Now, before I get into any ideas on how to adjust the current combat model, I should talk for a bit about how the current combat model has flaws/issues.



Two small ships, loaded with nothing but guns/missiles/lasers can kill a much larger ship, despite having the same total production cost. And they will do so with only losing one of the small ships. The reason for this is that ships can only target one opposing ship per-combat-phase.



In practice, this means that the big ship can blow apart a small ship, but then dies in round one to the smaller ship's damage. The reason that combat of this type will never make it to a 2nd round is that weapons do more damage-per-pound than armor provides hitpoints-per-pound. Also, any overflow damage does not go to other ships, meaning that even if they have a world-destroying amount of firepower on a gigantic ship, at most it can kill only 1 ship per phase.



Additionally, even if you have such a tech advantage that you somehow manage to survive with your larger ship. It will be 10-20 turns before that ship recovers from all the damage it took in combat. This leads to a situation where you would rather throw a bunch of small ships at an enemy fleet and have a few blow up, rather than have large ships which you cannot afford to replace be damaged/destroyed.



The current model of defense modules giving protection from a specific weapon is not efficient numerically. It is better to load another weapon on, rather than a defense module, because each defense module nullifies less-than-1 weapon's worth of fire from an enemy ship per round. An example of this is a ship with 2 guns versus a ship with 1 gun and 1 armor plate. The ship with 2 guns will always win.



I realize nothing I say here is any different than in a number of other posts about combat mechanics, but I wanted to reiterate them before starting on my suggestions.



First, to address the problem of armor not providing enough hitpoints-per-pound on bigger ships, I would suggest that the hit-point-armor modules all provide percentage based bonuses. This would make the health-per-pound curve go from a linear progression with bigger ships, to an exponential progression. Making bigger ships able to actually survive a salvo from smaller ships.



Second, change targeting so that each combat turn (it is my understanding that each combat phase consists of 3 turns of actual-combat) allow the ship to re-target their weapons. This would make it so that larger ships could fit guns or lasers to take out smaller ships, since each fire once-per-turn, and smaller ships could fit missiles since those only fire at the start of each phase. This would help add some more dynamics to the rock+paper+scissors combo of 3-weapon-types that exist now, and allow for bigger ships to take out smaller ships with a much better ratio.



Third, to address the issue of armor being less-than-1-to-1 effective vs guns, and to prevent ships from being simply "immune" to a damage type. Change defenses so that only one module of "any" of the 3 types can be fitted on a ship, but boost the modules to apply to "any" number of attacks of their type.

Guns: gun-armor should be scaled so that any gun armor of equal-level to a gun would reduce all gun damage by 50%. IE: tier 1 guns do 10 damage-per-shot, tier 1 armor would prevent 5-damage-per-shot (instead of the current per-turn armor). Tier 2 guns do 16 per-turn, tier 2 armor prevents 8-per-turn. Possibly add the ability for each gun type to fire multiple times-per-turn to help the damage keep up against un-armored targets, but allow guns 2 or 3 tiers below your tier of armor to still be able to damage your ship.

Lasers: laser-armor should simply prevent a flat percentage of laser damage from all laser systems. Start at 35%, and move the armor protection amount up in 5% intervals

Missiles: anti-missile-chaff should be a percent chance to intercept each missile (as it is currently). Start at the 35% chance that lasers have, and move up in 5% intervals

Possibly change the interface to have a drop-down box or something to allow people to select which armor type they want on the ship.



Fourth, allow ships to be repaired at a friendly planet. This may be the most technically-difficult-to-implement part, as it would require the planet interface to have a button to allow a planet to spend production to repair a ship. Assume that for the purpose of repair, it costs 1/4th as much to repair a 99% damaged ship as it would be to build a new one. This would allow even newly-conquered systems to start repairing up your damaged fleets, and encourage players to send ships back a system or two for repairs.

First of all: yes your statement is right.



2 destroyer can kill a cruiser - but normaly the cruiser not both destroyers.





secondly:



Your view of the combat system is wrong(!) - or at least missleading.



- 1 Phase (we have 5 - prelode, range, mid, close, outro) is divided in at least 8 turns (!)

- Laser and kinetics shoot every odd numer and hit every even (in phase 2,3 and 4)

- missiles shoot at turn 4 at hit in turn 8

- missiles will ALLWAYS get fired if the missile ship get to turn one of a phase (refer to: missilebug, do not confuse with invisible missiles - thats another bug)





Solving the problem:



a destroyer has ~450 HP at best.

Load a cruiser with ~10 weapons and the rest defence/HP.

He should now survive till the 2nd fireround of phase one - which makes the exchange EVEN.

On top of that you can (as a player) boost your own defence OR lessen the accurracy of the enemy fleet.

And even then your hero should give your defence at 40-100% boost AND if you fight on your homeground u get another defence multiplayer out of the left techtree.







I agree it is a problem, but mostly against bots/AI.

It's not tested in multiplayer vs. inteligent builds of humans.

We can test then in beta and I think a bunch of people (me included) will test that out.



