[DAv1.5x] Nerf Defense! (lol)

Square root of 167 is 12.9 which rounds down to 12.

Solution: Don't use mass drivers against a ship with 167 armor.

Lasers Brad...Psionic lasers....

Are the defenses working properly at this point? In my game, I've got Dreadnoughts with something similar to 20 beam, 20 shield, and a number of Precursor rangers with basically the same stats, except with mass drivers and armour. I'm fighting against enemies you use large arrays of beam weapons, but the precursor ships are typically taking less damage in every engagement. Is it something to do with how the defenses degrade when they aren't matched up with their appropriate weapon?

I'm halfway through my first 1.5x game, and I'm very pleased with how well the AI is using defense. Fleets with non-matching weapons (missles v. shields; for instance) easily destroy the enemy - but finally matching defense really matters.

Remember, defense blocks twice as much attack value - so a 150 def, with a sqrt of 12 is going to block 24 attack from each weapon type.

I quickly rushed to beam weapons and then gifted invulnerability field to the remaining AIs, and I watched my losses rise for a change. I am now working on researching missles (hooray, I have to change strategy) - we will see if I manage to pull this one out. Taking down medium through tiny fighters is still easy pickings, but those enemy capital ships loaded with def, oof!

Also, wow, aggressive AI. By the middle of year two I was at war with 8 out of the 9 civs!! Fortunately, they are also fighting each other... although the Drath are using transports with a move of 18 (also very cool) so I have to defend even my interior worlds from long range hits.

My old "- our alarming influence" quickly became "-- our alarming influence" and I just can't seem to keep people happy with me as easily. Early on I was gifting low PQ planets to try and keep up, but the drath super ability really looks to have done me in.

The game got harder for sure, and I love it! Call me a sado-masacist, but I really love to be challenged. I want to play through 2-3 games before I give a full reaction to the patch, these are just my preliminary thoughts.

I have not played very long since the update, but when I used armor on my ships it felt like they were'nt taking enough damage from lasers. I could be wrong though. I dont have any real data like the defence and attack ratings but it just seemed that I was almost immune to their weapons.

If there is a problem with off-type defenses not degrading properly, it's not happening consistently. In my last game my ~200 beam defence huge ships were getting damaged quite handily by Drengin missile frigates.

It could have a good deal to do with the kind of game I'm playing. I've got the tech speed set to very slow, so individual ships usually have under 30 attack at the frigate level. I'm noticing that my precursor rangers will take these kinds of attacks very well, even though they should be having 4-5 defense against a beam weapon. If, for example, the degrading shots are being applied to the maximum armour value as opposed to the square root, that means there is no appreciable loss of defense performance after each hit... so where I should be facing down 20 attack with only 4 defense, I'm getting 2-4 defense against each individual weapon being aimed at me!

I worry about the alternative, though... if it's applied to the square root, then there's a different problem: which attack gets applied first? If a person is using armour and it's square root value gets degraded almost to it's maximum by a few beam weapons, and then all subsequent attacks are mass drivers... well, it'd be a nasty way to punch through defenses.

What?


I dont pretend to understand the arcane game systems, but Ive never heard of this. It was my understanding it was the square root value...it should only block 12 damage. If defense is doubly potent as its numerical value, why did it need buffed so profoundly again ? (again, which I dont agree with...I used to win all my games with defense and a few large ships without bothering to tech up logistics...I got so bored with it Ive recently taken to mixing up my strategy to utilize offesively based mass smaller ship fleets...a strategy which seems to no longer work with the AI spamming defense on their ships).

Sounds to me like Defense needed buffing at the low-end, but it's overpowered at the high-end. That, in effect, makes Good alignment shine more later on.

I usually play at the low-end, so it works for me.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon with the new Defense: Cargo warships make more sense. Their "hit points" are their defense. By the time you research the high-end Defense you will probably already have Medium hulls--which is basically the same amount of space--but upgrading other cargo ships to fight is starting to make sense now. I just upgraded 4 cargo ships to big 35att/35d, and they cleaned out 3 AI fleets and 5 planets without any other help.

This thread makes me laugh (not the posters, but the issue itself).

In my opinion defence was already very, very powerful in DA before the new uopdate.

When i saw the changes with the update I was pretty sure people would start saying that defence was over powered, as it was already really good prior to this update.

I haven't tried the new update as I am still finishing an older game, but in my opinion defence in DA was already great. And capital ships were the bomb.

This update probably came too quickly. People needed more time to play with defence. So many people said it was worthless and exagerated how "worthless" it was.

