Sooo.......anybody feel like the problem has gotten worse......i do.

I just tried out this strategy as Cravers, I steamrolled everything I came across.

Sleel wrote:
Never had any problems building my ship with defenses to stop missiles. You guys seem to be married to single hull fleets for some reason. I've killed the AI destroyer fleets in a single volley, I've killed their BB fleets in a two. Usually one. Even can balance my designs so my destroyers can survive missile launches, while having enough offense to pound with. And with the techs to increase tonnage coming online with future builds/bug fixes, will have even more space to mix and match with.

Can you relay some of your designs and formation patterns Sleel? I am very curious!

Tikigod wrote:
I wonder if part of the problem isn't the progression of weapons technology?



Perhaps one way to introduce more mixed fleets rather than shifting the balance one way or the other is to instead have technology progression unlock more options in that specific weapon category rather than just constantly improving the single option in that weapon type.



A more advanced ballistics weapon might fire less volleys but have significantly higher min and max damage values and accuracy but can only fire a few shots off a phase.... a destroyer using one of those would be pretty ineffective as it would likely die before firing more than 2 shots... but give them to something larger that has more tonnage to dedicate to other things like survivability and it's an effective weapon.



A less advanced ballistics weapon might be more catering for destroyers, above average refire rates for the tech tier, below average min and max damage but lots of projectiles per volley and lighter tonnage... so destroyers could provide excessive blanket fire whilst the larger ships used the slower heavy hitters for example.



Similar approaches could be introduced to both missiles and lasers... making it more a question of what flavours of weapon type are needed to give hull sizes roles? And the fine tuning on each 'roled' weapon to get the desired result.

I HEAVILY agree with tiki here. To build of what he was saying we should have the basic lets say kinetic option. After the first 2 or 3 are researched it should open new tech tree options like (and forgive me for the example here) going from your basic kinetic to either something like a minigun or something like a Guass cannon from Halo. Just like with the military its good to have the slow, heavy hitting rifles(HMGs) with slight support damage from medium speed/damage(basic AR-15) to that does crap for damage but makes it rain lead weapons(SMGs).



As for missles how they are is alright with me. However I wouldn't mind tweaking it to were you have the same concept with the kinectics. 1 heavy missle/small salvo medium strength missles/cluster bombs.



This concept really though works best for beams and kinetics. I would love to my one shot MAC cannon or a single powerful beam like the aliens on Independance Day instead of constant burstfire that really isnt doing much of anything. Also as for the one shots the should have like single use per battle in the long range phase to where their not spammed every round.

Didnt think about it till know but those specialized weapons should also have some sort of special use. Like that single shot laser can be used for combat effectively but add a bonus to invasion.

I would definitely support a move away from the straight +1 -> +2 weapon tech. It doesn't have to be wildly differentiated if they're worried about getting balance right, but I'd love it if there was some consideration about what sort of fleet you're going to use when it came to weapons, rather than having them all be one-size-fits-all.

i am unsure if it is allready thrown in the discussion as an idea or topic but while balancing ideas are bounced arround there shouldn'T be overlooked the point of the defensive battle against a enemy race wich has the better techs. right now you can defend against that with swarfleets but if there is a change battlecode then it should still enable the partys to hold thier ground or at least low the enemie considerably.



what i would love most would be battles with lower rates off losses. combined with retreating ablilety giveing the ruler a chance to limit damage get out his fleet refit or rebuild beeing able to go for a retreating bttle so u might stop the enemy bevor you are done for. with the size proposed by the creators for fleets such thing would be nice . add an ability to reinforce battle to create traps for your enemy ,ambushes, and also add the ability to block retreat of allready damaged fleets to a degree may be a 60% chance influenced by techdevelopment would enhance the option a lot .



one thing that should change for sure is prioretising targeting depending on fleetcomposition and situation. so as lower tech side u might wanna concentrate all fire on the eahviest enemie for the start of the battle ignoring the rest just so u can waeken your foe and maybe after retreat or defeat overwem even a highr teched foe with the second fleet.



spully lfeets would be great as well, something like repairand refueltenders wich can repair your fleet and slwoy be move with teh front only able to defend lightly but fastrepair ships.



my first thought on that.

