darkcommanderq wrote:
So lets say that Enemy ship A has a balanced setup of kinetic, energy and missles. and ship B has all energy cause ship A has no shields. BUT that dosent mean ship B will win automatically. Dosent he need all the defenses to avoid getting smashed back?



I think the game encourages equal builds more than super focusing.

This would be true only if all techs started unlocked. Research changes the game dramatically, and if you are trying to play optimally you just don't have time to be good at everything equally.

Igncom1 wrote:
I just use all 3 weapons and have no defences.......yeah im the zerg.....WANNA FIGHT ABOUT IT?!!

Suboptimal solution in all cases.



Assume that all defenses simply ignore a set number of shots (i.e. do no damage) or are direct damage reduction (i.e. shot does not damage to the hull). This isn't entirely true, but is fairly close (kinetics armor makes shots bounce off doing no damage, and can deflect a certain number of bullets/turn. shields are damage absorption, and can reduce a certain amount of damage/turn, flak are the odd ones out: they attempt to destroy missiles every turn and have an unknown probability of doing so).



A ship that does 100 damage/phase in kinetics, 100 in beams, and 100 in missiles vs. a ship with 50 deflection in kinetics, beams, and missiles:



150 damage dealt/phase to the hull.



A ship that loads up ALL kinetics (300/0/0) would do: 250 damage/phase, or almost twice as much damage against the same ship.



Worse case scenario for stacked weapons/defenses (that is, 300 kinetics damage, 150 kinetics deflection)? 150 damage/phase (identical to the three-way split scenario).



Best case scenario for evenly split weapons? 200 damage/phase (stacked defense, which would get retrofit quickly to being an even split for a 25% reduction in damage taken).

Probably before there's any discussion about how to fix it, there should be discussion about what the desired outcome is. What do we want combat to be like, both per-combat and per-war.

And possibly a discussion about how weapons and defenses actually interact.



Kinetics and Beams get two turns of firepower in before the first missile launch, and could theoretically wipe out a missile fleet before they get a shot off. But missiles cause substantially more damage/ton at long range, and could also theoretically end combat by the end of first phase.



Most of my combats are over before melee range, and often end during long range.



So even though Kinetics outputs the most damage/ton at melee range, and is listed as delivering great firepower end game, a ship so equipped must survive long enough to bring those powers to bear. Thus far I haven't seen that happen, and that might be a stat balancing issue. There's also been some speculation that Deflectors work on a per volley or per turn basis, which would suggest that there may be a mechanics issue.

Lol another one of these threads

AngleWyrm wrote:
Kinetics and Beams get two turns of firepower in before the first missile launch, and could theoretically wipe out a missile fleet before they get a shot off. But missiles cause substantially more damage/ton at long range, and could also theoretically end combat by the end of first phase.

So even though Kinetics outputs the most damage/ton at melee range, and is listed as delivering great firepower end game, a ship so equipped must survive long enough to bring those powers to bear. Thus far I haven't seen that happen, and that might be a stat balancing issue. There's also been some speculation that Deflectors work on a per volley or per turn basis, which would suggest that there may be a mechanics issue.

Totally true. That's why DD swarms are better with beam weapons. However, defenses all seem to work by per-turn-basis or 'grouped volley'.



Check out /#/endless-space/forum/33-strategy-guides/thread/14018-what-is-the-best-fleet-design-strategy and /#/endless-space/forum/33-strategy-guides/thread/14004-attrition-combat-the-defenseless-destroyer-rush-why-and-how-to-address-it, if you haven't already--lots of good info.

My solution?



1: Defenses become much stronger than their relative weapon.

Deflection currently scales from: 0.625-2 deflection per pound.

Compare to: 0.75-2.1 Projectiles per pound of kinetics

Change to: 1-3 deflection per pound



Flak Currently scales oddly, maintaining approximately equal to its weight deflection.

Perhaps each flak system can destroy one missile of equal to or less than its rating each volley. I really cannot say. Flak currently is equivalently rated to a missile 5 tech levels above it, so I will skip this area. That said, approximately double current flak defensive ability.



