Not if the same level of defences are more powerful then the weapons.



And the main problem early game is the quick switching of weapons technologys to lasers that make your armour and flak defences useless.

Conjecture: Flak blocks missiles until the total Interception Evasion blocked exceeds the total Interception Accuracy of the ship. This is roughly consistent with Saranea's empirical observation of 2 Flaks : 3 Missiles; the ratio of Evasion to Accuracy is about 3:4 for the same tech level.



I think the following would be good changes:



Randomized targeting on the weapon level. This would reduce the overkill problem greatly by letting larger ships destroy close to as many smaller ships per turn as they have firepower for.



Higher HP to weapon damage ratios. At current a beam or kinetic weapon does 2/3 the damage in a single salvo as an equal-weight armor has hit points. This seems to be excessive considering three salvos are fired per phase--is it any wonder that battles rarely last until even the end of the long-range phase? I would advocate doubling or tripling the effect of armor modules--maybe we'd see some battles last all three phases then.

Evil4Zerggin wrote:


Randomized targeting on the weapon level. This would reduce the overkill problem greatly by letting larger ships destroy close to as many smaller ships per turn as they have firepower for.



Higher HP to weapon damage ratios. At current a beam or kinetic weapon does 2/3 the damage in a single salvo as an equal-weight armor has hit points. This seems to be excessive considering three salvos are fired per phase--is it any wonder that battles rarely last until even the end of the long-range phase? I would advocate doubling or tripling the effect of armor modules--maybe we'd see some battles last all three phases then.

Like the ideas, hope something gets done about this.

Given the tooltips, I'm kinda sticking with my analysis of there being 6 turns in a combat phase, but I'm not sure every weapon on a ship fires on every turn. It should be easy to test though, at least in an early game or under controlled (ie, multiplayer) conditions: build a ship with 1 kinetic, put it in a fleet by itself, get it into a fight, and count how often it shoots. Repeat for beams. I should just go ahead and start a new game up and do this, come to think of it.



As for defense vs weapon effectiveness. I think the lower rate of deflectors compared to kinetic salvos and shields compared to beam average damage is likely offset by misses, overall. Especially at the longer range categories. I'm still not sure how flak works. While it would be simplest to work like someone else mentioned that missiles are blocked until the flak's interception is used up, all the other defenses do have lower stat values compared to their corresponding attacks.



I have no way of substantiating the numbers posted about accuracy. My experience is that overall, accuracy is very high for all weapons in all phases; certainly high enough that trying to create a ship type that would survive long against a full-firepower enemy fleet is a pretty daunting task.



My best idea for doing so is to use cruisers for their hull type bonus to armor modules, stacking hitpoints while mounting enough beam or kinetic weapons to do 400+ damage in a turn, in order to be able to one-shot a slightly hardened destroyer every battle turn ,while surviving longer. I'm just not sure if they can stack -enough- hitpoints to make this work, considering the amount of damage those destroyers could be slinging themselves, while still using engines or repair modules. If system improvement hitpoint modifiers multiply up on the armor modules, then it seems feasible, with the caveat of taking even more ramp-up time and techs in order to get many of your systems equipped with those improvements. The repair modules are something you'd want on them, especially for in-battle healing, and engines would be required, at least in multiplayer, to even catch a swarm of destroyers on the map that didn't want to be caught.



That last one might be the direct undoing of an 'armor/regeneration' cruiser fleet, in fact - they wouldn't be nearly as able to take advantage of the fleet-wide movement bonuses from number of ships in the fleet, since they'd have half as many ships per fleet as a destroyer swarm. So the destroyer swarm would still be a lot more strategically mobile, and without trading off their combat capability for it. The indirect undoing is that you wouldn't have the tech to build a cruiser capable of doing enough damage and having enough hitpoints to reliably kill 3 or more destroyers per battle (thus winning on production/attrition) until the mid-game, at best, and you might need even more tech development and system improvements to produce them with hp bonuses and at a fast pace.



Bottom line, I think hitpoint-stacking cruisers won't work too well because they just want to spend tonnage on too many different things, and they don't have enough of that tonnage, and because they may just take too many techs to really work out. Using them without engines is an option, but the slow speed and inability to warp would then limit their strategic application to garrisons and frontal attacks. Using them without system-improved hitpoints is probably not an option.

