Igncom1 wrote:
You mean the 1 Glass cannon needed to kill a tank?

You have an amazing ability to read and answer a single post without even caring about the discussion.

In this entire discussion about ratios we were discussing CP-weighted ratios (and you know that).

So, an example of "1.2-1" ratio will be a combat of 6 battleships against 10 destroyers.

Igncom1 wrote:
Because that's all you need, 1 Glass cannon destroyer can effectively kill a Tank battleship, at half the CP cost.

That is a glaringly false statement.

The ratio of beams vs. shields per ton is about 1.2:1 (i.e. you need more tons of lasers than shields), on kinetics it's backwards -- 1:1.2 (you'll need more tons of deflectors), on missiles it's about chances and obscure mechanics, so I won't give you the exact ratio, but it's not in weapons' favor (we're not discussing missiles anyway).



So, a destroyer will have 200 tons of lasers (+% bonus) but battleship can have twice the amount of shields (+% bonus). Even an equal-CP amount of destroyers (2) won't scratch a battleship loaded with nothing but shields. The rest of your argument on this point is equally false, simply because 1 all-weapons destroyer won't kill (or even scratch) 1 half-defenses half-weapons battleship.

Igncom1 wrote:
Don't build your ships to rely on critical hits, build them to kill based on the damage of the salvos getting through.

Not sure if you're just trolling (as with the rest of your "advices"), but high-crit beam fleet is one of the most destructive powers in ES universe.

Igncom1 wrote:
That's why Glass cannons beat 'Tank' style ships.

Not if we're speaking missiles, no. It's too easy (tonnage-wise) to defend against lots of missiles.

Now, beam-based glass cannons (with probably +% HP from race trait or something like that) is another matter.



However, that works only on fleets of comparable size. A smaller glass cannon fleet will be invariably decimated by a larger fleet. It doesn't matter much if larger fleet have lots of defenses or lost of weapons -- an offensive larger fleet will just tear down a small fleet very fast (read: before taking noticeable damage), and a defensive larger fleet usually have means to repair itself, in- and out of battle.

-_- on a 1-1 ratio, Tanks will always lose to expensive Glass cannons, a combined arm's strategy of Beams and Missiles is called for and is easy to pull off, leaving Tanks in a place where they will never, ever have enough defenses to deal with the expensive Glass Cannons.



The Cravers are the best at this because their fleets are larger naturally.



The game has been like this since beta, and hasn't changed.

Igncom1 wrote:
-_- on a 1-1 ratio, Tanks will always lose to expensive Glass cannons

I know that. The keyword here is "1-1 ratio". Even the "1.2-1 ratio" of tanks vs. glass cannons usually becomes "1.2-0" after the battle.

The difference is that as glass cannons are cheaper, your enemy will never get that 1.2-1 ratio. As their ships are more expensive, and take more CP's.

Igncom1 wrote:
The difference is that as glass cannons are cheaper, your enemy will never get that 1.2-1 ratio. As their ships are more expensive, and take more CP's.

Erm. You do realize that ships have different HPs, right?

A 2nd ship hull (destroyer) is 1/2 tonnage and less than 1/2 HP than a 4th ship hull (battleship). It's also 1 CP vs. 2 CP. So, a cap fleet of destroyers without any defenses will very likely beat a cap fleet of battleships with heavy defenses, or at least come out with little damage because battleships have too few guns.

(In the long run, veteran battleships gain much better extra HP than destroyers, thus a veteran fleet will outclass even an equal fleet of glass cannons)



However, adding even a single extra battleship to the equation (suppose your enemy have larger cap) will heavily move the balance into "tanks" favor. Suppose tanks are armed with missiles, and just enough missiles so that 1 salvo will nicely kill a single destroyer without doing extra unneeded damage. In such a case, "tanks" will invariably win -- i.e. they will incur losses on a "glass cannons" fleet, so another battle would be even more uneven.