Absorption currently scales from: 1.77-12.5 per pound

Compare to: 2.22-10.5 per pound of beams.

Change to: 2.6-18 per pound.



2: Defenses are made imperfect.

Deflected projectiles dealt 0-15% of their damage.

This means it would take 333-44 pounds of Kinetics to kill 1 CP of fully armored opponent in a combat(less because of close range).



Defended Missiles dealt 0-20% of their damage.

This means it would take 183-36 pounds of Missiles to kill 1 CP of fully flaked opponent in a combat(3 times that in a phase).



Shielded Beams would deal 0-10% of their damage.

This means it would take 280-60 pounds of Beams to kill 1 CP of fully shielded opponent in a combat.



This means that stacking defenses becomes more valuable, because of your ability to do it. Beating opponents defenses is still valuable because you are now doing 10-20x more damage, but isn't a binary win/lose threshold for damage. This also provides more total depth to combat because of the interactions with hero stats and powers.





3: Health becomes more valuable because defenses aren't end all be all. Heavier ships naturally become more viable.



Theory of ship design in this system:



Defense Optimization



Defenses are optimized at having half the mass of enemy weapons.

i.e. if the enemy produces 5 ships with 50(250 total) pounds of beams, having 1 ship with 125 pounds of shields is optimal.



Optimized countering easily wins fights

If I have 10 destroyers with 50 shields and 50 beams of weight, I will easily outmurder enemies with 100 beams of weight.



Wide area countering becomes realistic

If you are good with both missiles and beams, having 30% of my ship flak, 30% shield, and 40% Kinetics now becomes a viable counter strategy. Even with 100% of equivalent weight of the enemy being dedicated to weapons of any given type, their damage would still be reduced by approximately 75%. This means it would take 102% of the enemy ship's weight as dedicated weapons to kill a ship in a phase. My ships, admittedly, average the same level of lethality of your ships and would approximately trade in combat, but are more generally useful and will not die to low-cost destroyers armed with a few missiles - a tactic which handily beats the high-cost all-in destroyers at low risk.



Combat Cards become more important

The generalist ships become more capable of utilizing defense related cards to dramatically swing fights. During the previous example, gaining an appropriate defense card against enemy attacks would have made the ships take very minimal damage, but would have done nothing for the enemy.



Generalists still beaten by proper counters

If a ship covers all 3 defenses, even in my version, it will still lose to a focused ship. If it covers two, it is vulnerable to the remaining area, even if it is a weak tech level.



Kinetics improve as close range becomes realistic

Chip damage means that after closing to close range the fight might end anyway. Generally reduced damage means you can hope to get into close range, where kinetics outdamage all other weapons in all equivalent situations.



Disposable Attack Ships still have uses

Either for destroying high-offense enemy ships at lower cost, or countering a high-defense large ships strategy of the enemy. Stacking fleet buffs provide additional strategic uses.



Intentional Researches become useful as counters

The damage spiking of fleet-wide crit bonuses can dramatically alter calculations in a defense-rich environment. Per-turn repair becomes more important if you are gradually being worn down.

Draco18s wrote:
Suboptimal solution in all cases.



Assume that all defenses simply ignore a set number of shots (i.e. do no damage) or are direct damage reduction (i.e. shot does not damage to the hull). This isn't entirely true, but is fairly close (kinetics armor makes shots bounce off doing no damage, and can deflect a certain number of bullets/turn. shields are damage absorption, and can reduce a certain amount of damage/turn, flak are the odd ones out: they attempt to destroy missiles every turn and have an unknown probability of doing so).



A ship that does 100 damage/phase in kinetics, 100 in beams, and 100 in missiles vs. a ship with 50 deflection in kinetics, beams, and missiles:



150 damage dealt/phase to the hull.



A ship that loads up ALL kinetics (300/0/0) would do: 250 damage/phase, or almost twice as much damage against the same ship.



Worse case scenario for stacked weapons/defenses (that is, 300 kinetics damage, 150 kinetics deflection)? 150 damage/phase (identical to the three-way split scenario).



Best case scenario for evenly split weapons? 200 damage/phase (stacked defense, which would get retrofit quickly to being an even split for a 25% reduction in damage taken).

