I'm sorry. But it does matter.

If a non-matching weapon only reduces armor by squareroot (abbreviated sqrt) of the value minus the damage, then matching weapons are actually MORE effective against armor than non matching.

That is armor-damage value > sqrt(armor-damage value)
What we think should happen is sqrt(armor) - damage value, that is a big difference.

To put in real numbers again, it goes like this:

144 - 12 = 132. That is a measurable loss that matching weapons have against matching defense.

The question is do non-matching weapons work one of two ways:
sqrt(144)-damvalue or sqrt(144-damvalue). If damvalue is outside of the parenthesis, than you get 12-12 = 0, and armor gets shot away at the right rate by non matching weapons. If, on the other hand, damvalue is in the parenthesis then you get sqrt(144-12) or after hitting an armor value of 12 with an attack of 12, it is reduced to sqrt(132) or 11.... basically you only are knocking one point off instead of 12.

If your attack damage on the off weapon is already >144, you wouldn't be able to tell if armor is reduced at the right rate, because it is gone right away anyway.

The next game I play I will set research to very slow and try and test low fleet attack values against non-matching armor, see if I can't get some hard numbers on this. It would be an easy bug to have crept into the code, just misplacing the closing parenthesis would do it.

Heh, it was a round about, tounge in cheek compliment, just so theres no misunderstanding. Brad's arcane game systems baffle me...but my brain is small and I'm easily distracted by small shiny objects.

thanks estafazero. Also, if you read one of my replies here you'll find other ideas, some pretty similar to the ones i expressed in this topic, some regarding the other big missing thing during the battles in the game: territory. Some improvements in this direction would give the possibility to bring few tactic also during the combats. It's not necessary to give control of the ship to the player but if there would be bonuses (or maluses) depending on "where" you fight (in your territory, close to your planets or asteroid fields etc., in open space etc., warp battles/impulse battles) i think we'll have even more fun.

richard

Here is the combat as I understand it:

https://forums.galciv2.com/?forumid=421&aid=139395#1104735

The reason we often assume that defences will block twice their rating in weapons is because defences roll as a whole for the ship, while weapons roll individually.

Say I have a ship with 10 beams, each with 10 attack for 100 total beam attack. It is attacking a ship with 100 total shields.

The first beam will roll 0-10 against 0-100 for the shields. On average, the beam will do 5 damage and will be entirely blocked about 96% of the time. So say the beam did 5 damage. Next weapon rolls 0-10 against 0-95 for the shields. Again, the beam will do 5 damage on average and will be entirely blocked about 94% of the time.

Individual weapons don't have a good chance to penetrate until the defences are worn down to rolling in the same range. To wear down that 100 shields to the 0-10 range will take 90 points of damage, which requires about 18 0-10 rolls on average. So only towards the tail end of the *second* 100-beam attack ship can we expect to actually see a bit of damage.

This is why, to a good approximation, defences stop 2x their rating of weapons. The actual value depends on the actual defence rating versus individual weapon damage. For ships with little defence, it can be as low as 1x, on average. For ships with lots of defence, it approach 2x, but is usually probably 1.9 or 1.95x.

One caveat for the above: for some strange reason, 'bonus' damage from weapons is gathered into the first shot from a ship, rather than distributed across it's weapons. So if you have a ship with 10 guns, each doing 0-5, but you have a 100% weapons bonus, your ship will read that it has 100 beam attack. It's not 10 attacks of 0-10, it's 1 attack of 0-55 and 9 attacks of 0-5. So if you are fighting a race with an especially high weapons bonus, they might do more damage than you would think, because the above configuration has a much better chance of penetrating shields than ten 0-10 attack, even though they have the same total.

Looking at the comments in this thread, I decided to do a test of whether off-type defences are actually working properly. Based on the results of the test, I can say definitively that they are not.

I created a scenario where a huge ship with a mass-driver attack of 199 attacks a huge ship with 14 beam attack and a beam defence of 345. Since the second ship's defence against mass-drivers is only 18, the mass-driver ship should completely walk-over the beam defence ship, with a reasonable chance of killing it on the first round.

Instead, the beam defence ships won 8 of 9 combats! The attacker, with 199 attack rating and facing no matching defence could only do 6 points damage on average (though with a high range, sometimes doing as much as 24).

So, until this is fixed, everyone might want to consider putting the wrong type of defences on their ship.

Ok...so defenses block twice their rating on average. That sounds pretty damn good to me, and probably explains while I was able to shut down or survive most enemy attacks in all my games while never having to exceed a 90 defense rating , and gain a war-winning advantage with nothing more than a 30 or 40 defense rating tailored to the enemey's weapons, prior to the last patch.

