Defenses and hit points » Forum Post by naselus

I'm not experiencing that defenses are useless - I tend to build my ships to take advantage of enemies using one weapon type primarily. I'd like to see the AI select defenses to counter their opponents' most-used weapons in the same way, I think that would help a lot.

As it stands, it feels like researching all 3 types of defenses doesn't keep up with focusing on a single weapon's research... especially as those attack tech-trees have stuff like 'shield leach' which negates the defenses they're aimed at.

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trims2u

Join Date 08/2010

+26

I'm with the OP.

The problem is that defenses degrade during the engagement, while weapons fire DOESN'T.

So, the value of 1 point of defense degrades over time, while 1 Hull Point will always stop 1 point of weapons fire.

This results in the situation where the best strategy is to build high-HP ships with as many weapons it as possible, but no defenses.

The only saving grace of defenses is that they recharge after each turn to full strength, whereas HP take a long time to repair. But, in a universe where production is cheap (like it is now), the best strategy is the Chinese Hordes one: build the best-armed ships possible, throw them into combat until their done, and build new ones with any newer weapons tech you've researched in the mean time. The traditional method of "husbanding" your ships - taking care of them, making sure they could hopefully survive several combats, worry about countering your opponent's strategies, and upgrading as needed - simply isn't anywhere as effective as the aforementioned Chinese Horde method where every ship is completely disposable.

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Quoting trims2u,

reply 2

The problem is that defenses degrade during the engagement, while weapons fire DOESN'T.

So, the value of 1 point of defense degrades over time, while 1 Hull Point will always stop 1 point of weapons fire.

Another argument that could be solved if we actually knew how defenses really worked. From my own experiences though, 4 defense is worth much more than 4 hp. Defenses blunt damage, and while they do degrade its not a 1:1 ratio. Good defenses can take several salvos of weapon fire, and are far cheaper on mass than equivalent weapons.

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Quoting Stalker0,

reply 3

Quoting trims2u,

reply 2

The problem is that defenses degrade during the engagement, while weapons fire DOESN'T.

So, the value of 1 point of defense degrades over time, while 1 Hull Point will always stop 1 point of weapons fire.

Another argument that could be solved if we actually knew how defenses really worked. From my own experiences though, 4 defense is worth much more than 4 hp. Defenses blunt damage, and while they do degrade its not a 1:1 ratio. Good defenses can take several salvos of weapon fire, and are far cheaper on mass than equivalent weapons.

Largely irrelevant. Defenses may block multiple points of damage, but the ratio of defense values per module to attack values per module isn't high enough to make much difference. You're always better off stacking more guns instead.

Any defense is actually only worth 1/3rd as much as it says it is, since 2/3rds of all weapon fire will ignore it. Weapons are always worth their full value, since even if the enemy has the correct defense to use against it, you will eventually degrade that defense and hit the hull. Moreover, late-game hulls have so many hit points that the relatively small amount of shield/PD/armour doesn't amount to much; you're likely to be able to just tank the damage regardless. Defenses simply don't provide enough soak value to make up for lost damage output.

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I'd like to see every defense provide some protection against any attack. I'm a little tired of having to put all 3 defenses on my ships, or else park them on a planet for 15 turns (and forget where they are) while they repair.

In real-life, navies have staff members who keep up with repairs, logistics and production. I'm too stressed with trying to upgrade 50 starbases to be able to keep up with my warships, so I usually just let them fight on until they die. *sigh*.

Production may be cheap - though my cruisers now take 8-12 turns to build - but building them and getting them to the front can take 20-24 turns total, so I hate to lose one.

I would say that the value of defenses depends on other factors, like how many ships I can mass in a fleet versus my enemy, or whether the enemy is building ships that are heavy on one weapon/defense or using designs that spread the points out. I'm fighting the IC and so far they've tried pure beam/shield, pure kinetic/armor and now they are focusing on pure missile/point defense and ships that use all 3 weapons and defenses. When I can mass 9 small or 5 mediums against his 2-or-3 ship fleets, I'm better off using all 3 defenses at low power, knowing I will kill his ships before he can land enough shots to hurt me.

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Defenses are most useful when stacked on escort/guardian ships, as these will be targeted before your offensive capital ships. They're definitely useful in this way, even generalist ships containing both offenses and defenses aren't.

As for the mechanics, I've seen that defenses take 50% of a random value between 1 to the weapons damage. If that's true, then 1 point of defense is worth 4 points of HP on average.

Quoting naselus,

reply 4

Any defense is actually only worth 1/3rd as much as it says it is, since 2/3rds of all weapon fire will ignore it. Weapons are always worth their full value, since even if the enemy has the correct defense to use against it, you will eventually degrade that defense and hit the hull. Moreover, late-game hulls have so many hit points that the relatively small amount of shield/PD/armour doesn't amount to much; you're likely to be able to just tank the damage regardless. Defenses simply don't provide enough soak value to make up for lost damage output.