The idea is not to be optimal, the idea is that i will always be doing damage and there for have no need to change the design other than to upgrade my weapons.



So my destroyers are zerglings, never having much attack, or defence but in numbers that can never be defeated unless you do the exsact same thing.



The only numbers to need to figure out is how to 1-to-1 counter me.

GC13 wrote:


the enemy will have incentive to give him this imbalance, because against an enemy with balanced defenses you can easily condense down to one weapon and blast his ships apart.

So lets say that Enemy ship A has a balanced setup of kinetic, energy and missles. and ship B has all energy cause ship A has no shields. BUT that dosent mean ship B will win automatically. Dosent he need all the defenses to avoid getting smashed back?



I think the game encourages equal builds more than super focusing.

darkcommanderq wrote:
So lets say that Enemy ship A has a balanced setup of kinetic, energy and missles. and ship B has all energy cause ship A has no shields. BUT that dosent mean ship B will win automatically. Dosent he need all the defenses to avoid getting smashed back?

Get hit point bonuses. Better returns for the weight/production cost.

GrilledCheezz wrote:
Honestly, now I'm not sure what the point is you're trying to make here - not trying to bash you, just trying to understand better. A major element to strategy games is using cunning and intuition to outwit your opponents.

The blog post AngleWyrm mentioned is more coherent—this thread was made when I was still trying to get a handle on the situation, and really should have been a blog post instead. The general thing I'm saying is that no, there should not be a game of rock-paper-scissors, at least when rock has no purpose other than to beat scissors. If rock could smash any scissors out there but you were more likely building it because of its ability to keep your doors open that would be great.



It's very telling language you use in your post: trying to outguess your opponent. That's not good strategy, it's exactly like poker. As it is people are finding destroyers without any defenses to be better than anything, and defenses aren't being made valuable by needing the one right defense to counter the enemy's offense.



If we could use strategy in a sort of RPS situation I wouldn't mind. Send out the destroyer fleets to do conquest after penetrating the enemy's territory. He's sending in a fleet of battleships to a system? They can't handle that kind of heat: send in your own battle fleet and pull the destroyers back to another system. Destroyers would be even cheaper relative to battleships and still useful, just not for fighting ships bigger than they are.

darkcommanderq wrote:
So lets say that Enemy ship A has a balanced setup of kinetic, energy and missles. and ship B has all energy cause ship A has no shields. BUT that dosent mean ship B will win automatically. Dosent he need all the defenses to avoid getting smashed back?



I think the game encourages equal builds more than super focusing.

Yes, the game should encourage balanced builds for defense and offense, but that is simply not the case right now.

If you haven't already, please check out this thread where I shred my own balanced BB design against pure weapons DD. You need at then enemy to evenly miss ~50% of all shots to survive.

Ketobor wrote:
My solution?



1: Defenses become much stronger than their relative weapon.



2: Defenses are made imperfect.



3: Health becomes more valuable because defenses aren't end all be all. Heavier ships naturally become more viable.

#1 seems somewhat extreme and may lead other problems, but in on junction with #2 the solutions seems viable.

#2 also offers the possibility to have different amount of leakiness; ie., more leaky defense has higher max defense value.

#3 I'd like to see this happen, but right now, the HP gain vs Weight just doesn't make sense even with leaky defense modules. HP is like the disfigured bastard child of ship design.



Still, I don't think I am going to drink the leaky defense cool-aid just yet--I need to do the math.

Ketobor wrote:


Generalists still beaten by proper counters

If a ship covers all 3 defenses, even in my version, it will still lose to a focused ship. If it covers two, it is vulnerable to the remaining area, even if it is a weak tech level.

If you have read the weapon loadout section my "omni tank" design, you will realise that it forces the opposition to defend against all types--a smart opponent will simply hard counter with DD swarm, which seems to be a hard counter to all designs at this time.



Special thanks to Davea for coining the term: omni tank.