The OP and others have laid out many issues that exist and that I've come across myself especially the numeric vs larger ship issue that bugged me so much I just edited the game file to increase the command point caps - hell it's not like the AI was paying attention to theirs anyway. Many decent suggestions for addressing some of these issues in the thread. A couple I'd prefer to see are:



Moderate tonnage increase (though this may not be so bad if the tonnage % increase techs actually worked, but even so ..) or better mix of discounts for the hull types of them don't make much sense.



The whole idea for targeting multiple ships at once has been needed since day one in my opinion, making it a researched C&C module that is only available on higher ships but has fleet wide effect makes sense to me, though making it a card isn't a horrible idea either.



Repairing ships definitely needs to be % based.





Random other pet peeve - Cruisers should not have that invasion discount, it should be on battleships or dreadnoughts

I assume Carriers are coming at some point later in development introducing the fighter aspect.



Anyway good discussion I think.

In the end, what the game needs is to have superiour defencive technologys that work over all (Not baised on a weapon type as this limits the techtree massively).



Removing weapon baised RPS would free up innovation in the weaponry allowing for modules that deal with the whole large Vs many small issue with weapons that are over kill vs smaller ships and weapons that can rapid fire but have problems with single tougher targets.......you know like ballistics and missiles but withous having to fofill the roles of Rock and Scissors.

Sleel wrote:
Never had any problems building my ship with defenses to stop missiles. You guys seem to be married to single hull fleets for some reason. I've killed the AI destroyer fleets in a single volley, I've killed their BB fleets in a two. Usually one. Even can balance my designs so my destroyers can survive missile launches, while having enough offense to pound with. And with the techs to increase tonnage coming online with future builds/bug fixes, will have even more space to mix and match with.



And "Decimate" means 1/10th of something destroyed, NOT the whole of anything. One tenth is what the prefix DECI means. This word gets almost as abused/misused as Epic does.

dec·i·mate (ds-mt)

tr.v. dec·i·mat·ed, dec·i·mat·ing, dec·i·mates

1. To destroy or kill a large part of (a group).

2. Usage Problem

a. To inflict great destruction or damage on: The fawns decimated my rose bushes.

b. To reduce markedly in amount: a profligate heir who decimated his trust fund.

3. To select by lot and kill one in every ten of.

[Latindecimre,decimt-,topunisheverytenthperson,fromdecimus,tenth,fromdecem,ten;seedekinIndo-Europeanroots.]

deci·mation n.

Usage Note: Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group. Sixty-six percent of the Usage Panel accepts this extension in the sentence The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war, even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population. However, when the meaning is further extended to include large-scale destruction other than killing, as in The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, only 26 percent of the Panel accepts the usage.







Yeah, you're not the only special snowflake to know where the Latin root of a word comes from. Fact is, the definition has changed, because you know, we no longer practise decimation on our armies if they don't do so well, and no-one has done for over a thousand years, making its original usage COMPLETELY outdated.





Oh, and you don't mention what difficulty level you're playing on ~ missile spam fleets on impossible if Hssh / UE / Craver are extremely hard to out damage / out last (due to massive +45% damage bonus, the extra hull or the extra CP numbers).

The "1vs1" where a ship can only engage one other in each phase also discourages building larger ships as you can field less. So a full offense battleship or dread will overkill as OP said a small ship, wasting damage that could have been done to a second ship. Now the AOE solution can work but what I would like to see it to make large capital ships the "artillery" of the battle and smaller ships like destroyers and cruisers the "infantry". The heavier ship should be able to house bigger weapons but will be slow and cumbersome while small ships are faster and more agile. This would prevent kamikaze strats for the most part unless a fleet is completely outnumbered. In the current phase system, this could be demonstrated through weapon accuracy/damage bonuses at long range for capital ships, while at long range smaller ships have evasion bonuses and in short range have some damage multipliers.

a solution could be to rework the target priority. Fleets would want to send the smaller ships for screening purpose and hold back the bigger ships to make the damage from far, so to reduce incoming damage. Also screen ships should in some way take or prevent damage to bigger ships.



With something like this in mind and some reworking about tonnage efficiency on hull per CP, and weapon module according to ship size and possibly a base defense value for each hull would solve the problem.

OP here. In addition to a couple new strategy analyses that aren't quite ready yet, I've spent some time in the last few days working on refining the destroyer swarm strategy outlined in the original post, as well as looking at other potential solutions and counter-strategies within the game.