Then again: the most easy balance step for that would be highten the basic HP (the higher the cass the more) on ships or boosting defensive modules.







Sincerly

Ah, i had thought each phase had 3 parts, since missiles are listed with a 3-phase-reload. It would be nice if the game had some in-game-way of conveying this information.



With the way offense ramps up, and the fact that offensive commanders give about the same bonus as defense, in the long run they do equal out.



And even if you do get it so one cruiser can take 2 destroyers out over the course of a fight, you get a problem when your fleet sizes get to to 5 cruisers vs 10 destroyers (still 2 destroyers per cruiser). Assuming it takes 3 destroyers to kill 1 cruiser per phase, that is still



*Phase 1

5c vs 10d

-each cruiser kills 1 destroyer

-3 destroyers kill 1 cruiser

*Phase 2

2c vs 7d

*Phase 3

5 destroyers live





With "big" fleet sizes of 20 command points



*Phase 1

10c vs 20d

*Phase 2

4c vs 10d

*Phase 3

1c vs 6d

*End

5 destroyers live

This keeps getting brought up, definitely some issues to iron out.

Indeed to the post above.

Use Battleships, not Cruisers. Go 50% flak + support mods and for the other 50% load the boat up wtih lazorz. Play a def% boosting card for the first phase, beam damage boost for the second and repair for the third.



The Battleships will tear throught the destroyers like a hot knife throught butter. Most of them will never even get to fire off their missles before they get popped.

Hecubus: This cruiser-spam-strategy works regardless of if you specialize in missiles or lasers or guns. Missiles are slightly-more-effective at it, all things being equal, because almost nothing can kill a cruiser before it can fire the missiles. Also, keep in mind, if the cruisers "do" get to fire, and you can afford 4-5 cruisers per battleship, they will have absolutely plenty of damage to win anyway. I can get you specific numbers if you don't believe me, but here is an approximation of what would happen. Keep in mind, that all cards have an equal chance of being cancelled or boosted, so cards are effectively a "null" benefit to either side when considering how combat will play out. If you assume all +defense cards, then it is just as easy to assume they would have an offense boosting card of the same value.



Lasers fire in rounds 1,3,5,7 and do damage in rounds 2,4,6,8. The missiles are fired in round 4, so you have to kill the ship in round 2, with 1/4th of your normal damage that you would do in a phase.



As-is, you would need enough lasers to kill a ship in a single volley, in the first phase. Even a battleship loaded with full lasers cannot do this against a cruiser with HP penalties.

Cruisers and battleships cost about the same, and both cost 2 cmd points. To my understanding the small boat loaded with weapons is generally a destroyer because it gets a discount on weapon tonnage. The battleship btw gets a discount on defense mod tonnage so they kind of cancel each other out.



The theorycraft behind destroyers > battleships might sound good on paper, but I'm not convinced it really works out in-game. From my experience, once larger ships start becoming common in battles, destroyers tend to get vaporized almost immediatly once the battle is started, and it's certainly not uncommon for them to do so before they have the opportunity to fire off a missle-salvo.



hypothetically speaking, if you had 10 cmd points, I'd much rather use fleets of 5 battleships over 10 destroyers. For one thing, the battleships will need to be replaced much less often and will therefore be much more likely to level up and become more powerful over time. The battleship fleet will also be stronger because you only need to devote 50% of the available tonnage to support modules as oppossed to a destroyer fleet. IE: if you equip your ships with engine and power modules, the destroyer fleet needs 10 of each while the battleship fleet only needs 5 of each.



That's a lot of extra tonnage you can devote to defense and weapon modules.



Finally the battle cards are usually % based. using the camoflage card (+45% to antimissle) is going to have a much bigger effect on battle ships loaded with 5 flak mods than it would for destroyers with only 2.

"as it is" at turn 4 the missiles will fire if the ship gets to turn one of the phase, regardless if you kill them in the first volley of turn 2.

That is the reason why your ships "explode without reason" in Phase 5 or it even is only shown in the battlereport. (nothing will happen if you have enough flak).



Missile-Destryoer (or any missile boat at that) is GARANTIED to do full damage in the 2nd Phase (First Combat-Phase).

It's not clear right now if that is a bug or a feature.





Sincerly

Yeah, I've been running into that issue from time to time, and sadly my current solution is to remove all the larger ships defenses and just load it up with a surplus of weapons, that being the case beating the other smaller ships a majority of the time.

I made this thread so people could argue with correct information.

/#/endless-space/forum/33-strategy-guides/thread/14009-how-combat-works-a-guide-to-combat-for-arguements-and-gameplay.



You are wrong on many points. For what its worth, you break up the combat into twice as many phases, but it has no practical difference.

The most notable issue is that you claim a ship with 1 weapon and 1 defense loses to the ship with 2 weapons. While your points about many small ships are still mostly true, the ship that has a defense in this idealistic scenario does in fact win. This is because weapons are not perfectly accurate.



I have my own posts later in the other thread for solutions to this problem with current offense-defense mechanics.