Regarding testing: Did anybody figure out how to mod module stats? Are the devs planning to move this data out into XML files?

Vector78 wrote:
That last one might be the direct undoing of an 'armor/regeneration' cruiser fleet, in fact - they wouldn't be nearly as able to take advantage of the fleet-wide movement bonuses from number of ships in the fleet, since they'd have half as many ships per fleet as a destroyer swarm.

That's an interesting point--maybe modules that are currently limited to one per ship should instead be one per Command Point, or Command Points should multiply fleet effects.

an example of dreadnaughts working in a way that makes sence:



The UE get a natural hp buff. and have an armour mod half way up their tech tree (can be researched very easily mid game) that give a flat hp buff and a small (2%) hp multiplyer which i believe stacks.



giving my dreadnoughts one of each weapon type, the second repair tech (which give 20% hp back each battle phase) and the rest armour mods. i can get a dreadnaught to 10, 000 health and much higher with tonnage bonuses. with the final UE specific armour tech ship become capable of enormous hp wells. hp equal to dozens of destroyers and is effective against all weapon types.



20% of 10,000 is 2000---> the amount repaired each battle phase by the repair mod. it is interesting because the repair mod activates right at the end of the battle phase just BEFORE missiles hit meaning that kinetic and energy wepons need to do more than 2000 damage in a phase or eles missile damage is negated... if i also use the repair card another 20% hp repair rate (which activates at the beginning of the next phase after the missiles hit) then my opponent needs to do 4000 damage every phase just to begin to negatively impact my hp. assuming a dreadnaught survives all three phases (never lost one) it has a total hp (with the repair rates of mods and three repair cards) 32,000---> and my current late game dreadnaught has a much higher base hp than 10000



the only issue becomes getting the dreadnaught to do damage---> it isn't expensive to refit three weapon mods to suit the opponents defence, but i have found that three decent missile mods on a dreadnaught is more than enough to counter most small ships and over multiple battles my super hp repairing dreadnoughts will wear down any opposing force simply because they don't die.

might need to rework a lot of the techs for this one but heres a solution



each chassis has different types of weapons suited for a different purpose



Fighters (Int/Bom)

Interceptors can down missiles and bombers/other interceptors

bombers good against large ships'

very fast can engage in initial phase of combat

Corvettes (Co)

very good against fighters as a second line of defence

uses kinetics (shrapnel guns)

defends dreadnoughts and larger ships against bomber attacks

fast but not as fast as fighters

Destroyers (De)

missile boats

weak armour

slower than corvettes but faster then cruisers

Frigates (Fg)

carries beam weapons good against destroyers and corvettes

tend to engage mid battle at short range good against destroyers

medium armour

slower than corvettes but faster then cruisers also slightly faster than frigates

Cruisers (Cr)

mid line ship good at stopping frigate attacks

engage at medium range with beams, missiles and kinetics

Battleships (BB)

slightly bigger than cruisers

good at destroying cruisers

engage at medium range with beams, missiles and kinetics

heavy armour

can

Carriers (Cv)

launches fighters has light weapons capable of fending off bomber attacks

Dreadnoughts (Dn)

has super heavy weapons capable of destroying slower targets in one shot battleships and cruisers

also super heavy armour capable of taking 2-3 shots from another dreadnought

vunrable to bombers

engage at long range and they stay there

good at bombarding planets with massive kinetic weapons



Basicaly a battle should go

initial phase

dreadnaughts engage each other and BB CR

fighters are launched and engage each other and/or rush to engage DN

middle phase

dreadnoughts continue to engage from afar

fighters move in close

cruisers and battleships move into combat range with each other

Frigates move in close to attack destroyers and corvettes

destroyers attempt to fire missiles

end phase

mop up phase things not suited to attacking each other engage

such as dreadnoughts left over targeting frigates of the enemy etc



Please add to this guys I got the inspiration from reading the mass effect codex's on battle tactics and strategy



[EDIT]