The question is then...WHY did defense need buffed so profoundly...a size reduction AND a rating increase? Why did it need buffed at all?



Wait...so you mean Im not crazy (in this particular instance)? I wasnt prepared for that...I dont know how to feel...

Yes. If you have a ship with very high defence against, say, beams, the only things that are likely to hurt it are:

1. Fleets with more than twice it's shield rating in beam attack
2. Ships that individually have a high proportion of it's shield rating in beam attack and a very high weapons bonus (due to the first weapon 'super shot').
3. Fleets using missiles or mass drivers that also have a high weapons bonus (again because the 'super shot', though in this case it doesn't have to be concentrated in single ships...)

Note that in case 3 the ship is going to get hurt, but much less than it would get hurt if off-type defences were working properly.

I wrote a whole bunch here, but then my browser had a problem, so I lost it. The short version is that the value of defense in the DA system is *very* dependent on ship size and fleet composition. So it makes it very hard to balance.

People were finding that unless you coud reach the 'supership' mode, deploying even the appropriate defenses was a serious waste of money. Of course, by decreasing the cost, it makes it easier to enter the 'supership' mode. The check on that is that, theoretically, the supership has two types of kryptonite out there.

As far is i know luck only affects the weapons rolls.

That could also work. Currently, off-type defences don't seem to be fully depleted, so in your first example it seems to go to 132/11/11 instead of 132/0/11 after the first attack.

Defense needed to be buffed for the AIs sake, and the way it uses defense.

However, I have run one test in game and got some real weird results, that I don't even know how are possible. Here was the setup:

I was Krynn, with a +100% defense boost and a +50% luck (I was universalists). I built up a starbase on my territory with the following stats: Attack 13/6/6, defense 10/10/10. Happily for me, the defense racial boost seems to apply to starbases, because I only had researched the basic starbase tech so I had 3 +5s to upgrade with. Anyway, this base was attacked by an enemy fleet with the following stats:

13 ships with missile attack, 6 attack per ship for a fleet value of 78 missile. They attacked.

In the first round of combat I took:
Attacker 1: 0 damage
Attacker 2: 4 damage
Attacker 3: 4 damage
Attackers 4-13: 0 damage!

What? Only 8 points? But it got worse. I destroyed one ship, and round 2 it went:
Attacker 1-12: 0 damage

Repeat till I destroyed all 13 ships. Took no more damage.

I left the combat taking only 8 points total. My defense against missiles should have been 10+sqrt(10)+sqrt(10) or a 16. I was fighting against a missile attack of 78, so on average that is 39 damage in the first round. I should have taken in the area of 23 damage the first round, 21 damage the second round, and so on. Do starbases work differently? Does my luck effect enemy attack roles (to decrease them 50% maybe?) Is some kind of my armor not going away - remember, 6 of those 16 points of defense were from off armor values.

Ship to ship I'm having problems setting up a test because suicidal just got a lot tougher, and I'm not able to manipulate situations to the same degree I used to be able to. I have not managed to survive long enough to get to medium hulls and a decent level of defense and attack yet (with settings on very slow research... along with the new tech trading, I mean ug!) I think I may have to try and test this on a lower difficulty level or with a faster rate of research. I'm not really playing to win, just playing to set up certain battles, and it isn't working on suicidal

The game is harder, for that I am happy. But the little I have been able to test low defense and offense numbers, like for this starbase, I've gotten some inexplicable results.

Conjecture: If non-matching defenses don't decrease at all, it is possible my starbase, after losing its point defense, had a static defense of 6 [sqrt(10shield)+sqrt(10armor)] leaving me with a def of 6 vs. an offense of 6 missile on every ship, and then luck was on my side?? Still hard for me to say exactly what happened here, but through 13 rounds of combat to only take 8 points of damage, well that is beyond a few lucky rolls. That is a law of averages result at that point. And it does point to some kind of problem, not sure what exactly though.

On a side note, are starbase attacks working right either? With three kinds of attack, I expected some spill over damage, one attack for each weapon kind. Instead, I would just destroy one fighter a round to exactly its hp total. Shouldn't starbases get 3 attacks with three kinds of weapons? Do they count as doing one multi-purpose attack? How is THAT damage figured against defense?

I RARELY use starbases to fight, so I am not very experienced with starbase combat generally. Do they have some other rules I'm not aware of? Please help.

Hi,

Do you guys that run testbed battles really say that defence doesn't work as specified (better than it should be)??

Have fun