PS: One thing that makes "tanks" hard in a real game scenario is that balancing them properly -- i.e. maximizing damage potential so that they'll reliably destroy at least a single enemy ship each battle and then filling the rest of tonnage with defenses -- is quite hard to do properly. Making glass cannons doesn't require any math and/or playtests and is much simpler.

just_dont_do_it wrote:
Erm. You do realize that ships have different HPs, right?

A 2nd ship hull (destroyer) is 1/2 tonnage and less than 1/2 HP than a 4th ship hull (battleship). It's also 1 CP vs. 2 CP. So, a cap fleet of destroyers without any defenses will very likely beat a cap fleet of battleships with heavy defenses, or at least come out with little damage because battleships have too few guns.

(In the long run, veteran battleships gain much better extra HP than destroyers, thus a veteran fleet will outclass even an equal fleet of glass cannons)

This is correct.

However, adding even a single extra battleship to the equation (suppose your enemy have larger cap) will heavily move the balance into "tanks" favor. Suppose tanks are armed with missiles, and just enough missiles so that 1 salvo will nicely kill a single destroyer without doing extra unneeded damage. In such a case, "tanks" will invariably win -- i.e. they will incur losses on a "glass cannons" fleet, so another battle would be even more uneven.

That would also be correct if it wasn't the case that:

1. Destroyers can be created long before battleships

2. That those battleships cost much more then 2 destroyers.



So not only will you be facing glass cannon destroyers long before Tank battleships, there will be far more destroyers then battleships, so many more that you will never beat Glass cannon Destroyers with Tanking Battleships. It is impossible.



Especially cost wise.

PS: One thing that makes "tanks" hard in a real game scenario is that balancing them properly -- i.e. maximizing damage potential so that they'll reliably destroy at least a single enemy ship each battle and then filling the rest of tonnage with defenses -- is quite hard to do properly. Making glass cannons doesn't require any math and/or playtests and is much simpler.

Figuring out how many guns need to kill a Glass cannon isn't hard, because it is a constant.

Igncom1 wrote:
That would also be correct if it wasn't the case that:

1. Destroyers can be created long before battleships

2. That those battleships cost much more then 2 destroyers.



So not only will you be facing glass cannon destroyers long before Tank battleships, there will be far more destroyers then battleships, so many more that you will never beat Glass cannon Destroyers with Tanking Battleships. It is impossible.

The total amount of ships is immaterial as combat is still 1 fleet vs. 1 fleet.

The only thing that matters is the ability to incur ship losses (not just HP losses) on any given fleet per game turn.

In a "1.2-1" combat ratio properly designed tanks will be withstanding lots of glass cannons while killing some of them. The net amount of glass cannons total needed to reliably destroy 1 tank per turn is probably VERY large.



I'm not even beginning to talk about heroes, who will just break this entire hypothetical scenario, and in "otherwise equal" situation will benefit tanks much more than glass cannons (because 1 hero can use only 1 fleet of glass cannons, but 1 "tanks" hero can withstand several attacks per turn).

Igncom1 wrote:
Figuring out how many guns need to kill a Glass cannon isn't hard, because it is a constant.

I'd say several magic words:

1) Accuracy;

2) Critical hits;

3) Battle actions.



Only slugs fire in such a large numbers that their net damage become statistically predictable near end-game. Beams? Hell no. Missiles? Twice as stronger no.

just_dont_do_it wrote:
The total amount of ships is immaterial as combat is still 1 fleet vs. 1 fleet.

The only thing that matters is the ability to incur ship losses (not just HP losses) on any given fleet per game turn.

In a "1.2-1" combat ratio properly designed tanks will be withstanding lots of glass cannons while killing some of them. The net amount of glass cannons total needed to reliably destroy 1 tank per turn is probably VERY large.

You mean the 1 Glass cannon needed to kill a tank?



Because that's all you need, 1 Glass cannon destroyer can effectively kill a Tank battleship, at half the CP cost.



The destroyer will be killed, but that's the point, to trade 1 destroyer for 1 battleship.