This is simply not true. As long as your opponent has enough of the defended weapon type that your defenses are depleted before the ship is destroyed, they provide full value.

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Larsenex

Join Date 04/2009

+212

I'd like to see Defenses provide more power say 3 or 4 to 1. Also the mass needs to be adjusted down a bit to be attractive to builds.

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We probably need to see some combat sims on this one.

Take a fleet of medium ships or something, load them with guns. Take another fleet, same config except you swap some of the weapons for suitable defense, and see how they perform.

My gut tells me that once you have enough weapons to kill a ship in a few rounds, then defenses will be stronger than more guns, but no sense speculating when we can just find out.

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ManiiNames

Join Date 03/2006

+27

especially as those attack tech-trees have stuff like 'shield leach' which negates the defenses they're aimed at.

I'm not convinced these actually do anything though?

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Quoting lolpurplecow,

reply 6

This is simply not true. As long as your opponent has enough of the defended weapon type that your defenses are depleted before the ship is destroyed, they provide full value.

It is true, though I perhaps may have stated it rather less clearly than I'd hoped - by '1/3rd of all weapon fire' I'm referring to only 1/3rd of the weapons in the game being effected by the defense, so for example shields aren't effective against missiles or kinetics. Your attacks will always do damage to the target, even if that full damage is being done to a defensive system rather than hull; however, for 2/3rds of incoming attacks on average any given defensive system will do absolutely nothing.

As such, even if we take a broad average of 4 hp value per blocked shot, the total value can be reduced to 1.3 recurring since it won't come into play for 2/3rds of all shots the ship will encounter (on average). This is slightly better than hull, but since you get lashings and lashings of free hull hitpoints, but must spend precious mass allowance to gain individual defense values, players have largely determined that all-gun is the way to go.

I don't really mind the balance between weapons and guns presently. I just think that a naked hull shouldn't offer so much tank that players can ignore defensive systems and just stack guns - at present, the 'best' end-game fleets largely consist of huge hulls loaded with a million missile launchers and bugger all else. By shifting the emphasis from hull to defense, we're empowering defenses vs weapons, but more importantly we're weakening hull vs weapons. It's the second point which I'm more concerned with in my suggestion.

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Quoting Stalker0,

reply 8

We probably need to see some combat sims on this one.

Take a fleet of medium ships or something, load them with guns. Take another fleet, same config except you swap some of the weapons for suitable defense, and see how they perform.

My gut tells me that once you have enough weapons to kill a ship in a few rounds, then defenses will be stronger than more guns, but no sense speculating when we can just find out.

It'd probably be more useful to compare an offensive fleet vs a fleet with a few tank ships, rather than an offensive fleet vs generalist fleet.

Quoting naselus,

reply 10

It is true, though I perhaps may have stated it rather less clearly than I'd hoped - by '1/3rd of all weapon fire' I'm referring to only 1/3rd of the weapons in the game being effected by the defense, so for example shields aren't effective against missiles or kinetics. Your attacks will always do damage to the target, even if that full damage is being done to a defensive system rather than hull; however, for 2/3rds of incoming attacks on average any given defensive system will do absolutely nothing.

As such, even if we take a broad average of 4 hp value per blocked shot, the total value can be reduced to 1.3 recurring since it won't come into play for 2/3rds of all shots the ship will encounter (on average). This is slightly better than hull, but since you get lashings and lashings of free hull hitpoints, but must spend precious mass allowance to gain individual defense values, players have largely determined that all-gun is the way to go.

You're overthinking this. You'd be correct if the defenses blocked 4 HP/shot, but they don't block per shot, they block per point of defense. Even though defenses only block 1/3 of the shots, they still block a total of 4 HP per point of defense.

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Larsenex

Join Date 04/2009

+212

We need to test this.

Two tests and I am not sure how to use console commands to do so but here is my test.

Single ship to ship combat, 4 combats, move the ships so we do not have the same combats over and over.

Each ship has an engine, a thruster and a life support. Lets use Medium and if possible a large hull. Test only with the 'first tier' of a weapon after specializations.

One ship has Weapons only.

One ship has 1/2 weapons and 1/2 defenses against that weapon.

Variance:

One ship has 2/3 defenses and 1/3 weapons.

Run combat 4x

Further variance: Fleets.

4 ships of the weapons only.

4 ships of the other, run sims for both 1/2 and 2/3rds.

Lets see the results.

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Quoting lolpurplecow,

reply 11

You're overthinking this. You'd be correct if the defenses blocked 4 HP/shot, but they don't block per shot, they block per point of defense. Even though defenses only block 1/3 of the shots, they still block a total of 4 HP per point of defense.

