A dev answered this in another thread by saying that they made every attack do at least 1 damage regardless of the attack strength and defense strength to avoid having battles take too long. To me, this is the wrong solution to the problem. Attacks that have less strength than the target's defense strength should do no damage to hit points. Period. The attack may reduce the target's defense strength by some amount, but that is it.
I would think that with a little creative thinking, math skills, and probability knowledge, the devs can come-up with a way to conduct battles in both a logical and computationally efficient manner. Obviously, having an attack with a strength of 1 do 1 damage no matter what the defensive strength is does not pass the sniff test.
I also do not like having every ship target the same ship in the enemy fleet at the same time. The battle viewer shows that this results in a lot of wasted shots when the target gets destroyed by one of the first shots in a round and the shots by every other ship show as "Missed" because the target is already destroyed. If I have a fleet of 20 (or more!) ships, it does not make sense to have every one of them target a single tiny ship in the enemy fleet. With a little work, I think the devs can come-up with a mechanism to improve this part of the battle logic by:
- Creating a "prioritized target list" for each of my attacking ships based on the attack type and strength of my ships and the defense type, strength, and remaining hit points of the enemy ships.
- Starting with my weakest ships and working up to my strongest ships, adjust their priority targets based on what the prior ships are already targeting.
This would let my smaller ships deal with the enemy's smaller ships and not waste the attacks of my larger ships on taking out the enemy's tiny ships unless that is all they have.