I've noticed a few things about the combat system are a bit unbalanced and could use fixing.



First and most importantly, weapons. Weapons are VERY overpowered. There is absolutely NO REASON to invest in armor at all. If you want to see what I mean, try this ship design:

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Research as many weight upgrades as you possibly can (tonnage modules and empire upgrades)

Research any powerful weapon (just get the highest one that is practical to research at the time)

Get the Destroyer (United Empire) or equivalent (reduced weapon module weight is what you want)

Make a new ship with that hull and: Tonnage Module, the first Energy Module (the one that has a +40% damage bonus) and fill the rest with the best weapon of one type that you can get

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Now make a fleet of these at your best industry supercenter system. If you have a fairly large max fleet size, you will have no trouble at all making a fleet that has about a hundred thousand military power and can destroy EVERYTHING that is thrown at it. You don't even need shields, since, at least in this case, offense is the best defense. No matter how much defense an enemy ship has, your weapons will cut right through them! While I find this tactic rather entertaining, at the end of the day, it just feels cheap.



Second, retreating. This isn't exactly unbalanced, but it needs to be implemented more. The first thing I want to see is a button to retreat in auto-battle mode instead of having to make my multiplayer partner wait for me to finish manually retreating. I'd also like to see my enemies retreat. This could work well with Offensive Retreat (guerrilla warfare, anyone?)



Thirdly, weight modules. While the dreadnought is a very nice ship to have, when I have it at its max capacity of 900, it just doesn't stand up to the Destroyer, which has a max capacity of 300 and only takes up 1 fleet point as opposed to 4. I really think the tonnage module should give more weight based on the size of the ship in such a way that the Dreadnought would have a maximum tonnage of 1200.



Fourth, fleet size. 22 is a bit of an arbitrary number to have as the max fleet size, don't you think? It has the factors 11 and 2, and 11 is an ugly prime number which we can't do a lot with. Why not 24? 24 has the factors 2^3 and 3, which makes it divisible by 1, 2, 3, and 4, which would make it so I could make a fleet that is completely full of any given ship type.



I can't think of any other things off the top of my head, but I welcome anyone to add their opinion on combat balancing to this thread, and, of course, reply to my opinions.

1st point. People call this tactic glass-canon fleets : All in weapons, and no defenses whatsoever. It's very fragile, and a similar fleet with less weapons per ship will be just as effective against a glass-canon fleet, yet much cheaper. Then in the long-run the glass-canon user will lose the economics race. In any way, even the biggest glass-canon fleet, crushing anything thrown at it, will lose some pieces during its victories, and ultimately loses from attrition. I generally prefer a well-thought defense-focused fleet that's very hard to take down, and will crush the AI fleet stacks without any losses.



3rd point. I don't feel dreadnoughts are very good in their current state. They let you cram good modules in a single ship on top of regular weapons and defenses. But they have no passive bonus, battleships do a much better job of it with -20% defenses weight. Combined to weight modules, it makes them a very inefficient CP usage. One dreadnought per fleet is more than enough, it makes your hero a bit safer I'd say.



4th point. Fleet size isn't capped at 22 for everyone. Different factions have different traits modifying CP. Giving a 24 cap to one would mess up the other. And I fail to see how the CP cap factors matter, unless you're way more OCD than me. Also, there's no ship taking 3 CP, so why not use a max cap of 20? Or 4?

Yeah, as Marthann said, a glass cannon fleet gets obliterated the first time an enemy gets a shot in on your units. This becomes especially problematic when you face a fleet that has a slew of "little" (1 CP) ships. You can't kill them all on the opening salvo, and they can ruin your day in a hurry. Another problem is going up against higher level big ships. A level five Dreadnaught is capable of taking an amazing amount of punishment (Especially with good defenses) and can absorb your first salvo while dishing out enough to start picking your units off, one by one. As the fight goes on, they'll get more effecient as you lose ships (And thus offensive potential) while their survival shoots up.

Wrong forum. See /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11125-no-suggestions-in-the-design-discussion



Weapon/defense balance may need a second look, but there are already many threads on the topic. Here's a thread reaching the same conclusion you seem to do: /#/endless-space/forum/33-strategy-guides/thread/14019-glass-cannon-tactics-losing-to-win



This is exactly what you are talking about: Glass cannons. I'm not fully convinced it is this end-all-be-all myself, however.

Here are some numbers on defenses (based on wikia):



Laser does 10-20 damage, so average 15. Costs 9 Weight.

Reflective Isotopes absorbs 15 damage. Costs 8 Weight.

In a perfect setup, where you know what you are being attacked with, you can block all of their damage by paying 8/9 of the weight. However, in reality, you don't know what you're getting attacked with, so you likely would need one of each defense mod.