In the end the destroyers will win because they can kill the battleships in a few rounds, but each battleship can only target 1 destroyer at a time, leaving the remaining destroyers free to stack upon the battles ships and kill them even faster.

I'm not even beginning to talk about heroes, who will just break this entire hypothetical scenario, and in "otherwise equal" situation will benefit tanks much more than glass cannons (because 1 hero can use only 1 fleet of glass cannons, but 1 "tanks" hero can withstand several attacks per turn).

Again with the hypothetical scenario, it stops being hypothetical when you put it into practice and it works.



At which point this is just experience.



And this is still discounting the fact that the Battleships won't be surviving more then 1 battle with the destroyers, and there will be destroyers left over because the battleships won't be killing quite as fast.

I'd say several magic words:

1) Accuracy;

You can eaisly account for this, and find the amount of salvos that get to target.

2) Critical hits;

Don't build your ships to rely on critical hits, build them to kill based on the damage of the salvos getting through.

3) Battle actions.

Again build them to work on the salvos getting through.

If you get countered, then use a different card that will counter theirs.

Only slugs fire in such a large numbers that their net damage become statistically predictable near end-game. Beams? Hell no. Missiles? Twice as stronger no.

Beams and missiles are easily predictable, just like kinetics, because Glass cannons won't have defenses, and so you only account for how many salvos are getting to target.

That's why Glass cannons beat 'Tank' style ships. because even if the enemy has lots of defended ships, proper glass cannon destroyers will always cut through them.

just_dont_do_it wrote:
You have an amazing ability to read and answer a single post without even caring about the discussion.

In this entire discussion about ratios we were discussing CP-weighted ratios (and you know that).

So, an example of "1.2-1" ratio will be a combat of 6 battleships against 10 destroyers.

SO your purposely putting up a ratio where there are more CP of battleships the destroyers? Despite the fact that this won't happen?



Why should I even bother listening to you when you are clearly pulling facts out of thin air to support your arguments.

That is a glaringly false statement.

The ratio of beams vs. shields per ton is about 1.2:1 (i.e. you need more tons of lasers than shields), on kinetics it's backwards -- 1:1.2 (you'll need more tons of deflectors), on missiles it's about chances and obscure mechanics, so I won't give you the exact ratio, but it's not in weapons' favor (we're not discussing missiles anyway).

Of course we are also discussing missiles, you just don't want to discuss them because then it would prove you wrong!



That your battleships would be slaughtered by missiles.



And all that is sidestepping the fact that you can use more then 1 weapon at a time, so really your ratio mean nothing because you have no proof to support them.

So, a destroyer will have 200 tons of lasers (+% bonus) but battleship can have twice the amount of shields (+% bonus). Even an equal-CP amount of destroyers (2) won't scratch a battleship loaded with nothing but shields. The rest of your argument on this point is equally false, simply because 1 all-weapons destroyer won't kill (or even scratch) 1 half-defenses half-weapons battleship.

That is still avoiding the issue that you can have more destroyer then battleships, and can build them earlier.



Further down the tech tree all of the tonnage boosting techs and mos=dules also give a much greater boost to Destroyers then Battleships, making them superior in a tonnage-CP basis.

Not sure if you're just trolling (as with the rest of your "advices"), but high-crit beam fleet is one of the most destructive powers in ES universe.

Seriously? you are not even reading what I am saying anymore.



You are wrong, and your circular logic is getting you no where.

davea wrote:
It seems clear that a tech advantage is *supposed* to give you a combat advantage. To me this is not related to fleet size limits.

That may be so, with the rare occasion when you play a pacifist and all your tech goes into farming )))

Depending on your race's traits, like big or small fleets, focusing on system production over sci may give you a quick military boost to overwhelm with multiple full sized fleets. Going the tech rout often leads to one very powerful fleet (assuming your researching military tech), but you cover less systems. All in all it depends on traits and preferences.

davea wrote:
If you want more ships in a fleet, research the techs to raise your fleet cap. Without these techs, your ships cannot communicate effectively enough to act in a large fleet. This prevents the "stack of death" problem that many other games face.