Soon the anti-defence people will start with all their numbers... should be a fun read.

- Livonya

Hence why I put the "lol" in the title. I knew the defense changes were in response to some very recent posts as to how it was "worthless". But I agree with you...it was plenty powerful. It maybe needed some rebalancing towards the lower end.

I don't think it's overpowered (except maybe at the high-end). It just takes some adjustment to get it right. You just have to get used to ships having higher defense numbers than attack numbers--not the other way around, as we're used to.

Two other nice side effects: Good alignment is better, and the whole thing with having the right defense type vs. the right weapon type means more.

What *IS* a problem are the +15 hit-points techs (e.g. Reinforced Hulls, etc.). They are way underpowered now, because defense is so strong. Same goes for Repair race ability (which was already way underpowered) and Micro Repair Bots. Meaningless. The game still needs more balancing.

1st one yes, second one though is just the opposite, as I demonstrated in my original post. Such absurdly high defense ratings are making defense much more potent against opposing weapon technologies too. Now you need to overwhelm your opponent offensively, even with opposing tech.

One thing is for certain though...small ships now are just completely out of the equation. They cant mount enough offense to overwhlem these new over the top defenses, even massed in fleets, and they cant take a hit to survive and wear the enemy down...in the new combat system big ships just chew up small ones bunches at a time, as we all know.

I guess Im back to ignoring logistics and building big ships with easily inflated defense scores now.

Bingjack -

I totally agree with you. I managed to achieve this in DA before the update.

Logistics was largely pointless.

I just built huge ships with tons and tons of defence. Early on these ships dominated all enemy ships even when my ships had the wrong defence.

Towards the end of the game I did have to put some of these ships in fleets and I did end up creating 3 types of ships so that I could have the correct defence to face the correct weapon.

The big ships just ate up the little ships and fleets of little ships as if they were nothing.

In truth I actually like it this way, I just want the AI to focus more on defence tech as I think defence is very good. It sounds like the AI is doing that.

So I am looking forward to playing my first game with the update as soon as I can.

- Livonya

Defense blocks about twice as much as attack value because of the law of averages, an attack rating of 200 will on average actually do 100 pts of damage per round.

Armor is calculated seperately against each weapon type, so the order it is figured doesn't often matter.

Tiny ships are still useful, because the smaller the hull size the larger the fleet attack value can be (a fleet of maxed tiny hulls easily packs 500-700 more attack value than a fleet of maxed huge hulls - the former approaching 4k and the latter being closer to around 3k per fleet). You will take attrition with smalls or tinys, but not as much if the enemy is using low attack values to cram in lots of defense.

Defense is powerful, but only against matching weapon type or very low fleet attack values. So it helps more in the early game, and then later when tech levels start to even out as everyone maxes out a few branches the rock/paper/scissors (seems to) start to matter now - I need to play a few more games to say for sure.

I still haven't run into a defensive ship I can't destroy, but its costing me more in a bc per bc killed ratio. Fleets of Krynn Huges supported by medium fighters are much tougher than they were two days ago.

Whoa--if you have defense of the wrong type, how does it get subtracted? If you have 144 deflectors, and the AI hits you with a 12 mass driver attack, does it subtract 12 from that 144, leaving you with 132 the next go? That would make defense overpowered REAL quick. I would've thought it subtracted all 144.

If you have 144 beam defense you really have 144/12/12. So if you had an attack fleet that had 100/20/20 you would probably do no damage - each kind of attack and defense being figured seperately. That is fine. You will do plenty of damage if you have an attack of 0/0/140. You need to use massed attack, but it needs to be of an off kind than the def being used.

So I guess to answer this specifically, it doesn't get subtracted at all.

With 144 deflectors, you will block all of a 12 mass driver attack, and still have 144 defelctors to face beams. And 12 points to deflect missles. Each catagory is figured independently of the other two. This has the effect of making mixed weapons less effective, and they have been less effective ever since DA came out. Focus on just one weapon type in a fleet.

I thought as you undergo multiple rounds in a single combat, the defense gets subtracted by the attack roll? That's what I'm trying to find out: if you have 144/0/0 D vs. a 0/0/24 attack, and the attacker rolls a 12...do you lose no HP and the next round it's equivalent to 132/0/0 vs. 0/0/24? Or is it 0/0/0 vs. 0/0/24? That would make for two VERY different outcomes.

