This thread discusses combat mechanics of Supernova v2.1.
First, a special shoutout to @illauna who developed this wonderful combat guide: Steam Community :: Guide :: Space Combat and You. While we don't always agree on everything GC4 combat, you have to give respect where its due.
Second, this discussion is around competitive combat. Fighting weaker opponents is a part of the game but balance decisions around what ships to build and weapon to mount aren't a major factor when you were going to win anyway. Its in the close combats that the real balance matters, and that will be the focus.
The Volley System
This system is notably improved since the early access, especially with auto-fire now added in. Volleys not only pre-damage ships, they IGNORE DEFENSES, which gives them a solid niche. There are however four main problems:
- You get a -20% damage for every hex you are away from the fleet, meaning its optimal to get right up next to fleets before using volley.
- You can kill a maximum of 1 ship per volley. Therefore, its optimal for a person to split their fleet up into tiny pieces, each one fire a volley, and then recombine the fleet for the actual fight.
- There is no hotkey for this very common operation.
- The animation takes a bit of time, and there is a little pause after the animation until the updated damage is shown. Multiplied volley after volley it eats up a noticeable amount of time.
Together, this creates a lot of micromanagement and tedium for true optimization. You have to move fleets in and out, break them apart and put them back together. This is off brand for GC, it is principally a strategic combat game, not a tactical one. And while a few tactical elements are welcome additions, this level of nitty gritty adjustment is a problem.
Suggestions
- Volley damage is -20% period, whether its up close or a little farther away.
- Have each ship roll volley damage one at a time. If the enemy ship dies, the next attack moves to the next ship, so on and so forth (calculation only, visually its still one large attack).
- Add a hotkey!
- Add an option to turn off the volley animation.
Missiles vs Beams
[Spoiler]
These two weapons both operate in a similar niche. Both are longer range and weaker in damage than kinetics, and both provide the volley option. However, beams boast 3.33x the damage of a missile given equal attack numbers (except for frigates), and missiles don't have THAT much longer a range. Lets look at a bit of data.

What we see here is the actual effect of range, in terms of the "free shots" a ship gets over the short range kinetic. Missiles get 1-2 more shots off than beams do before the melee begins, but the damage of beams quickly overtake that. Remember that all things being equal.... 1 beam ship will destroy 3 missile ships once in range! So while the missile ships might kill a few ships first...unless they kill a LOT of enemy ships (which only happens in non-competitive battles), the beams will still clean them up. This is what you generally see in competitive battles.
Table: Raw damage for 1 weapon module at each given weapon tech tier.

What this table shows is when one weapon has a better "raw value" than another. And you can see it bounces back and forth. Sometimes beams have a better raw bonus, sometimes missiles. So we cannot say that missiles recoup some lost damage because their base damage is higher. And even if they were, when its a 3x damage difference you have to make up...its pretty hard to do.
Now Missiles do have an advantage in volley range, able to hit 4 hexs away instead of 2 hexes. But as I noted above, because of the damage loss I am always going to get as close as possible anyway, the only real exception is starbases which cannot move. This means that for ships, beams are just as good at volley as missiles are, but they are SIGNIFICANTLY better in the main combat. And then cost wise...it varies. Soemtimes beams are cheaper, sometimes missiles, but its never a significant difference.
And so I would argue.... when it matters, beams are straight up better than missiles.
Suggestions
- Make beams have a -40% volley damage (versus 20% for missiles based on my suggestion above).
- Make beams notably cheaper than kinetic and beam modules.
This would give missiles more of a niche. They will remain the premier volley weapon, with beams participating but at a notable disadvantage. This gives missiles the volley niche, and kinetic remain the combat damage niche. We then give beams the cost niche but making them notably cheaper. While battle performance outweighs cost in most cases, making beams cheap + a volley ability + decent damage and range gives them a nice well rounded aspect that gives them purpose.
Defenses
I believe that at the current values, armor absolutely dominates shields, and the data below will show why.

How to Read the Chart
I took a cruiser with +40% HP (from the two main hp boosting policies) so 70 HP. Then we look at each module of armor (+2 for prototype defenses, and any % armor bonuses from that tech level). On the weapons side, I took the weapons from the same tech level as the armor, and then each row is added 1 module of weapons. So row 3 is the value for 3 weapons modules on that ship.
I then ran hundreds of thousands of simulations for each section using millions of attacks. The cruiser (with the noted armor) would get attacked by a weapon of that strength over and over again, and armor would negate some or all of the damage. This would continue until either the cruiser was destroyed, or the armor ran to 0 due to armor attrition. The total amount of damage mitigated by the armor was averaged over the thousands of sims, to get the value noted in the chart.
Now if the ship has multiple weapon types, you would use the single attack value. So looking at table 1, lets say I had a frigate with a kinetic/missile/and beam weapon module, each at strength 4. Even though the total attack is 12, you would use the row with strength 4 for the assessment of how good armor is.
Chart Example
As an example: In the first row, a 3 attack weapon (a Gauss cannon fighter as an example) attacks a cruiser with 13.2 armor (1 titanium plating + 2 prototype defense + 10% armor bonus). Ultimately on average the armor absorbs 37.8 damage, using armor of 3 mass. So 37.8 / 3 = 12.6. This means that the armor provided the equivalent absorption power of 12.6 shields for a single point of mass. In comparison, the equivalent shield module (shield generator) provides a meer 2.5 shields per mass.
Conclusions
From our example, you see that the first armor module is 5x more effective at absorbing damage than shields!
Now what you will see is that the more armor you add, the less effective it tends to get (whereas shields remain constant). This is because armor losses more armor the more you start with for every hit. On the flip side, the higher the weapon damage, the more effective armor becomes. Armor is at its weakest when you are taking lots of very weak attacks, and gets stronger the more damage a single weapon attack does.
Looking at the charts, its noted in red when the armor actually becomes less effective than shields. And....that only happens with a LOT of armor! but as the game continues and damage per attack increases, even this starts to die down. By the later game, it takes an incredible amount of mass dedicated to defense before shields become a more effective defense. Further, the more HP you have (aka later game Hp upgrades and battleships and the like), armor becomes even more effective!
Now that's bad enough....but shields are also MORE EXPENSIVE than armor! So they are worse in effectiveness, and they are worse in cost.
Suggestion
Ultimately if you keep trying to have both modules compete in effectivness, one will tend to dominate over the other. Instead, I recommend if armor is going to be your "mass effective" defense, than make shields your "cost effective" defense. Make shields super cheap in cost, to provide one way they compete fairly with armor.
Another option, you could not reset armor depletion in each battle, instead have it recover over the course of X turns. This would give shields a niche for "continuous combat", whereas armored vessels are beasts in the big skirmish, but then would need to pull back and recover or else risk getting destroyed.
Even with that said, likely some adjustments are needed here, as the disparity is quite large in your general use cases.
Lingering Questions
While our combat guide tells us a lot about combat, there are a few combat mechanics that are not documented that the community remains in the dark on. We would love the devs input into these questions.
- Evasion Max Cap: Technically you can raise evasion to 100 on larger ships, which in theory makes them unhittable. In practice this does not happen, so the assumption is there is some kind of "max cap" for evasion.
- Evasion vs Accuracy: The way the combat calculations are understood, accuracy and evasion are separate rolls. This means for example that the +50% accuracy for a frigate is mostly wasted on beams and kinetics, as there is no benefit above 100%. Is that correct or is there a way in which these two mechanics interact with each other, so that accuracy above 100% can lower evasion.
- Volley Targeting: How does a volley choose what target to attack?