Also need to make techs for making all types earlier and then able to improve them with later techs

this would force combined arms

[EDIT2]

a few more ideas occurred to me whilst i was at work (sic)

would have to change the cp on a fleet to about 50 or so

fighter squadron (without carrier) 1 cp

corvette & destroyer 2 cp

Frigate 3 cp

Cruiser 4 cp

battleship 5 cp

Carrier 8 cp
dreadnought 10 cp



also Hero's act as admirals and can only be added to a fleet with a dreadnought (capital ship maybe carrier for some races) this fleet then gets extra cp and the dreadnought is free of cp, base say +25 cp and this can get higher as the admiral levels up



chassis should be tier 1, 5 and 10 weapon tech with weapons for each class in between these would have to be fairly cheap and/or give bonuses to completion to each other



the dreadnought should be considered to be a giant mass accelerator; with an engine. it should also be necessary to invade a planet due to it being the only ship large enough to have enough life support to support the massive numbers of troops required.



I could go on there is also a few tweaks i wanted to make but its late and i cbf at the moment

Clearly the combat system needs some attention as it's unbalanced for now.



There is a lot of work to do, and many possibilities available (some proposed here are great).

I read the opening posts and a good portion of the thread, and saw that several others had a similar idea to what I was thinking, but didn't quite say it.



A really simple (and possibly elegant) solution is to just give each hull type a bonus against another specific hull type. There are a number of benefits (that I can see) from doing such a thing, that I'll list at the end. The percentages below are arbitrary and could be adjusted as necessary to create the most balanced effect.

• Destroyers have a 10% bonus damage against Dreadnoughts (bear with me) and take 10% less damage from Dreadnoughts*
• Cruisers have a 10% bonus damage against Destroyers and take 10% less damage from Destroyers
• Battleships have a 10% bonus damage against Cruisers and take 10% less damage from Cruisers
• Dreadnoughts have a 10% bonus damage against Battleships and take 10% less damage from Battleships
  
  

*There could be some reasoning that the Dreadnoughts have massive guns that are built to hit larger, slower targets while Destroyers have specialized weapons or some other fiddle-faddle that make them effective against Dreadnoughts (Another thing to consider is that if fighters/bombers or Strike-Craft are brought in as well, this adds a completely reasonable setup for these bonuses. Strike Craft are designed to take out the larger ships and get a 10% bonus against Dreadnoughts, while the Destroyers are designed to be anti-Strike Craft boats, and get a bonus against Strike-Craft. Completely plausible and creates a nice circle effect).



I left out Corvettes because they can quickly become outdated and are more prone to be scouts or something similar anyway.



There are several benefits I can see from having something like this:

• It sticks with the game's rock, paper, scissors format by having specific hulls being an effective counter against another specific hull. This adds to combat by not only considering what type of weapons and defenses to have, but also what kind of ship hulls to have and how many, which also leads into the next point...
• This forces fleets to remain multi-hulled groups even into the late game, as the bonuses begin to cycle. The strongest fleets would be those that are the most multi-layered, as they are equipped to meet any threat.
• This system also provides incentives to actually pursue the higher level hull classes, and creates a bit of an arms race, which would probably add an extra level of fun to the game. Being the first race to have a Cruiser class ship in a universe with only Destroyers or Corvettes would mean having an advantage over the other races. In the same way, it doesn't add too much benefit to those races that jump way ahead. Having a Battleship in a universe with only Destroyers or Corvettes would still be nice, but it wouldn't provide the benefits that having Cruisers would. In many ways, having the Battleship would just be a countermeasure for when another raise made their first Cruiser.
• It's fairly simple to setup, and figure out for players, rather than having to run through intense calculations about weapons benefits and tonnage bonuses.
  
  

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



Currently as you advance through to better weapons, every factor improves except for tonnage requirement.



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.

Yes,sir. Doesn't really address underlying issues all that well but with removal of those issues, would certainly make things interesting.

Platescale wrote:
That's... that's awesome. Someone should write a short story about this. Maybe even a not-so-short story.

Oh god, I have to jump into a eight page long thread just to reply to this.



http://365tomorrows.com/ would be the perfect place to publish such a story (and at a 600 word maximum limit, writing it should be easy! Not :P)



That is, of course, assuming that such a story doesn't already exist on the site. I've read damn near every single one and while I don't recall a story like that, it's possible I'm either not remembering it, or it's one of the ones that exists in the gaps between where I've read (I've read the site in chunks, and never originally started in a definable location, so while I've read from "the first story published" up until "I've read this one before" and likewise from the most current, backwards, the segment in the middle isn't necessarily contiguous).