No, I'm not. It still stands, as I was referring to a single point of defense in the previous post. The number of points of defense on the ship is irrelevant, since hp per dp is a constant.

Each point of defense is worth 1.3 points of hull, since each point of defense is still only effective against 1/3rd of incoming fire (on average across all combats). A successful defense blocks 4 hp/point. 1/3rd of all shots are successful defenses. Therefore, defenses have a value of 4/3 hp/point - also known as 1.3 recurring.

The maths is very simple; there's no room in there to overthink

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Quoting naselus,

reply 13

No, I'm not. It still stands, as I was referring to a single point of defense in the previous post. The number of points of defense on the ship is irrelevant, since hp per dp is a constant.

Each point of defense is worth 1.3 points of hull, since each point of defense is still only effective against 1/3rd of incoming fire (on average across all combats). A successful defense blocks 4 hp/point. 1/3rd of all shots are successful defenses. Therefore, defenses have a value of 4/3 hp/point - also known as 1.3 recurring.

The maths is very simple; there's no room in there to overthink

No, you're still overthinking this. If you want to think about it your way, then you'd have to also take into account that defenses aren't depleted at all by 2/3s of weapon fire, so they're worth 3x as much. 4 * 1/3 * 3 = 4.

You're right that it really is very simple, as long as you make the assumption that the enemy ships have enough of each weapon to deplete your defenses before the your ship is entirely destroyed: in this case, it is trivial to see that each point of defense adds 4 points of HP. Since this assumption should always be true unless you're making some very stupid design decisions, other, more complicated cases are irrelevant.

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Quoting lolpurplecow,

reply 14

No, you're still overthinking this. If you want to think about it your way, then you'd have to also take into account that defenses aren't depleted at all by 2/3s of weapon fire, so they're worth 3x as much. 4 * 1/3 * 3 = 4.

... That's completely absurd logic.

The defenses don't come into play AT ALL against the 2/3rds of weapons fire that don't deplete them. They do nothing. They are worth nothing in those cases, so their additional value in those cases is ZERO (if not negative, for the wasted mass). They're not acting as health in any way and the ship can be destroyed with them completely unaffected. Stop trying to find a fault here, because you've failed to do so.

Consider it like this. You have 4 points of pd and 10 points of hull, and the enemy fires at you with missiles. Your effect HP against this attack is 4*4+10, so 26.

You have the same ship and the enemy fires at you with lasers. Your effective health is 10 hp.

You have the same ship, and the enemy fires at you with kinetics. Your effective hp is 10hp.

The effective health of your ship, on average, is thus (10+10+26)/3. that's 46/3, or 15.3. The 4 points of PD thus have an average health value of 15.3-10, or 5.3.

5.3/4 = 1.3 recurring.

1 point of defense = 1.3 health.

Is that clear enough?

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You're not granting the assumption. Of course, on the premise of randomly assigned defenses and your opponents only focusing on one weapon type, defenses will be worth 1.3 hp/point. But neither of those premises are going to be true for a human player and an AI opponent. Human players should not randomly assign defenses, but even if they did, AI opponents tend to have at least two of three weapon types in their fleets.

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I was rather surprised the specific defenses returned in GalCiv III. I never built any on my ships in II, and I have not done it in III yet. That extra gun I always find more usefull, whether my opponent has defense to it or not. And that is not counting to be able to skip all the research. I was beginning to think I am overseeing something as people on this forum seemed to find them necessary but I am afraid naselus is right here.

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A real test would include opposing fleets of 4 ships each.

First fleet is all attack of one type only.

Second fleet includes one high defense (appropriate to the attack type of the other fleet) escort ship, plus 3 high attack capital ships.

My experiense is that a high defense escort ship will take no damage from the first 7-8 hits from an all attack ship, meaning that 1.5 ships from fleet 1 will be destroyed before the escort ship starts taking damage.

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Quoting lolpurplecow,

reply 16

You're not granting the assumption. Of course, on the premise of randomly assigned defenses and your opponents only focusing on one weapon type, defenses will be worth 1.3 hp/point. But neither of those premises are going to be true for a human player and an AI opponent. Human players should not randomly assign defenses, but even if they did, AI opponents tend to have at least two of three weapon types in their fleets.

Yeah... you're gonna hate this, but they're still worth 1.3hp per dp.

Consider this:

You have 10hp, 4pd, 4 shields and 4 armour.

You opponent has 1 of each type of weapon.

The enemy fires his laser at you. Your effective hp is 26 (10+0+0+16).

The enemy fires his missile at you. Your effective hp is 26 (10+0+0+16).