Now, you are spending 24 weight to block 9 weight of weapons. NOT a good trade off. You could use that 24 weight to get 126 hps via armor. But that would only block 2.2 rounds of damage.

Why not just spend this weight to put more weapons on?

Anyway, just my thought on it. I think defenses need to be more effective...

At the OP: try a few mods, perhaps one of them is more suited to your tastes?



Or draft up something in-depth of how you'd like to balance things and that will inspire others and open constructive debate on the subject.

@StriderV:

Your example does not take into account that weapons do miss quite a bit when not in their sweet-spot-range. So the 15 average damage of beams only occurs in the mid-range-phase.



However:

While risking to repeat myself, I once again state, that I feel the way how damage-mitigation works in this game was a very unfortunate design-choice.

I feel it would be much better when it worked like damage-mitigation in other games works.

FinalDamage=RawDamage*100/(X+100) where X is sum of defensive-strenght of all defense-modules of a specific type. The amount of defensive-strenght could just scale with the tech-level of the defense-module. (Maybe 20 for the early ones going all the way up to 120 or even higher for high-end-ones)



This way you could never completely mitigate all damage but would still feel that defenses do a lot for you.

@Ail - not sure that this would be a brilliant design choice either. This works in the competitive PvP sphere in games like League of Legends, DoTA, etc - but for a 4x game where massive scientific leads could be obtained this would actually be counter productive. You'd have a ship with 10x the technology levels getting damaged by what it would otherwise consider an insect in this genre.



Part of the fun in other games within this genre is the ability of acquiring an 'insane' tech lead - with shields absorbing almost all damage at that point. If not, you risk making spam/zerg 'tactics' too valuable. If nothing could ever completely protect a ship, no matter the investment made in defenses it would necessarily resolve the problem that is being described.



I do agree that the current system is an unfortunate design choice, but I am not sure your solution would be beneficial in this specific genre.

@Ail - Good point, I forgot about miss rates!



In all, miss rates make beam weapons about 70% as effective as they would be otherwise. So, that 24 pounds of defenses would 100% block 12.86 pounds of weapons in the case where you buy one of each to block one opposing weapon. In the best case, 8 pounds would block that 12.86 pounds. Obviously the "worst" case is that you have defenses against a weapon type that the enemy is not using. Though not great, this is more acceptable.



On the armor side, that 126 armor would block exactly 3 phases best and worst case scenario it is still taking 24 pounds to block 12.86 pounds of weapons.

I think defenses could be "better" and that armor shouldn't essentially be just as good as defenses. One recommendation would be to somehow let defense help other ships in the fleet, at a lowered effectiveness, when not used to defend the ship that has it. Or, just make them a little better.



For myself, for now, I will always be using custom races with nerfed defenses and just put armor on my ships.

Hmm... Maybe it is different in the multiplayer environment, but thus far I have found giving about ten of each defense module, then focusing all offensive weapons to one damage type per fleet makes for a much more potent fleet than going glass-cannon and hoping the enemy doesn't hit you. And in the case of Dreadnaught-class ships, a few armor mods that have a % bonus can work some magic, but they tend to be irrelevent on the smaller ships.



The glass-cannon fleet will obliterate everyone in the opening salvo, sure, but if the enemy gets enough shots off (Especially rockets) your day's going to go south in a hurry. They also have no staying power. A few fights with the enemy, regardless of luck, will inevitably result in a small fleet of damaged ships, assuming any remain alive. Some defense mods on the other hand can give them enough resolve to sit and bombard a system long enough to snatch it from the enemy. And oftentimes stay in orbit and defend it indefinitely.

EvilTactician wrote:
@Ail - not sure that this would be a brilliant design choice either. This works in the competitive PvP sphere in games like League of Legends, DoTA, etc - but for a 4x game where massive scientific leads could be obtained this would actually be counter productive. You'd have a ship with 10x the technology levels getting damaged by what it would otherwise consider an insect in this genre.



Part of the fun in other games within this genre is the ability of acquiring an 'insane' tech lead - with shields absorbing almost all damage at that point. If not, you risk making spam/zerg 'tactics' too valuable. If nothing could ever completely protect a ship, no matter the investment made in defenses it would necessarily resolve the problem that is being described.



I do agree that the current system is an unfortunate design choice, but I am not sure your solution would be beneficial in this specific genre.

I know, late reply, but I haven't read that post before...

I don't feel "complete protection" is necessary.



The guy who absorbs 90% of 1000 damage will obviously still totally cream the guy who absorbs 55% of 10.000 damage almost unharmed.