20,000 credits? Should have put in 9,999,999 credits and gotten their starbases too.
I'm mostly concerned with vs AI play, as this is what nearly everybody plays. If you prefer to have competitive matches against other people, more power to you. Still, you are wrong in implying the defender and attacker are on equal ground here. Defenses do not need to be perfectly tailored to attacks in order to be 100% effective, they can be off by quite a bit and still absorb 4 hp/dp. [quote]Actually, you DO have an effective hp against each specific weapon type. That's exa
[quote who="naselus" reply="19" id="3560719"] 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). [/quote] That's not how it works. I don't have an "effective HP per enemy wea
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.
[quote who="naselus" reply="13" id="3560688"] 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
[quote who="Stalker0" reply="8" id="3560646"] 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 whe
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. [quote who="naselus" reply="4" id="3560460"]<br /
You could probably get around pirates by adding a sensor module to your colony ships...they'd build slower, but you'd also find planets easier, so it's not entirely a loss.
I think there's a pretty simple fix to the sensor ship issue: make sensors increase vision area instead of vision radius.