You'll have to wait until Monday or Tuesday at minimum as they're on vacation per the notification up top. (or is this post irrelevant due to 'lack of factual provable and factual information?)

Anyways, I agree with you, the battle results have been annoyingly inconsistent as of late. They actually used to be better. (or, again, is this post irrelevant due to 'lack of factual provable and factual information?)

Damage = rand()%(1 to max attack) - ( rand()%(1 to max defense in corresponding defense) + sqrt(rand()%1 to max defenses in non-optimal corresponding defenses).

And I agree, the battle results don't seem to intuitively work the way they should.  I'll ask someone to look further into it.

But if I had to guess, it would be an issue of overkill.  The winning side had 3 ships while the other side only had 2.  So even if you super killed one of the ships, the other still got an additional round.

I have further observed battle, and there is a Major problem. I have just lost a battle due to enemy destroyed ships still firing on me and my ships firing on destroyed ships thus causing no damage while I am taking some from same destroyed ship. And I have proof!

Here is the setup: I have 2 ships as follows

Enemy Altarian has 3 ships as follows:

On the very first opening shot I destroy "Point of light", so far so good. It's 2 vs 2

Later on in the battle we are down to 1vs1 as shown below. Notice how many ships are in screen and how many are darkened in the upper corners.

Now, watch were I get totally screwed. In the next shot taken 2 seconds later, notice how many enemy ships are non screen.

Here is another angle, showing both ships, and damage log shows 2 ships firing on me, while upper right corner shows only one ship remaining for altarians.

And Finally, the battle report... Notice how miraculously a second Altarian ship has risen from the dead. Notice also the Altarian fleet's total HP of 91 and the damage I dealt to their fleet being 137. Who took the missing 46 damage? (137-93=46). I went over the entire battle log, here is what I found. The second ship, 'Cutting Principle' never resgisters as "destroyed" in the log, even though HP was at 0 for roughly half the battle. Conclusion, I was shooting at a ghost ship dealing no damage, but was taking damage from said ghost ship. See screenshots below.

At this point, I most definitely would like an explanation from the developers as to how this could happen?

I have no inside knowledge, I am only speaking from a lot of experience looking at battle logs.  Setting aside the whole issue of how damage is calculated (which needs a LOT of work), what I believe is happening is the following:

• at the start of each round of combat, each ship selects a target
  • the algorithm for selecting a target does not appear to limit the number of ships targeting a single enemy ship based on how many ships are likely to be needed to destroy the target.  This leads to a lot of wasted salvos as too many ships target the same enemy ship.
• after all targets have been selected, each ship fires its weapons
• the result of each salvo is calculated and applied to its target
  • if a ship is destroyed, all salvos targeted at it continue to hit it wasting a lot of ammunition
  • salvos that are fired by an enemy ship that is destroyed during the combat round will continue on to their target
    • this means that, with the current logic requiring that every salvo will do at least 1 damage, your ships will always be damaged in combat even if your fleet is vastly superior to the enemy's fleet

It would be nice if the devs would adjust the target selection algorithm to take into account the weapons, weapon strength, and defense strength to only assign enough ships to a single target ship to have a 90% probability of destroying the target ship.  This means that occasionally the target ship will survive, but the benefit of spreading-out the attack of a fleet to more targets far outweighs the downside of occasionally having a target survive.

Quoting damonlundy,

reply 10

The solution to all of this pain would be if we could "control" each of our ships (if we so chose) for each battle (again, if we so chose). We could then select how many ships targeted the enemy, how many fired, where the ships maneuvered, what they did during battle, where they attempted to flee or not or self destruct, and which weapons to fire on each enemy ship. Master of Orion 1 and 2 did that masterfully as well as other gems including Interstellar Space: Genesis, which was modeled after MOO.

 

Just saying. Not trying to be a Jack Ass here.  

I have mentioned MOO2 many times in regard to combat. So, no problem with me.