Hey Davea. I agree that the stack of death is a problem in other games, but I think there is a problem if you go to much in the opposite direction. A game I had played with DMT yesterday involved at least 10-11 fleet battles every turn. This was a consequence of both of us having 18-19 systems up and running and producing ships trying to kill eachother. There were many fights for two reasons. 1. Our ability to produce ships vastly outweighed our capacity to throw them into fleets. We were each producing maybe 12-14 CP's worth of ships per turn. Given what we had teched, this was about one whole fleet a turn. 2. DMT also spread his ships out over my systems to maximise blockades (something that disincentivizes the fleet mechanic). I think there may be an underestimation of the ability of the player to produce large numbers of ships because the fact is, doing a ton of battles every turn is extremely frustrating to the player. Ideally, a fleet isn't something an empire can't just throw out there in a couple of turns. (albeit one). There are different solutions to this kind of problem. 1. Make it so an 11 MP scout can't blockade a 600+ defense star system with 18+ pop at turn 100. 2. Make fleets more expensive (which can either be achieved by increasing ship costs, or by making techs give more cp's, higher base cp's, etc.)

The suggestion about having a minimum requirement of ship MP to blockade a large system has been made at least once per month since April. One possible solution is to keep defensive fleets at your key home planets, instead of using all your fleets to attack.



In a recent release, the maintenance cost of ships was increased quite a lot, at least for late game fleets. Unfortunately the AI was not upgraded at the same time to know about this, so it often went bankrupt. Perhaps the maintenance cost is not high enough yet. Would it make any difference, for example, if the maintenance cost was doubled? How about 5x? Or would a better solution be to multiply the cost of the larger frames (BS, CA, DD) by 2x? How about 5x? I am reluctant to suggest small changes, so these are large numbers.

davea wrote:
Would it make any difference, for example, if the maintenance cost was doubled? How about 5x? Or would a better solution be to multiply the cost of the larger frames (BS, CA, DD) by 2x? How about 5x? I am reluctant to suggest small changes, so these are large numbers.

I suggest there should be a non-linear (not as harsh as exponential, but of the "climbing" kind) maintenance costs scale after some global CP cap.

Also, that CP cap should probably be empire-size independent (i.e. not tied to tech, amount of systems, amount of pop, or the like). This way, there'll be a direct (and adjustable by patches, if needed) deterrent on huge empires "swarming" lesser empires with endless amounts of ships.

The_Quasar wrote:
I agree with this... a "stack of death" has no limit (see Civilization IV for a good example). The idea in these games is to build one, as high as possible (or with as many units as possible), then steamroller everyone else... it makes a rather boring and predictable type of combat.

There are a number of ways around this problem... one unit per tile (like Civilization V) is one good way; and increasing fleet/army sizes by technology advances, is another (as in ES).

Personally, I like the way ES has got around this problem.

Or making smaller faster ships harder to hit like in Starbase orion. They get out of enemies range and use long range weapons! then It wont matter if the enemy has 200 big slow mammoths. It a solution for now, but in the long run tactics and differences should be the way to go.

If you notice, I just have one fleet attacking an enemy's fleet. How do I get it so that every single ship of mine in the area is attacking the enemy fleet in the same battle?

davea wrote:
It seems clear that a tech advantage is *supposed* to give you a combat advantage. To me this is not related to fleet size limits.

I'm talking about the exact system that makes a "stack of death" being, you know, "of death". The problem with stacks is not only the fact that it attacks too strong, it's also because it have excellent survivability.

In ES, larger fleets have an extreme ability to cope with any smaller opposition without noticeable losses. It's not a problem at all when a superior empire have larger stacks, it's your inability to even scratch a large stack with a small stack (or several) that is problematic. Once you get 2nd ships up, you can pump them full of missiles and at least do suicide runs (if they have missiles too you won't get away), but after the 4th ships (the one with more defenses) this tactic becomes moot, because missiles have terrible weapon tonnage-to-defense tonnage ratio. I.e. it's quite simple to get enough flaks up to withstand a heavy missile barrage from suicide bombers -- and if you're using 4th ships, you'll still get enough extra space for a good amount of weapons.