In attempting to refine (and counter) the defenseless ship designs I've run up against a fairly high-level question I can't find a real answer for, which is 'Exactly how do the various weapons work, and how do defenses interact with their corresponding weapon?' I can see numbers in their tooltips but I don't have a good sense of what those numbers mean - I can infer things about them, but they aren't actually explained anywhere that I can find. I have guesses, but no formulas that could help determine the effectiveness of attacks against defended ships. Assuming the tooltips are even accurate is probably a leap, but it's all I have to go on; if anyone reading knows more about this all, please share.



Here is what I have inferred about the weapon stats:



1) All weapons have an Accuracy stat, which is 1 in every case. So I conclude that means it's a multiplier (thus, 1 would be no modifier). If nothing else, the fact that it's the same for all weapons means that it shouldn't have much impact on relative performance between them.



2) For all weapons, it seems clear that Damage Min/Max is the damage range per projectile, though how the damage is determined on a hit isn't clear - is it just randomly rolled between Min and Max?



3) It also seems clear that Salve is the number of projectiles fired per hull unit in a single attack for that weapon. Kinetics are the only weapon that have a value over one here. Is every individual projectile fired in a kinetics Salve calculated individually for accuracy and damage and critical htis? And, uh, should Salve actually be named Salvo?



4) Getting less clear, it seems obvious that Critic Multiplier is the damage multiplier on a critical hit. What isn't clear at all is the chance of scoring a critical hit. There's a Critic Chance stat that some weapons have, and not others - is this a tooltip error, or does it represent a critical hit chance modifier that those weapons have? In every case I can see, Critic Chance is set to 0 - does this mean that weapon cannot critical hit? Critic Chance 0 is notably on all missiles and most kinetics (except the top tier one), but no beams. Does that mean practically nothing but beams can critically hit? Since we can't actually see individual damage on hits, I don't know if there's a way to tell when a critical hit lands or not to check.



5) Missiles and beams have an Interception Evasion stat, kinetics do not. For beams the Interception Evasion stat is always 1, however; for missiles it scales up as you get more and more advanced missiles. Is the stat on beams a leftover/placeholder? For missiles it seems clear that it's compared/rolled against the target's flak Interception Accuracy stat to determine if, and how well, the attack beats the defense. Shields don't have an Interception Accuracy stat though; if Interception Evasion is an 'active' stat on beams, does its existence mean that they have a tiny chance of just bypassing the shields?



6) More of an observation than anything, but the missile stats of Turns to Reload and Turns to Reach give me some insight into how many individual turns are in a combat phase: 6. Missiles launch halfway through the phase: 3 rounds to reload (I guess you go into battle without some of your weapons loaded) and hit just a few seconds before the next phase starts (3 rounds to reach).



And here is what I am currently thinking about in terms of how defenses and weapons interact:



1) The Deflector Defense Module has a stat of X deflection per turn. On a comparable tech tier this stat is slightly lower than the Salve number of the kinetic weapons this defense opposes, so my conclusion is that each until of Deflector Defense will 'deflect' that number of individual kinetic projectile hits in each turn. I'm assuming 'turn' here means turn inside the battle phase, like with missiles loading and reaching time stats. I assume deflect here means 'negate completely' and thus deflected projectiles cause 0 damage. Because this stat is listed as per turn I further infer that the defense is depleted as it's used, and thus kinetic hits after the ship's maximum deflection per turn is reached are completely unmitigated until the next turn starts over.



2) The Flak module has an Interception Accuracy stat that is slightly higher than the Interception Evasion stat of missiles on the same tech tier. The fact that these opposing stats are called Accuracy and Evasion and the fact that flak's Interception Accuracy is not labelled as 'per turn' implies to me that there's some kind of random roll involved - a separate chance that each missile will or won't be intercepted. What's even less clear to the point of being completely opaque are how the interception chance is calculated, if flak modules attempt to intercept individually (and if so, if multiple interception rolls would be made against a single missile if a ship has more flak units than missiles coming at it - or if no interception rolls would be made against missiles beyond the ship's number of flak units), or if interception attempts are made against missiles that missed on their own or not.



