Battle mechanics details

After playing some games and looking at battle mechanics, there are few details that are not clear to me. This comes down to non-obvious mechanics like accuracy and speed.

Looking at base accuracy of all weapons, they are extra high. From studying some battle logs, it seems misses are extra rare. Meaning, that accuracy bonuses seem to be useless, when base accuracy is already close to 100%.

Speed is another question mark. How does speed affect combat? It is obvious it allows ship to get closer in range, but what after that? Does range affect accuracy? Eg. farther away attack goes, the less accurate it is? Are faster ships harder to hit?

The next complain is size. It seems that right now, building only largest ship possible is the way to go. There doesn't seem to be reason to have fleet of big and small ships. It seems big ships are just as good at fighting small ships as small ones. But small ships, when destroyed are lost forever. If same amount of damage is done to big ship, it can be repaired or at least same ship can participate in next battle until destroyed. It would make sense to make big ships loose accuracy when fighting small ship. This combined with high speed would make it possible to swarm small fleet of big ships with big fleet of small ships. It would also make it necessary to combine various sizes in single fleet, making battles much more dynamic.

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I only disagree about the need to do anything about big ships fighting small ships.

I have the same questions about accuracy, agility, and speed, but there are definitely reasons to build different sized ships.

First, it takes a long time to reach the largest hull sizes. You'll only have the smaller hulls for the first half or more of the game. And remember, if you have a lot of high production shipbuilding worlds that can turn out a large hull every turn, you've probably already won (against the AI.)

But what if you're not there yet? You might have a lot of low production worlds that can turn out just as many hit points worth of small ships every turn.

Another reason to build different sized hulls is to set the type of ship you produce. You could have a large support ship armed with missiles and as small assault ships to your logistics level armed with short range mass drivers. This fleet can push deeper into enemy territory. You send a stream of smaller ships to the fleet as you go. Yes, as you point out, the small ships are destroyed, but they soak up damage for the larger ship. And as you're able to produce them faster, a stream of the small ships can keep the fleet at the logistics limit, turn after turn.

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Accuracy weighs against Jamming, directly. If you have a 90% hit chance, and the enemy has 20% jamming, then you only hit 70% of the time. This is why getting accuracy over 100% is useful (though not as useful as it could be).

Speed and range have no effect on accuracy at all.

As to big vs small... as it happens, small ships have the advantage in some circumstances. Carriers are the most OP thing in the game, because ships can only shoot at 1 thing per round. Sure, it might completely destroy a small ship with that salvo... but if you've just wasted 18000 Laser on killing a 15hp fighter, then you've wasted a lot of kill potential.

There's some serious balancing to be done with this, though. Fighters are OP because they spend no mass on engines at all. Independent Tiny ships, on the other hand, spend about half their mass on engines, which is vastly more than Huge hulls. This means a Tiny vessel fleet has hugely less firepower than a logistics-equiv big ship fleets does, just as a Huge fleet has less firepower than an equivalent tonnage of fighters.

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I modded a -30% to be hit into Tiny Hulls, -20% for Small, and -10% for Medium and it worked out really well. It kept the smaller hulls viable for a larger chunk of the game.

I am considering increasing those bonuses and then adding half of to increasing the chance of scoring a hit (such that larger ships would have a harder time scoring a hit on a smaller ship but smaller ships don't have the same problem). I have not pulled the trigger on that though since I'm not sure what other effects it might have.

But yes, the combat does need some balancing/tuning IMO. It's OK now, but pretty formula - bigger is better. Period.

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Quoting Uncle_Joe,

reply 3

I modded a -30% to be hit into Tiny Hulls, -20% for Small, and -10% for Medium and it worked out really well. It kept the smaller hulls viable for a larger chunk of the game.

It's a good change to make, but it also makes fights even more OP. A better approach is nerfing speed for bigger hulls to keep engine mass costs in proportion to hull size, so that a ship spending, say, 30% of it's mass on engines will always move the same amount regardless of size.

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Luckily I haven't found fighters to be AS ridiculous in the last few patches (they hit later and worthwhile CVs aren't spammed out as easily as before), but yes, it does help fighters a bit, unfortunately.

Also FWIW, I also added +3 speed to Tiny Hulls, +2 to Small, and +1 to Medium. This has a number of beneficial effects:

The early game doesn't drag as much since you can explore quicker
I actually want RANGE on my ships since I can actually use it with the faster speed
Small ships retain some viability since they are quicker responders (although this bonus diminishes as the game moves on)
Pirates are more of a threat early on (since they have greater danger area)
Early AI ships are more dangerous

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It might be worth just modding in half a dozen Thrusters onto fighters, tbh. Fill 'em up with combat engines to the same extent other ships are filled with jump drives.

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