I just have little destroyers with wimpy missiles so the destroyers die and then random sperm missiles appear out of empty space and blow up the enemy

GC13 wrote:
Considering the cost to retrofit and how absurdly high productivity can get I think you're right: I'm actually seeing fewer retrofit wars and more "oh, you destroyed my fleet? Oh well. *redesign* Here's a new one that will destroy yours."

I got into that in my last game - initially it was fighting off the kinetic-spam Pirates. Towards the end of that the Horatio and Hissho came and each time I had to to a mass-refit to my fleets to do this (I originally had mass reactive armor [40onDreadsandotherabsurdlyhighHPvaluesonotherships] until I met one of the races and had to play 'plug the holes in the dyke' while researching a new tree to counter; when that was done, I had lost a lot of territory but was able to claw my way back to domination).

AngleWyrm wrote:
Nice blog post. I'd like to point out though, that weapon damage is not a smooth linear line in terms of effectiveness. More is not necessarily better.



Ship hulls have specific hit point ratings (which can be improved). So damage output below that threshold is not a good thing, and damage significantly beyond that threshold is wasted space in the general case.



With this in mind, ship designs can be made that output the 'right' amount of damage for their targets. And that may leave empty space in the hull for extra equipment.

I, too, ran into this issue. When I first started, I just hit the Auto Upgrade thinking the computer would know what was best until I got a handle on things. It ended up putting missile heavy on almost every ship so I had 12 Plasma Torpedos on a Battleship and even more ludicrous on Dreads! Eventually I recognized this and started to tailor - two or 4 torpedoes, 4 or so lasers, lots of hull deflection and shielding (to counter the kin/las setup of my enemy). Things went significantly better after that.



EDIT: My thoughts are... why don't ships have certain number of slots for a certain thing? Like Battleships for instance. Why not have 15 slots for defense, 15 for offense and 5 for support? Or a system like that so you don't have to worry about the zergs - you know they only have so much in the way of armaments. If you want, you could even vary it by race so the Cravers can do small def/large off where as the Sophons can be balanced.

I strongly second that. While it takes a bit from the customizability it might do wonders for the balance. In the same turn the hull bonuses could be changed from "-25% tonnage cost" to "+x modules of type y".

Well, I have already found I way to balance that. What I did was to build large ships that had a HUGE defence in everything but a weak beam attack (because I think this is the most effective weapon) and small ships that had powerfull attacks but a weak defence. Then, my fleets would be composed of one large ship acompanied of some smaller ships so that the large one endured the enemy's attacks while the smaller ones anihilated them. It worked, but I had to constantly substitute the small ships in my fleets, as they often died.

Then again you could have gone the extra mile and stuffed your big ships with defenses and armor only. That one pesky laser wouldn't have saved the day for you anyhow.



While this might work it doesn't seem like a natural/logical or even entertaining fleet composition. Some big fellows with big riot shields to take the damage and some small bastards hiding behind to shoot the occasional rocket or beam?

Apart from that your small guys seemed to die frequently so this doesn't appear to be economically viable.



Don't get me wrong, this might work for you and you are fine with it, but I would like a more diverse fleet composition to be encouraged more strongly.

For example by allowing some support/defense modules to cover/repair other ships in your fleet aside from the one they are built on.

Considering the cost to retrofit and how absurdly high productivity can get I think you're right: I'm actually seeing fewer retrofit wars and more "oh, you destroyed my fleet? Oh well. *redesign* Here's a new one that will destroy yours." Still, there would be some tactical refitting going on, even if nobody had the Dust to do it constantly, and lots of time spent on the Design screen stacking weapons and defenses to the enemy's weakness of the moment.



They're still essentially playing rock-paper-scissors with weapons and defenses, and the RPS will continue as long as one player doesn't want to even out all of his weapons and defenses.



I don't see heroes really fixing this. For one you're going to have more fleets than heroes. You'll try to have heroes at your most important battles because having one while your enemy doesn't essentially guarantees your victory (another problem for another thread) but you can't assume heroes will be at every battle when designing.

1 - It's still alpha

2 - the AI isn't fully fleshed out

3 - from what I understand they're planning on giving race AI's personalities, depending on the race.

4 - the rock-paper-scissors setup is only avoided by making it even more stupid to try and use defence.