Alright, so I ran some basic tests using ships with the following designs - 1 kinetic, 1 beam, 1 beam/kinetic, 1 beam/kinetic/missile and feel confident about the following:



First, there do indeed appear to be 4 'turns' per combat. Kinetics and beams fire 4 times per phase, consistently. At first I thought this meant that the other 2 turns (to make a total of 6) would be separate turns that missiles launched and landed during, but actually they appear to fire on turn 3 along with the other weapons, and then land on turn 4. So the '3 turns to reach' part of the tooltip for missiles appears to be wrong. And so I was wrong to trust in it, hehe.



None of the test fights lasted long enough for me to see if the missiles 'reset' their loading time at the start of a phase, or if they carried it through - if they carry it through we'd expect to see missiles launching in 'turn 2' of the medium range phase, and then on turn 1 -and- turn 4 of the melee phase. Basically what this means is - missiles 'should' fire 4 times over the course of a full combat (12 turns), but may only fire 3 times if turns are 'isolated' by phase.



Because they fire four times as often, beams and kinetics both have a greater damage potential per phase than missiles. I don't have data for accuracy still, though I will say anecdotally that it appears kinetics miss a lot during the longrange phase, but that beams hit quite often. I think this further supports the experience people have had with beams being optimal weapons for destroyer fleets - myself included now, thanks to further experimentation. And since missile-armed ships can be destroyed before they launch at all, it makes a lot of sense to avoid missiles on an offense-oriented swarm strategy.



With some more investigation, it actually does seem practical to make hp-stacking cruisers that can take 3-4 destroyers' worth of broadsides while still holding enough guns to down a destroyer every turn. I was able to build an 1800-hp cruiser with a healing module capable of doing about 400 damage per turn without having to get too high on the 'armor' tech tier. My destroyers at the same point were able to do an average of 630 damage per full-hit broadside, so that cruiser type should survive 2 turns at minimum and 3 turns most of the time (more if built in systems with shipyard improvements), thus able to at least break even and usually coming out ahead, against tech-parity destroyers. It didn't have an engine and did require advanced containers, though (as well as requiring you to tech both beams and armor in the military tree, instead of just beams). Still, this does now seem to me like it could work as a defensive counter to the destroyer swarm, by using fleets of meaty hitpoint cruisers on Intercept in your own systems, or key chokepoint systems. As a note: this might not work against the Hissho, even if you are the Hissho too. Their accuracy and damage bonuses will help the destroyers more than it helps the cruisers, I think.

Some representative designs, using approximately the 3rd weapon/armor and 2nd other support tech level:



Kamikaze Destroyer

Cost: 325

HP: 240

Damage per Salvo: 693

(11 Pinch Guns * 45 average * 1.4 from HEC)



Components:

• Advanced Containers
• Lossless Fusion Pods
• High Energy Couplings
• 11x Pinch Guns
  
  

Balanced Destroyer

Cost: 266

HP: 408

Damage per Salvo: 441

(7 Pinch Guns * 45 average * 1.4 from HEC)



Components:

• Advanced Containers
• Lossless Fusion Pods
• High Energy Couplings
• 7x Pinch Guns
• 5x Reflective Armor
  
  

Balanced Cruiser

Cost: 494

HP: 1552

Damage per Salvo: 567

(9 Pinch Guns * 45 average * 1.4 from HEC)



Components:

• Advanced Containers
• Lossless Fusion Pods
• High Energy Couplings
• Intelligent Tools (is this a good repair choice?)
• 9x Pinch Guns
• 21x Reactive Hulls
  
  

If you replace the HEC with 2 more Reactive Hulls, damage does down to 405, but HP goes up to 1951.

The cruiser I designed, IIRC, used 8-10 pinch guns, intelligent tools, advanced containers, and filled the rest of its tonnage with reactive armor. With very slow or no healing between combats unless you have repair modules on the ships, I wouldn't use hp stacking without also using repair modules. Thus in order to ensure I had enough guns and enough armor, I didn't also use an engine - something I consider to be a serious drawback to the design.



