First off it is hard to express my excitement in finding a game so closely modeled after MoO! It's been a long time coming; too long.



However, my biggest gripe so far is the way ship defense is designed. The rock, paper, scissor design is all nice and dandy for the battle cards--it's not my favorite system, but I can see the appeal. I don't mind watching the fights; however, when it comes to ship defense it's really bizarre. Losing a fleet of ships because the enemy randomly spawns their own fleet of newly minted missile boats and you have virtually no defense against them is beyond annoying. I don't mind retrofitting ships; that's something I greatly enjoyed doing in Moo2, but it seems over the top that I have to do this constantly if my opponent swaps up his design (which leads me to believe that attacking in multiplayer is going to be incredibly annoying as they have a pretty major advantage in this regard). Some of this also stems from the fact that each defense is down its own tech line within the tree, which makes it a little difficult to keep all of the defenses up to par.



Which leads me to my first question: is it viable to create ships with mixed defenses? So far I have been doing a pretty even splitting of tonnage between weapons and defense (so far the support features seem entirely underwhelming and literally really heavy, relegating them to specialty ships only). With that split I usually focus one or maybe two defenses depending on the enemy ship design(quick question, is there a way to "scan" enemy ships reliably; it seems that I can sometimes see their offensive values, etc, and other times it will show me nothing but their command value). So I guess at the core of my question is if it's viable to create a 3 way split in defenses under the current system (or is that necessary), and if so what % of tonnage should be dedicated to defense in order to make reasonably durable ships? This aspect of ship design is something that I find a little daunting. Figuring out exactly what values I need in order for my ships to survive is difficult. I wouldn't mind having a base set of defenses that act as a foundation for each ship type and have additional defenses at the cost of optional tonnage. I've experimented a little, but the results have been mixed. Flak defenses seem to work pretty well even if you don't invest much in them whereas I've found that Kenetic defense is the exact opposite. The biggest problem is I haven't been able to really test this out thoroughly. Are defenses just flat values vs flat offensive values? How does accuracy figure into that? How do ships get prioritized in combat (it feels like it's a 1 ship vs 1 ship thing each round, opposed to the damage being distributed in the fleet). If that's the way it works does it mean that defenses should be set expecting to absorb fire based on fleet size? So if my opponent is running really large ships with a lot of firepower does that mean that every one of my ships has to be prepared to eat the full brunt of that assault?



I like customization, but this leaves a lot of room to make significant errors in ship design. It feels like there needs to be a more streamline defense system.

O.o Defenses are Rock Paper Scissors too? Are off defenses partially effective, at least? Playing guessing games with an opposing empire where one wrong move could obliterate your fleet for lacking the correct defenses seems an odd choice.



EDIT: I realize this comes off as incredibly ignorant. I'm still reading up on the game and have only played about 40 turns in to my first solid play-through, I've only encountered one kind of offsense, kinect weaponry, so I'm not familiar with how the later engagements play out.

This would be a great thing to test and find out the actual answers. I am pretty sure the off defenses do almost nothing. However, it is possible that armor (in the support tab) is effective, and there are the various repair modules (also in support). Some kind of general purpose defense would definitely be worthwhile.