3) Shields have a flat Absorption value that is lower than the average of the min and max damage values for beams on the same tier. Based just on its being called Absorption I'm guessing shields directly block and subtract from beam damage. But it's not listed as 'per turn' and that gives me the impression that shields either are never depleted and thus be blocking Absorption x Units every turn to reduce the damage caused, or else that once shields are depleted in a battle by absorbing their full value for the ship they are gone for good and beam damage from that point on is unmitigated. Or else the tooltip is wrong and it is 'per turn' or possibly 'per phase'? I don't seem to actually recall 'seeing' a ship's shields be depleted in battle and stop activating against lasers, but take that with a grain of salt due to ship destruction and the camera swinging around making it hard to be sure if I'm always looking at the same ship or not.



There's a final, general question: what exactly is the penalty applied to a weapon being used outside its ideal phase? Or does a weapon have normal performance outside its ideal phase, and then get a bonus during its ideal phase?



Making the rather large assumption the tooltips are useful and largely correct, then putting my thinking together using my observations and experiences in gameplay here's what I'm concluding: if missiles and kinetics can't crit, and beams can and also sometimes bypass defenses (even if at a low rate), this would seem to reinforce what some posters on the thread have found about beams being the superior weapon type to use with the destroyer swarm strategy. And, assuming kinetics and beams fire once every turn - which might be a bad assumption, I can't really tell for sure visually - and there are six turns in a phase, it would mean their damage potential per phase might be much higher than missiles, as well, since missiles only hit once per phase but don't do 6x as much damage tier for tier as far as I recall. This is offset a bit by their spike nature, though, I think - against human players at least, missile volleys can dramatically change the situation at the end of a phase, leaving you very little time to react with a battle card before the next phase kicks in.



Deflectors and shields seem to have mechanics that would give them an 'immunity point,' but no scaling above it. At least, if I'm right and a ship has more deflection per turn than kinetic projectiles being fired at it, or more shield absorption than beam damage, those weapons can't even damage it. But once the immunity point is overcome, the defense doesn't scale - which is in line with how well all-out offense is working in practice against defended large ships, and with how I've noticed some heavily defended ships just never taking damage from weaker enemies in my experience. Flak and missiles are a still something of a question mark; I'm not sure if flak has an immunity point or not. My experience with using missile destroyer swarms indicates that enough missiles -always- got through against flak-equipped ships. I just don't know if that's because of some limit on how many interception attempts a ship can make in a turn or phase, or because of random rolls/luck and missiles hitting really hard.



I'd like to know if anyone else has insight or experience to share here that might help answer these questions out.

After the Forum ate my post, here is the 2nd try.



All i describe here are my experiences and maybe they are dead on or totally wrong - take them with a grain of salt.

Also note that english is my 2nd language - so please don't be to hard on me.



Befor discussing the Destroyer problem here a short(!) runner-up of the combat system.



Accuarcy:



As everybody knows every weapon has a accuracy malus depending on the phase it is fired.

Here the numbers i find to be true as chance to hit per phase



Kinetic: 20% , 50%, 95%

Laser: 70%, 95%, 70%

Missiles: 95%, 80%, 70% (missiles numbers are maybe way off for 2nd and 3rd phase)





Damage



Phase1: Missiles > Laser >> Kinetics

Phase2: Laser > Kinetics >= Missiles

Phase3: Kinetics > Laser >= Missiles



Note that accuracy AND overkill are included





Firing in Phase



A phase has 8 turns.



Kinetics and Laser fire every odd turn, damage is calculated every even turn.

So both fire 4 times

Missiles fire at turn 4 (50%) and damage at turn 7 (80%)





Defence



Missiles defence (Flak) is the most effective one: 2 flaks deny damage of 3 missiles (of the same tech level)

Laser defence (shield) is the midone: 5 shields block 6 Laser

Kinetic defence (Deflector) is the worst: you need 11 deflectors to defend vs 10 kinetics





Critcals



In the game right now are 2 options to increase the chance of critical hits.

One is a power modul which gives 7% crit. For this modul it's not clear if it effects only the ship or the whole fleet ("7% critchance on fleet weapons")

2nd is a ability of the hero for 25% crit on kinetic and missle (It's a combat card!).

There also seems a low percent chance to do crits (I asume 2-5%).

Also note that only at missiles there is a "0 critcal chance" mentioned - meaning the other 2 have a native crit chance.







Hope i could help



Sincerly

Saranea wrote:
After the Forum ate my post, here is the 2nd try.



All i describe here are my experiences and maybe they are dead on or totally wrong - take them with a grain of salt.