And, countering a high-HP cruiser fleet would be the work of offense-favoring dreadnoughts, I think. They should be able to mount enough weapons to down ~2000 hp in a single turn using advanced containers and high-energy couplings to fill up on either pinch guns or the beam that comes after it. Then destroyerswould counter those dreadnoughts. So... there is a sort of 'rock-paper-scissors' potential here, but between fleets of homogenous ships.



A 'tanky dreadnought' that stacks hitpoints is a possibility I haven't investigated yet, though it seems like it might be possible, just not as attractive as the cruiser solution unless it can reach truly massive hitpoints. With a destroyer being destroyed every turn while averaging 600 damage per turn each, a ship would need at least 6000 hitpoints to survive past 4 turn and kill more than its own weight in destroyers. Whereas a cruiser would only need at least 1800 to survive to the 3rd turn and kill its own weight or more in destroyers. I'm not sure how many hp a dreadnought can stack up to without going further up the tech tree, at which point the destroyers will also be doing more damage.

Please read:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/





I don't think destroyers should be faster than cruisers and dreadnaughts. A bigger rocket just needs more fuel.



Instead there should be a fleet size limit which is by class. Each class of ship gets it's own command points. Something like 7 small ships (destroyers or corvettes) + 3 cruisers + 2 dreadnaughts per fleet.



If you make a fleet with 7 destroyers (maxed out on number of dreadnaughts) and your foe makes a fleet with 7 destroyers and 3 cruisers and 2 dreadnaughts... who will win?

Perhaps certain techs or races might change this: for example the 'United Federation of Planets' gets +2 cruisers and -2 destroyers in their fleets. ;-).

daveybaby wrote:
The problem, it seems to me, is that there isnt really any clear distinction in behaviour and/or roles for different ship classes. Theyre just bigger or smaller lumps of stuff to glue guns & shields to. Sure there are different tonnage bonuses for weapons etc, but there arent really any clear roles that come out of this.



If the different hull sizes actually *behaved* differently, then we might have somewhere to go on this.

e.g:

Make destroyers faster by default.

Make destroyers more accurate by default.

Have some large weapons which can only be fitted on large ships.

Implement something like fighter bays on large ships.

Have a C&C module which can be fitted to large ships which increases the number of smaller ships which can be fielded.



Just... *anything* to give ships some kind of distinct roles.



To my mind the solution shouldnt be to try to 'balance' destroyers vs dreadnaughts, but to encourage some sort of combined arms approach, where a successful fleet will comprise of a variety of ship sizes and designs, each fulfilling different roles.



At the moment, the actual ships themselves are almost an irrelevance. You might as well just add up the total number of guns and shields, do some math, and tell us the winner.

Vector78 wrote:
Alright, so I ran some basic tests using ships with the following designs - 1 kinetic, 1 beam, 1 beam/kinetic, 1 beam/kinetic/missile and feel confident about the following:



...



Because they fire four times as often, beams and kinetics both have a greater damage potential per phase than missiles. I don't have data for accuracy still, though I will say anecdotally that it appears kinetics miss a lot during the longrange phase, but that beams hit quite often. I think this further supports the experience people have had with beams being optimal weapons for destroyer fleets - myself included now, thanks to further experimentation. And since missile-armed ships can be destroyed before they launch at all, it makes a lot of sense to avoid missiles on an offense-oriented swarm strategy.



...

This would all be fine if missiles didn't fire regardless of the ship being destroyed.

In my game last night I encountered a fleet with four destroyers (one all out missile boat, three balanced missile - beam).

My fleet was composed of one missile destroyer, two beam destroyers, two cruiser (2/3 beam, 1/3 missile armament) and one battleship (mostly beam).



due to the massive damage beam weapons do, two destroyers were killed almost instantly.

Then the camera zoomed in on the remaining two destroyers as one was exploding. The last destroyer then fired his three missiles and was killed in a salvo of beam weapons.



The victory cam then focused on my still complete fleet with the three missiles happily floating to one of my destroyers.

Upon impact this destroyer exploded, and one other destroyer and cruiser felt so sorry for him they decided to spontaneously combust?

This despite no more missiles or beams being fired visualy.