PS: I'm not talking about any other weapon systems, because they don't have the ability to focus massive damage like missiles do. Larger fleet -> more targets -> less damage per target -> they'll repair any beam/slugs damage from a small fleet anyway.

davea wrote:
It seems clear that a tech advantage is *supposed* to give you a combat advantage. To me this is not related to fleet size limits.

I agree with this... a "stack of death" has no limit (see Civilization IV for a good example). The idea in these games is to build one, as high as possible (or with as many units as possible), then steamroller everyone else... it makes a rather boring and predictable type of combat.

There are a number of ways around this problem... one unit per tile (like Civilization V) is one good way; and increasing fleet/army sizes by technology advances, is another (as in ES).

Personally, I like the way ES has got around this problem.

It seems clear that a tech advantage is *supposed* to give you a combat advantage. To me this is not related to fleet size limits.

davea wrote:
If you want more ships in a fleet, research the techs to raise your fleet cap. Without these techs, your ships cannot communicate effectively enough to act in a large fleet. This prevents the "stack of death" problem that many other games face.

Actually, no. It merely hides it in a less obvious place.

Given that in this game a smaller empire is weaker in ALL stats to a larger empire (except diplomatic standing), this also means that the big, steamrolling empire will likely also have superior tech, and thus, bigger fleets. Here's the stack of death problem comes again.

wetblowdryer wrote:
How do you do that exactly?

Select the separate fleets in the lower left panel. Use CTRL-click to select more than one fleet. Click the Merge button in the middle of the bottom of that panel. This will create one big fleet where there once were two (or three, or...)



Alternatively, click and drag the ship itself shown in that panel on top of another fleet's entry in that panel. This will add the ship to the fleet.



Note: There is a maximum size your fleets can handle, larger ships take up more fleet 'command points'. Research in the west tree will expand your fleet size.

wetblowdryer wrote:
How do you do that exactly?

Well if you have several smaller fleets and you have a command limit of, say, 10, then you add all of your smaller fleets into the same one, so:

2/10

3/10

5/10

becomes:

10/10.

I personally once suggested that fleets be able to attack as many times as their movement points would allow, but it was said that this might give an unfair advantage to races like the Sophons.

Tiggy wrote:
also on a side note, why is it a fleet can only attack once per turn? it does get irritating when trying to get rid of a few dozen tiny annoyances.

Because engaging in fleet battle more than once a year would be too tiresome obviously. Don't know really, but I guess there is some reason for it.

i do have to say, i always thought that the max fleet limit in this game was rather small, i would like to have some pretty monstrous sized fleet roaming around. the biggest fleets ive seen look more like little strike teams than actual fleets battling over an entire system. and also blob of death has a huge disadvantage as to where a persons entire fleet is just that, one single blob of death where they can only be in one place at a time, meaning there can be multiple strikes at different planets at the same time to make the blob advantage pretty much disappear.



also on a side note, why is it a fleet can only attack once per turn? it does get irritating when trying to get rid of a few dozen tiny annoyances.

Roflrocket wrote:
Put all your ships into the same fleet temporarily.

How do you do that exactly?

If you want more ships in a fleet, research the techs to raise your fleet cap. Without these techs, your ships cannot communicate effectively enough to act in a large fleet. This prevents the "stack of death" problem that many other games face.

Put all your ships into the same fleet temporarily.

YellowSock wrote:
You can't.

Are you serious? That's a downer.

There is a limit there. Only one fleet may engage another, no matter how many fleets are in one place. So, 1 fleet may only attack once, but it can defend an number of times. For example, it's not uncommon for 1 fleet at 20000 strength to defend and destory vs 5 fleets at 10000 strength. I wish there was a bonus to fleets (dmg and def) when they are in the same system as an ally fleet, because it's kind of absurd when that example with the super-fleet happens. But ya, one fleet on fleet battle at a time. Hope that helps some.

You can't.