Okay, as you all know I don't crunch all the numbers all the time so I am basically having a difficult time with ship combat for some strange reason, since the update just to add that to this.
My question is, I had a fleet of four huge hulled ships fully decked with the highest missile defense possible. The fleets combined defense vs. missiles was so high that on screen it was just three stars, ***. They were armed and supported by a couple of smaller ships, all using neutrino bullets since I was the only force who had researched this tech.
Everyone else in the game was using missiles and the proper defenses, with a few AI's using some lasers/shields as well. Now to my surprise, every fleet that I encountered with mine wiped the floor with my ships. I couldn't even destroy one of theirs and could only helplessly watch as my 'invincible' ships got trounced. Even my hitpoints tripled theirs.
So what am I missing here? I have better HP's, better logistics, weapons to which there are no defenses yet, and defenses so high that missiles/lasers should bounce harmlessly into space. This is on NORMAL difficulty. Now I know I was having a tough time adjusting to the expansion, and even normal is giving me a fuss, but what gives with the combat? I thought this was how to have the edge on the rest of the civs? I even tried with huge hulled ships and nothing but guns, guns and more guns and still nothing, the enemy fleets had no problems with me. Any help or explanation would be greatly appreciated since at this point, it is pretty much pointless for me to play, at least at the normal difficulty, and quite frankly I'm getting bored with cleaning house on cakewalk and the sub-normal diffs.
Oh, and the 'diplomacy route', tried it, no success. Even if I pay a civ like the Terrans 100 bc a turn they still wage war on me, and I had all diplomacy techs and wonders. And the trade option, negative again. As soon as war is waged on me they hunt my freighters down, even with the UP resolution to protect freighters. And also once again, when I escort my freighters, the escorts are always defeated even though they are well defended against missiles/lasers and armed with gun tech, which again, no one else has the tech nor the defenses for. Is this all just me? Am I losing it?