Now, I know there was a bug where missiles didn't show in combat. But I saw three sailing towards me, so I guess something else is going down here

The missiles won't fire if the ship is destroyed in turn 1 or 2. They will fire if it's destroyed in turn 3. Missiles will then still hit if it's destroyed after they're launched. The comment about missile-armed ships being destroyed before firing refers to turns 1 and 2, not to missiles disappearing if their originating ship was destroyed after they launched. Sorry if that caused any confusion



What I meant by missile armed ships being less ideal would be that if you had missile-only destroyers going against enemy cruisers who killed one per turn, the cruisers would always kill 2 before they launched and a third as it was launching. The cruiser would always come out ahead in production/tonnage attrition like that. Even though the 3rd destroyer's missiles would still kill that cruiser on turn 4.

Gc3 wrote:
Please read:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/





I don't think destroyers should be faster than cruisers and dreadnaughts. A bigger rocket just needs more fuel.



Instead there should be a fleet size limit which is by class. Each class of ship gets it's own command points. Something like 7 small ships (destroyers or corvettes) + 3 cruisers + 2 dreadnaughts per fleet.



If you make a fleet with 7 destroyers (maxed out on number of dreadnaughts) and your foe makes a fleet with 7 destroyers and 3 cruisers and 2 dreadnaughts... who will win?

Perhaps certain techs or races might change this: for example the 'United Federation of Planets' gets +2 cruisers and -2 destroyers in their fleets. ;-).

If you have read through that website, you must really hate 4X space games, you just gotta ignore the small stuff.



The reason fighters and here with destroyers are faster then larger ships is becuse they can accelerate faster and thus get to where they are going alot quicker when in the end they would all be going just under the speed of light.



and the Command point system in the current game works well enough, why change it? destroyers are not the problem, the combat system is, allowing a full weapon approch to win out when it should be about overall stratigy and how you designed your ships rather then did i counter his rock with my paper.

Truly the "optimal" fleet composition should be one that consists of multiple weapon types and multiple hull sizes.



Supported by many various sources, both real and fictional.*



A well organized fleet mix will be composed of a proper ratio of firepower via light weapons (your fighters doing Thousand Cuts) and heavy weapons (your dread's mass driver capable of nuking a planet from orbit) and the in-betweens. The big ships are the ones that dish out the damage, but are slow and non-manueverable. Your artillery or heavy bombers. Your fighters and corvets are your light ships that can get in close, under the big guns, and spit out high rate of fire but low damage-per-shot attacks against these large targets. Your middle-sized boats (for us, these are our destroyers) are the slower, less maneuverable defenders that protect the larger even less maneuverable Big Guns from the fighter hoards. Their weaponry exists in between the low-fire rate huge damage guns of the capital ship (missiles) and the high ROF low damage guns of the fighters (whatever ES calls kinetics). Appropriately there is a weapon class that fits here: Beams (aside from the fact that beams actually have a higher damage over time than missiles, but missiles are very much the spike damage weapon).



The problem lies in the fact that high, sustained damage, and no defense is simply more optimal. It's the Zerg Principle: cheap, easy to produce, faceless numbers willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.



Why? Because our capital class ships (dreads, etc.) are too vulnerable due to their CP cost and by putting them into a fleet composition, there's no ability to "defend" them from damage with the smaller vessels (and fleeting them with other large ships won't help, as then you get swarmed by numbers: the light weight corvets get in close, under those big guns, and chew the bigger ships up).



But enforcing a fleet "size" limit of "7 battle ships, 3 cruisers, and 2 dreadnaughts" is the wrong way to fix the problem: the only way to get a bigger, better fleet is to add a single bigger ship! It doesn't allow for the Zerg Principle for 14 battleships to outnumber and outgun 4 dreadnaughts. The 7:3:2 ratio should arise from the mechanics, not the other way around.



And no.



I don't have a solution.



*That last one will make you work a little bit. A formation consists--if I recall correctly--of one heavy weight, two middle weights, and a handfull of lightweights (six to eight). The heavies were essentially the bombers. The middle weights were the defenders, the lightweights were the attackers (trying to down the heavies while avoiding the middles).

Gc3 wrote:
Please read:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/

That site..... It claims to be scientific but it also assumes that no advanced will ever be made in the field of space travel..... The worst kind of Dogmatic Adherence to established science......