Take the latter way first:

Round 1: sqrt(144)/0/0. Attacker rolls a 12. -0 hp
Round 2: sqrt(0)/0/0. Attacker rolls a 12. -12 hp.
Round 3: sqrt(0)/0/0. Attacker rolls a 12. You're dead.

vs. the other way:
Round 1: sqrt(144)/0/0. Attacker rolls a 12. -0 hp.
Round 2: sqrt(132)/0/0. Attacker rolls a 12. -1 hp.
Round 3: sqrt(121)/0/0. Attacker rolls a 12. -1 hp.


If defense is being calculated the second way...we have a problem....

Defense gets subtracted per round, that's it. Neither of your scenarios are correct.

If my defense is 144/0/0 and I am attacked by a FLEET with an attack value of 0/0/24, it would go like this:

Round 1: 144/12/12. Attacker rolls a 12. - 0hp
Round 2: 144/12/12. Attacker rolls a 12. - 0hp
Round 3: 144/12/12. Attacker rolls a 12. - 0hp

Of course, sometimes the attacker will roll better than average, so even with my 144 defense I am not invincible against this wimpy attack. For defense to lower, you need to have large attack values in one round. Lets give the attackers three ships with a 0/0/24 rating, and then look at it:

Round 1:
144/12/12. Attacker 1 rolls a 12. - 0 hp
144/12/0. Attacker 2 rolls a 12. - 12 hp
144/12/0. Attacker 3 rolls a 12. - 12 hp

Round 2:
144/12/12. Attacker 1 rolls a 12. - 0 hp
repeat....

Also, lets look at something slightly different. Say the attacker has three ships, one 24/0/0, one 0/24/0, one 0/0/24.

Then:
Round 1:
144/12/12. Attacker 1 rolls a 12 beam. - 0 hp
132/12/12. Attacker 2 rolls a 12 missile. - 0 hp
132/0/12. Attacker 3 rolls a 12 guns. - 0 hp
132/0/0

New round: 144/12/12

To overcome defense in DA, you need to focus on just one weapon type so that each fighters attack adds on to the attack from the previous fighter, rather than being figured seperately - like in the first example.

At least the above is how it is supposed to be working.



If defense is being calculated this way, so that you had a defense of:
144/sqrt(144)/sqrt(144) - then you do 12 gun damage and it goes to -
144/sqrt(144)/sqrt(132)

Then I agree we really do have a problem. I couldn't answer what is happening without seeing the code. Also, in my one game with the new system attack values per fleet are in the thousands, so I wouldn't notice this bug even if it were there. If that is what people are experiencing on low attack values, couldn't hurt to look into.

I dont speak mathenese. Your furious spamming of facts and logic has made me confused and angry. What was I complaining about again?

I think this discussion is interesting but pointless. Even if you find a perfect balance between attack/defense you will end up massively building either one or the other. I'm playing a game in DA 1.5 just now and i haven't actually changed my defense-focused strategy. The real improvements seems to me not in the combat system but in the use the AI make of this. So the game seems now even more challeging than before and it's good. But the problem persist.

An easy solution, as i said in another post, could be to introduce the concept of completly obselete weapons/defenses after the discovery of new technologies.

If weapons and defenses become obselete:

- you would always need to search not for more powerful but more advanced weapons or more advanced defenses to face your enemies. You couldn't allow yourself to slow your weapon/defense research if the other races are going on
- your new weapons/defenses would be maybe unstoppable by the old ones but not so powerful, so there would still be balance
- with weapons/defenses of new generation also small ships would become very useful and you would have more strategical options (like a technological oriented civilization with few manufacturing)
- it wouldn't be so easy to change from a weapon/defense to another, so you would have to choose very carefully which of them research in the beginning
- because you would need to keep an eye on your neighbors, far civilizations maybe will devolope completly different weapons/defenses with the consequence of very interesting war scenarios
- upgrading should become more interesting

Ok, this idea of mine is only a way to compensate the lack of tactical possibilities during the battles, leaving all the tactical choices to scientific research. But, stating the actual combat system, it's the only way. I also think logistic, sensor and experience should be improved giving a player more choices. (I could build, for example, a not so powerful ship but very precise in hitting the enemy etc.)...

richard

I'm looking at my fleets and thinking that the defense versus unintended weapons is borked. I was fighting enemy ships with beams and shields with similarily outfitted ships, but the enemy defense was climbing sky high so I switched to missiles, which I'd already researched substantially. My attack values with missiles were HIGHER than my beam ratings, the enemy was still using shields... I should have been ripping through them, but my effectiveness went down.

Something there is off.