Combat calculations gone wrong...

Something is not right here.

from GalCiv2 Forums
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I have screen shots of this, but I am not sure how to post them here. If somebody would not mind informing me how to insert a few screenshots, I would be glad to give them.

I had a fleet that had: mass driver: 1164 and beam: 12, and a beam defense of 366, total hits were 601

An enemy fleet had: beam: 1076, NO mass driver defense (but missle defense of 639), and total hits of 290

So, I had 1164 attack vs his ZERO defense against it.
He had 1076 against my 366 defense.
I had TWICE the hit points.

I had 6 huge ships, and he had 10 ships of varying size.

What would you expect as an outcome??? Based on hits alone (more than twice), I would expect to loose half my force (maybe 3 of the 6 ships) tops. Given that I had a defense against his offensive type, I would expect to loose less, maybe 1 or 2 of my ships lost, worst case 3 (given random), but never more.

NO, I reloaded 3 times just to see what else it did. The first time, the AI had 1 ship left!!! What the FRICK??? The second time, I had 1 ship left, and the next two times, I had 2 ships left. What does this mean??? It means something is not quite right in the combat calculations.
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Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
What does this mean??? It means something is not quite right in the combat calculations.


No I don't think it does. In round 1, you can expect to take (on average) 355 points of damage. Say goodbye to 3 of your ships. Now because it's 6 v 10 there'll be a round two, which on average will be 3 vs 4. That means there'll ALSO be a round 3. So basically 4 ships is about the minimum you can expect to lose.

If he gets a bit lucky and you a bit unlucky in round 1, it could easily be 2 vs 5 in round two. From there it's anybody's.

When you're talking about one shot death offensive capability like that, the number of ships on each side becomes substantially more important. I'm not a fan of the combat system myself because hitpoints don't get close to scaling with offence, which leads to the sort of thing you've just seen, but it IS working as intended.

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Actually his defense against your weapons is not zero. It is the square root of 639. This means that there are certainly going to be times where his ships take no damage depending on an individual ship's attack roll versus that defensive roll.

Also 6 vs 10 is not an automatic win for you unless you really out class your opponent. Granted luck plays a role in determining what damage is inflicted each combat round but if nothing else you have 6 shots and he has 10. Unless all six of your shots wipe out each ship they hit leaving him with only 4 then you are going to be hard pressed to win the engagement.

Keep in mind if this is under the new BETA the combat rules have changed. Rounds are simultaneous now. Meaning that so long as a ship survived into the round it will get to fire in that round. At least that is how I think it now works. If that is incorrect the please someone straighten me out . The change log gives a brief description of the new rules.

In summary I'd say you are actually lucky to win that engagement at all. So I agree with the previous post... working as intended.
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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Actually, I didn't work that out at all right as it all depends how the offences and defences are split from ship to ship. But still, it doesn't sound a very surprising result.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Ok, so what you are saying is building large ships is utterly useless. I would think that this should all be based on the number of guns, not ships. If you think of this logically, should a huge ship be able to take on a dozen fighters? If all things were equal attack-wise, I would think that they would destroy each other, but based on what you are saying, the huge ship would only take out 1 figher. Wouldn't starwars be really boring if an Imperial Star Destroyer would only be able to target one X-Wing at a time? This makes absolutely no sense.

Ok, now that is about the stupidest thing I have heard regarding this game yet. I am completely disappointed in this.

Now that I know this, it does make sense why the AI mixes its fleets as much as it does.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
yes, the basic reason for this is that most of the damage you are doing ends up 'wasted' as overkill. the results you were getting, as the others said, sound just about right.

I guess you could argue that overkill shouldnt be wasted - but thats a different debate. For me personally, it makes a fair bit of sense - no matter how big a gun you aim at a small fighter, you can only kill it once! you could try to make it more reallistic by taking number of guns and the direction they're facing into acount etc to decide how many ships you can potentially damage, but it would get uneccesarily complicated.

I'm not a fan of the combat system myself because hitpoints don't get close to scaling with offence, which leads to the sort of thing you've just seen


i think the combat system itself is ok, but i wholeheartedly agree with the hitpoints not scaling - ships of the same size built with low-tech are just as flimsy (bar a few tens of %) as ships built with uber-technology? no way!

Ok, so what you are saying is building large ships is utterly useless.


as it stands increasing attack suffers from a serious diminishing-returns type thing against not-particularly-well-defended opponents, so its not that large ships are useless, just that you're better of building your big ships with more defense than you have
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Ok, so what you are saying is building large ships is utterly useless. I


Earlier in the game, huge ships are fine because those extra hitpoints really mean something. Also, if you have a half decent tech lead, you can fit enough defences on huge ships to completely own opposition fleets with minimal losses. Because of variance, eventually the defences become relatively useless. At this stage, you're better off with smaller ships. However, if you've managed your fleet of huge ships well and concentrated on getting experience for a core group of ships which you've kept upgraded, they can have enough hitpoints to still be very effective. I've had (a very few) fleets of huge ships with more than 400 hitpoints each.
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Basically with defences you want to be at least matching the opposition attack ratings, and preferably have somewhat more. If you don't (like you didn't) then don't expect those defences to do you too much good late on.