Does anyone else get the feeling that base hit points are too high, and attack-specific defenses are too low?
I get the idea behind the defenses-as-additional-hitpoints mechanic, and it's not a bad one - it's more straightforward than the modifier approach in GC2, and it makes ships a bit tougher against attacks they're built to withstand. But, as has been pointed out, it's generally better to ignore defenses altogether and just use as many weapons as possible. Most ships have enough tank to survive the firepower of a 'generalist' boat, while a generalist boat will not have enough tank to survive the firepower of a 100% beam/missile/gun ship, as his defense value won't cover the shortfall. Even though defense hit points are regenerated after every battle, they're still not valuable enough, because they cannot counter the full force of an attack.
I think that reducing 'structural' hip points by 50%, and increasing 'defense' hit points by 100% would fix this. A heavy PD boat would be able to withstand alpha strikes from missile boats, and would be able to take out a defense-free hull in the return salvo. Picking weapons to circumvent the enemy's defense tech would suddenly become important again, rather than just massively outweighing the def value with extra guns.
The basic hit points of a ship should basically account for the few millimetres of hull between the crew and outer space. Everything else is accounted for by armour, shields or PD. Anything getting through those should cause grievous damage to any ship, no matter the size. We shouldn't be seeing hulls with 5-6 times the basic tank of their defense mods, which currently is the default.
A better way to make defense play a role in battle would have been to make the fleets distribute their fire more evenly rather than focusing it. Yes, focus fire is mathematically optimal for a situation where being under fire does not result in a loss of offensive capability (but I doubt it would have been that difficult to add in an accuracy penalty or a firing rate penalty for being under fire), but it does tend to trivialize defenses when you have a dozen ships all hitting the same target at once unless the defenses are quite potent. This could also have been accomplished simply by spreading fleets out a bit more, getting ships to remain at something closer to their maximum engagement range, or reducing weapon ranges; it wouldn't necessarily have to involve new code. Fleets cannon concentrate their fire as much if the ships involved cannot all hit the same target. I also suspect that it would result in much more visually interesting battles if fire is spread out rather than all concentrated on one or two ships.
(Yes, there are situations currently where fire is distributed fairly evenly. Those situations normally occur when the targets can each be destroyed out by a fraction of the fleet's fire - almost like the fleet's choosing a target, running through ships until the target dies, choosing the next target, running through ships until that target dies, and so on until the fleet runs out of ships - or when the surviving vessels are sufficiently spread out that not all of them can fire on the same target. What a coincidence, don't you think?)
The game already allows for distribution of firepower. If you have multiple ships of one type, the enemy ships that are targeting that ship role will target different ships. Just tested 5 escorts versus 5 escorts combat to verify and yep, the targets seem random. This is the actual targeting not just who they are firing on due to their primary target being out of range. So no fleet focus fire in the traditional sense which I think is great for visual appearance. This makes defense even more useful than I had realized.
A couple of things occurred to me during a fairly intensive testing session last night:
1) Weapons seem to have a 'threat' score. How does this interact with preferred targeting? It appears to apply after class - so you'll target the escort with the highest threat before attacking a capital ship with a vastly higher threat level.
2) If defenses work as peteincary2 suggests, and there's no 'overflow' of damage from the shot which destroys the defenses (so if you hit 1 point of shields with 1 gazillion laser, you still only destroy that 1 point of shield with that shot), then lower-end defenses might actually be the better way to go at higher levels - unless you pump so much mass into defense you're gimping your attack scores, you're not going to get enough point defense level to stop a 900-point alpha strike, so every value of PD between 1 and 225 is actually worth exactly the same amount in that combat - both will block exactly 1 shot.
This may mean that the 'best' build for 1vs1 is actually all-weapons plus 1 lowest-level defense of each type. This ships will block the first shot of any ship firing on it, but will still unleash enough firepower to 1-shot un-defended targets (because you're only sacrificing a very small amount of mass for the protection).
But there is one thing I don't know: What happens when a really strong attack hits a low defense value? Do any damage go through, or do the defense block it all?
If a ship has even 1 point of defense remain, the entirety of the attack goes to taking down that last point of defense. In other words, massive attacks have a lot of wasted firepower on that final shot to the ship's defense.
Is that per weapon or per barrage?
Lets say I have 8 25 damage lasers as a quick example.
Would that 1 point of shield counteract the whole 200 points of damage, or just 1 25 attack....leaving the rest of the damage to go through?
Lets say I have 8 25 damage lasers as a quick example.Would that 1 point of shield counteract the whole 200 points of damage, or just 1 25 attack....leaving the rest of the damage to go through?
It seems to be per barrage, calculated on a ship-by-ship basis (so if those 8 lasers are 4 each on two ships, one ship will just destroy the shield and the other with cause full damage to the hull).
That would make smaller glass cannons more valuable. Why waste multiple shots from a capital when several smaller ones would do the trick?
Indeed it can often be better to spread-out the firepower amongst several smaller ships instead of a few big ones. One of the reason carriers are so strong - instead of concentrating all your firepower on one or two targets per round (as with a battleship), the fighters can knock out a large number of weaker targets very quickly, or wear down a large target.
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