Also note that english is my 2nd language - so please don't be to hard on me.



Befor discussing the Destroyer problem here a short(!) runner-up of the combat system.



Accuarcy:



As everybody knows every weapon has a accuracy malus depending on the phase it is fired.

Here the numbers i find to be true as chance to hit per phase



Kinetic: 20% , 50%, 95%

Laser: 70%, 95%, 70%

Missiles: 95%, 80%, 70% (missiles numbers are maybe way off for 2nd and 3rd phase)





Damage



Phase1: Missiles > Laser >> Kinetics

Phase2: Laser > Kinetics >= Missiles

Phase3: Kinetics > Laser >= Missiles



Note that accuracy AND overkill are included





Firing in Phase



A phase has 8 turns.



Kinetics and Laser fire every odd turn, damage is calculated every even turn.

So both fire 4 times

Missiles fire at turn 4 (50%) and damage at turn 7 (80%)





Defence



Missiles defence (Flak) is the most effective one: 2 flaks deny damage of 3 missiles (of the same tech level)

Laser defence (shield) is the midone: 5 shields block 6 Laser

Kinetic defence (Deflector) is the worst: you need 11 deflectors to defend vs 10 kinetics





Critcals



In the game right now are 2 options to increase the chance of critical hits.

One is a power modul which gives 7% crit. For this modul it's not clear if it effects only the ship or the whole fleet ("7% critchance on fleet weapons")

2nd is a ability of the hero for 25% crit on kinetic and missle (It's a combat card!).

There also seems a low percent chance to do crits (I asume 2-5%).

Also note that only at missiles there is a "0 critcal chance" mentioned - meaning the other 2 have a native crit chance.







Hope i could help



Sincerly

very interesting. Could you please tell me where did you find the data ? isearched the forum and didn't succeed in finding it by myself.

I've included a recent save ~



4 AI, serious, me playing as the Hssh.



I built lasers destroyers. Only destroyers. And never upgraded them from the 2nd design (using the 4th? laser ~ something very low level, under the meridian tier). I didn't even bother to upgrade them when I'd researched the +hull techs ~ the +CP bonuses more than made up for any meagre defenses or dreadnought hulls the AI used.





Guess what? Game, set, match. Totally steam-rollered all the AI.







Solution



The easiest and most logical solution for this is to have weapons (and perhaps shields / flak?) have an energy requirement. Each hull has an inbuilt energy and if you want to stack more weapons onboard, you have to use a power module (which currently are just combat mods, but can easily have a secondary stat on them).



Want more fire power?



You have to sacrifice some space to enable it.





e.g.



1 energy = 1 weapon



Transport: 1

Corvette: 2

Destroyer: 3

Cruiser: 4

Battleship: 5

Dreadnought: 7



Each power module should give +2.5 - 3.5 energy slots, so the highest will give +12 slots, roughly.



Of course, tweaking with numbers to allow more kinetic than lasers than missiles etc for balance works easily ~ and you can still build those attack heavy destroyers, but you'll need to research the +hull techs or have racial bonuses to help you out.

fixou wrote:
very interesting. Could you please tell me where did you find the data ? isearched the forum and didn't succeed in finding it by myself.

Saranea wrote:
All i describe here are my experiences and maybe they are dead on or totally wrong - take them with a grain of salt.

He made them up. An awesome length of post full of total fantasy.
AutoSave 540.zip

4x_Fan wrote:
He made them up. An awesome length of post full of total fantasy.

Are you sure? That is, does your experience/data directly contradict?

4x_Fan wrote:
He made them up. An awesome length of post full of total fantasy.

It's called experience of 75 hours of gameplay including testing the combatsystem with massive load/reload for battles.

If you have information that contradict it - go ahead I'm open for constructive critizcm or more datapoints.



On topic:



What i would do to "solve" the problem is pretty simple: buff the defensive bonus of the modules by 50%.

If you then fit ~75% tonage on defensive and the rest for offensive you will outright kill the suicide destroyer - but not much more - balancing it in it self.





Sincerly

They just need to elimonate the defencive modules specialtys.



No counting spasific weapons at all, instead have them add to the defences of a ship in diffrent ways like: Armour = Reduce damage by %, Shields = +HP per phase, Flak = Reduce slavo by %.

@igncom: that would kill the early game defence in favor of more guns. which is the problem.