lol, ok here's the thing with how combat works... it's all a very wide range of numbers right now so it's very hard to see from the battle logs what's going on. the weapons are actually a chance of doing dmg from 1-max weapon range, not sure if it's per weapon exactly. and defense does the same thing, random number between 1 and the defense number that is used per hit (from ship total i think, not weapon). and that defense number blocks the dmg number i think, not a hp shield. ship roles work the same as in gac civ 3, which is very complex atm and has ships just randomly targeting other ships first and last based on ship role. not entirely sure of this stuff though since the ui doesnt show much and the battle logs are very hard to understand with this system, plus the system keeps slightly changing. that 50 to 10% non optimal defense was actually just changed i think to be the square root of the def instead of 10%, not sure exactly how that works yet though.
hopefully more info on that will come out within the next 2 weeks since the game is launching on the 26th now.
accuracy is set at 80% for all weapons, all weapons have same range and rate of fire too btw.
In addition to what Basalisk outlined I would add a couple of things:
- I believe that an attack will always do at least 1 damage if it hits. (so a 20 beam attack against 30 shields still results in 1 damage).
- I'm not sure how much accuracy matters presently.
- With battles every ship will select their priority target at the beginning of combat - so even if that target is destroyed, ships that had selected to attack it will "miss" (because they fired on a ship that was destroyed after the weapons were deployed, ostensibly).
- Right now the battle dynamics favor larger fleets of smaller ships vs smaller fleets of larger ships.
(We believe) that the battle system will continue to see some changes prior to full release (or in the post-release patch cycle), so the advice you're getting here may only be only situationally useful, depending upon what those potential future changes may be. And the UI "battle predictor" may not be very accurate at this particular moment.
The changes from last patch to this patch have been good and improved battle (from what I've gathered), so any additional changes are likely to be making battles better and more intuitive.
Hope this helps!
-tid242