The enemy fires his kinetic at you. Your effective hp is 26 (10+0+0+16).

Your pd value is (16+0+0)/3 = 5.3. 5.3/4 = 1.3.

Your shield value is (16+0+0)/3 = 5.3. 5.3/4 = 1.3.

Your armour value is (16+0+0)/3 = 5.3. 5.3/4 = 1.3.

The ONLY case where it's worth more is if you're opponent is using only one or two weapon types, and you only defend against those specific weapon types. As you noted, the AI tends to use 2 or 3 weapon types in a fleet, so you're pushed into a position where you're getting an average of 1.3hp per dp.

The assumption that you want me to grant is that the very, very specific circumstances in which you're correct are the case. That's not how statistics works.

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Quoting naselus,

reply 19

You have 10hp, 4pd, 4 shields and 4 armour.

You opponent has 1 of each type of weapon.

The enemy fires his laser at you. Your effective hp is 26 (10+0+0+16).

The enemy fires his missile at you. Your effective hp is 26 (10+0+0+16).

The enemy fires his kinetic at you. Your effective hp is 26 (10+0+0+16).

That's not how it works. I don't have an "effective HP per enemy weapon type". I have an effective HP given the totality of enemy weapons.

It's clear to see why your model is wrong when you consider the total amount of damage that has to be done to my ship for it to be destroyed. Since, in your example, all of my defenses will be fully depleted by the time my ship is destroyed, a total of 10+16+16+16 = 58 damage will be done to my ship. (58-10)/16 = 4 hp/dp.

The assumption that you want me to grant is that the very, very specific circumstances in which you're correct are the case. That's not how statistics works.

How does my assumption only apply in very, very specific circumstances? It applies assuming you spend some effort building defenses roughly proportionate to enemy weapon selection.

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Maiden666

Join Date 12/2008

+62

I find it somewhat awkward to evaluate the worth of defenses in an offtype scenario - because they should always be ontype. If not, then there was one or more false decision made previously (in not matching the enemy's weapons in the ship designer) and this has to take its own responsibility and mustn't mean that all defenses are automatically too weak.

The 1.3 ratio in the above formula only occurs if defenses are either picked totally randomly, OR if the enemy will always use all 3 types of weapons.

The first example doesn't account for a good AI/player decision or gameplay, sure it's not always possible to match but a player can match that much more often than just the mathematical average number. As for the AI, that would need to be observed over a longer time.

As for the latter example, this approach actually gimps itself because it has to use much more technological resource which could have been used otherwise (for example, increasing logistics, mini etc) and I don't think the cost of this is justified only to decrease the enemies defenses.

The biggest problem of defenses actually lies in that it doesn't provide a cumulative fleet-wide bonus (such as attack) and therefore, doesn't positively scale together with increased logistics. If you mathematically compare the values of an all-attack ship versus an ontype defense ship (that still retains a somewhat balanced approach to attack) then you'll notice the odds for the defense ship are best in a 1 vs. 1 scenario and become increasingly worse as larger the fleet(s) get via logistics. As a rule of thumb defenses are only worth it when when they can reload, and that is totally dependant on the magnitude of the incoming attack, and this increases via logistics.

Finally, in order to make a genuine comparison, you'd also have to take the build cost of each ship into equation, as well as the time or effort it will take to get the required technologies.

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I agree with maiden.

you have to start with the best scenario for defenses. If they aren't worth it there then they aren't anywhere.

from there it's a question of when defenses are worth it.

also we are comparing defenses to hp, but that is really the wrong comparison. I can't really increase my hp or my defense, only with lots of durantium do I have that option.

its really a question of how much offensive is defense worth? Is a ship with lower offensive bit stronger defense ever a more effective combatant?

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One thing is for certain. Having at least one point of defense is always worth it. All damage from an incoming attack is negative the defending ship has at least one defense point remaining. So a ship with 300 beam firepower will do zero damage to the hit points of a ship with a 3 point deflector on it, on the first round of attacks.

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I build tanky (all three defenses) escort ships with a couple of weapons. 90% defenses spread (30/30/30) and 10% weapons.

I win a LOT vs. the AI with this setup.

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Quoting Nodor,

reply 24

I build tanky (all three defenses) escort ships with a couple of weapons. 90% defenses spread (30/30/30) and 10% weapons.

I win a LOT vs. the AI with this setup.

+1 to this.

Using 2 defensive escorts (the AI will split attacks between the 2 ships) and all remaining ships are high attack capital ships, I take hit point / hull damage almost never from the AI. Not even 1 point of hull damage.

I think the whole point of escort ships is that they get attacked before most other ship types (especially capital ships) so they naturally benefit from being defensive ships and make defenses worth it, even if on paper defense does not look as good as it really is.

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