What I found when I was observing the fleet battles is that if defence is 0, then there is always damage of 1. So, my guess is that attack start calculating from one.

Hmmm, I might have to actually run a sim. My current simming dice are open-ended, but that can be remedied

What I found when I was observing the fleet battles is that if defence is 0, then there is always damage of 1. So, my guess is that attack start calculating from one.

Do you mean whatever the attack value, if defense is 0, then damage will be one?

Do you mean defense 0 (=no defenses) or defense rolls a 0?

I know I've had defense roll a 0 before, because I'll occaionally take a point of damage when my defense value absolutely swamps the attacker's value for that type (mainly due to star base bonuses). When the enemy is rolling
0-1 and I'm rolling 0-8 and a point of damage squeaks through, I've plainly just rolled a 0.

Do you mean whatever the attack value, if defense is 0, then damage will be one? Do you mean defense 0 (=no defenses) or defense rolls a 0?

I mean defence is 0 (and thus roll always 0). But in order for the ship to always take damage, the attack has to start always from one.

I had a case when my ship of attack 1 was attacking some other ship with defence 0. It struck each time for the damage of 1!

By the way, I have strong suspicion that if the ship has two types of defence, then the strongest one is used, not the sum of them. The reason why I say is that in the battle I see that if the laser is used against my ships, then only deflectors are used in the battle history list - you can see that the deflectors are bright, and the other shields/armor are dark. Can anyone confirm that?

If so, then there is no reason to design the ships with protection such as 4/2/2. Because that 4 will give you defence of 2 anyway.

So here's another question: What about in fleets?

I'll admit that I've hardly had a cahcne to play (damn that work thing and other away from keyboard obligations) but i'm wondering how this talk of attack/defense optimization would play into the fleet aspect. Would it be better to have each ship in the fleet have a mix of weapons? Or comprise the fleet of a mix of specialty ships...some ships that are only missles and some that are only beam? Or focus the entire fleet on one type of damage?

I think this depends on situation. You should have intelligence in order to see what is your opponent building.

I think you more often end up building the same weapon against the same opponent. Until the opponent starts using the appropriate shields.

Hi Mxm111
I've made another observation to further our discussion about weapons and to complicate your calculation matrices.
What will determine the number of shots a ship fires? In my last game when looking at the report in the end, I noticed that my ships usually fired almost 2 times the number of shots that the enemy fleet fired. I'm at work now, so I can't check if those ships had 2 weapon types or not, but that should change things a little shouldn't it? (I'm almost certain that hey had 2 weapons (beam and missile) ).
What do you think?