altered by the use of the protector/defender class as it is designed to draw more "aggro" from enemie ships.

Do you mean starting at long and then getting closer on phase 2 if my card says so? Can defender draw enemy fire from attackers to another lane before my non-defender ships on the same lane are destroyed? I thought it's long in all three phases even if in 3D visualisation my lane 2 and opp's lane 3 almost touch when both pick e.g. Power to Shields (MLL) tactic. Also what I noticed a few timesin 3D visualisation during my last game at the start opp fires a bunch of missles from lane 1 to my ship on lane 2 with most of them hitting and then switches to firing at my ships on lane 1. In the report my lane 2 ship (not using repair modules) is undamaged. So I ended up ignoring 3D visualisation as an inaccurate depiction of battle damage. I would only hope the lane paths were drawn correctly in battle preparation advanced screen, so I can deduce before battle starts if my/opp flotillas can shoot at adjacent lane or if they will be obliterated without firing back, cause it's a difference between losing 1 ship or losing almost all of them... or even better: changing this, because it's silly that human or other aliens are passive when receiving tons of damage (but this is for another topic I guess).

plutar wrote:

What your seeing is the difference in placement of your ships against the optimum enemy ranges and putting your ships at their optimum ranges as well.  Also shooting accross lanes again always starts at long.  Hope this helps, most of the battle guide stuff still holds true, although you can throw the rock paper sciccor method out the window. 

I have a feeling the main topic of my previous post wasn't touched, so I created a simple to reproduce test (ignoring separate lanes, morale boost and whatnot) I would still like to get explanation on.

Steps:

1. Start a game as UE with all the default settings.

2. Edit Patrol hull to contain only engine and queue 4 of those.

3. Start exploring with your ships to discorver a minor faction.

~8 turns later:

4. Edit Patrol hull and add lasers or beams. Retrofit 2 ships.

5. Edit Patrol hull again and change lasers to slugs. Retrofit the other 2 ships.

6. Go with your 5 Patrol army to system with a minor faction.

7. Wait for minor faction to build ships and attack them (make sure their ships don't have missiles or you will likely take no damage).

8. Move all ships to middle lane and pick Turtle tactic.

9. Observe damage on your ships.

10. Load the game and attack again twice, changing order in which you move ships to middle lane.

What I observed there is every time with the same order I get the same values:

* setup 43443: received 2661 damage and my second ship with 391 health left

* setup 43434: received 2439 damage and my second ship with 613 health left

* setup 43344: received 2605 damage and my second ship with 447 health left

As you can see in the screenshots above only the ships' which are not fired upon order is changed. If I do these battles at a later turn with another battle in between, the damage I receive is not changed. So the question remains: why is it predictlable and yet not intuitive?

I was refering to cross lane shooting, IE ai puts ships in center lane, yours are at the top lane.  (This is more relevent for larger battles) but when engagement begins accross lanes it always will start at long regardless of battle tactic used.  The early battles are predictable, there is another fact missing from your accounting.  Your patrol ships Hit Points change in accordance with their experience, the higher experience the ship has the more health it has, thus longer it lives ect.  I know your recreating a exact scenario, so not sure if this applies.  The longer a ship lives the more damage it obviously will have to deal over time.  

I am not really sure about the root of your question?

Results will always be different as the ranges and chances for damage are % based, like if you flip heads 1000x times sometimes it could be more than 50% or less than %50 percent with a variance will be 99.99% within 100 ~ flips 400-600 heads kinda thing....

The morality boost also dictates your defenders HP value, and it will be targeted first as it is a protector class ship, unless its in a different lane.  By lane I am talking flotilla, its also near impossible to tell by watching a space battle when one lane ends up vs's another, some weapons can't even shoot from flottilla one to flottilla three, which is abusable :()  

Understanding space battle in this game is like trying to do math blindfolded with a rubix cube. But in your scenario I am about 75 percent certain your seeing the morality boost and a lane mechanic at play.

Yes your defender can aggro accross a lane it can shoot at IE flottila 1-2 2-3 1-2 3-2...  And the AI will always attack its own flottila first, (unless protector or lensors are used, have not tested in latest patch)

Since your using the turtle card, both of your avaiable options start at close range, also there should be a tooltip that shows how much damage % of the average DPS is being dealt at a certain range over the weapon.  IE Kinetics are Long/Med/Short range damage modifier per each hit is 10/25/85% while missles are the opposite.  Beams being the only consistent outputting weapon.  And you hit the nail on the head the damage is preditable and not intuitive... I recommend you play a game wtih a buddy and do some testing on a small galaxy with one of the mods that allows for almost instant development to test.  

The original ambishion was to have some kind of rock paper sciccor mechanic that got convelueted as time passed.  Sorry I can't find a better answer for you.