Why little to no damage?

Quick question-did you destroy him?

Second question-what's your tech level?  What guns are you on, and what lasers?

Thirdly, what shield defenses is he on?

Fourthly, are you seeing 4 per hit, or 4 per round?  These are completely different things.  If you're seeing 4 per hit and your units have greater than 3 weapons on them, this is normal.  In DA, each weapon fires separately.  If you're seeing 4 per round, there's something wrong.  (A round for our purposes is one firing of each weapon on each ship.)

Fifthly, you might be seeing your laser ship doing more damage because defense depletes during each round in DA, and is refreshed after the round.  So if your gun ship is firing first and lowering the defenses sufficiently, by not getting through, your laser ship essentially has a clear shot.

I'm not sure offhand what the mechanism is for what ship fires first in a fleet, though.

Another thing to consider is that if he has a shitload of defense (which my guess is he doesn't) then you won't really be doing damage at all, as off-type defense provides the square root of its value against weapons it doesn't technically defend against.  So 49 defense gives him 49 against lasers, or 7 against guns and missiles, etc.  But I'm not sure this applies in your case.

Ok, well I fortunately had an autosave of this game right before the battle and had a nearly identical fleet nearby whom I thought would be inferior since they had beam weapons rather than gun weapons.  So, I guess I need a clarification about how the mechanics of this game works because it does not work as I had thought.

And, if this is covered somewhere else, I appologize.  You can just refer me there

In the battle, he had 5 ships - 2 frigates, 2 cruisers? (had 10 hp), and 1 battleship.  I had 3 ships, all custom made but of a large hull size.  When I looked at the stats, I thought I would totally dominate the battle.  All of his ships had some tech 3 shield (barrier) defense and whateve the tech 2 laser weapon is.  One of my ships had tech 3 laser (plasma?) weapons and barrier defense while the other two had tech 2 gun (singularity?) weapons and barrier defense.

I ran this battle twice - once he lost one ship, once he lost 2.

However, when I attacked his fleet with my nearly identical fleet of 3 large ships, but which all had the plasma weapons and barrier defense, I won the battle and had one remaining ship left.

I looked through the manual a bit as well as your post; the manual clarified a little but is lacking.  I thought that, when you watched in a battle, when you saw the ships firing, that was them firing all of their weapons at once.  You have made me realize that is not the case.  Before, I thought that a tech 1 did 0-1 point of damage, a tech 2 weapon did 0-2 points of damage, etc. and the defenses prevented damage in the same way.   After looking through the manual, it doesn't point this part out but it does state that missiles do the most damage, then lasers, and then guns.  So, I now realize that this can't be the case.  But the manual didn't clarify more.

Will non-laser weapons also deplete the shields of enemy ships?  Is a ship with 3 tech 2 weapons equal to one with 2 tech 3 weapons in terms of total possible damage per round?  When I watched the battle again, I had a lot of times where the singularity drivers were doing 0 points of damage to the enemy.  Still not understanding that part... are gun weapons significantly weaker than laser ones?  I even ran the battle again where it eventually came out to be just the battleship and one of my gun mounted ships and the gun ship did 0 damage consistently.

Thanks again.

Let's try to break this down.

Yes, non-laser weapons will also deplete the shields (only for the round, though-as do all other weapons).  If say his shields are 9, and you do 1 point of damage, ignoring defense rolls for the moment, his roll of up to 3 trumps your 1 damage so 1 point is deducted from his defenses-but not from the square rooted value.  So he's down to 8 shields now, for the round.

Saying 3 tech 2 weapons vs. 2 tech 3 weapons is misleading; it implies that the attack ratios for all weapons are the same, and this is simply not the case-not even within a tree.

Where you have a ship with 3x4 vs. 2x6 attack, you will actually do slightly higher damage with the 3x4 attack ship, as weapons fire on a per-weapon basis.  This can be countered by sufficient defenses, though, and I believe there's a break-even point, so don't spend too much time agonizing over it.

-

Singularity drivers have an attack of 2.  This means their possible rolls, without factoring luck in, are 0, 1, and 2.  Therefore, you should expect to see a 0 about 33% of the time when using singularity drivers.  When factoring in the enemy's defenses, this will probably be significantly higher in the beginning of an attack round and begin to approximate 33% as your enemy's defenses are overwhelmed for the round.

This might help, and I'm surprised I haven't linked it yet.

For what it's worth, gun weapons are actually preferable on smaller ships (medium or smaller), as opposed to lasers or missiles.  Not positive on medium, come to think of it.  There's just a phenomenon of the combat system that low tech weapons don't work very well even against low tech off-type defenses; although they obviously work somewhat better than against on-type defenses.

Sole,

Thanks, I am finally understanding now what is going on.  His high defense would explain why tech 3 lasers could work better than tech 2 guns.  No more frustration

Alright, still a bit confused about one thing... why am I consistently seeing very high attack values, especially from my enemy, in combat.  The wiki had mentioned that sometimes you will see a high attack number due to bonuses but why am I seeing it all the time?

I don't like it when I see 0, 6, 11, 11 and such sequences when the enemy has plasma level 2 beams

I'm also getting the impression that researching another line of weapons in order to combat someone going high defense in one area isn't very effective.  When an enemy has 14+ in shield, having a tech 3 gun isn't going to make a huge difference compared to a tech 3 laser since the shield value, even rooted, still will catch most of the gun fire.  Or am I wrong in this?

Hi!

That may be the weapons bonus at work, with the Luck ability adding and insult to injury. If your enamy has weapons +50% and his ship has 5 plasmas (10 total attack), the shot from the first plasma gun will not be 0-2, but likely 0-7 (2 + (bonus 50% of 10 = 5)). If we add into that calculation the Luck, then the first shot could be even from 1.75 (25% of attack 7)  to 7.

Not wrong, just not fully informed. To increase the chance to damage opponent's hull, you need either to:

1) bring his defenses down first with lots of low-power attacks. You need lots of weapons == fleets of ships for this, and with low-powered weapons it (almost) doesn't matter what kind you're using, 

or

2) fire through his defenses with low amount of high-powered weapons. This is why the Psionc Beam (attack 12) is so powerfull weapon in early and mid-game. It has very high chance to get through wrong defenses (rolls higher than square-rooted defenses do) and damages/destroys hull while defenses still exist.

BR,  Iztok

Well, I am doing way more analyzing than I normally do, but I am really determined to see what's up with all of this.  Something just isn't seeming right.

If what you are saying is correct than the mechanics of the game are bad.  In your example, he is not getting a 50% bonus but actually a 250% bonus (7 is almost 300% of 2).  That would mean that he could do 0-7 damage while someone with no bonus would only do 0-2.

However, after looking through several battle numbers, what you have said can't be exactly right.  The reason being is that I have a 4% attack bonus and am attacking with beam 3 and yet am, at rare instances, getting 4,5, or 6 values.

But here is the thing... in my latest battles, we have the same amount of ships, like 3 each.  When comparing our ships and after you take into account these bonuses and all, when I get into a battle, my modified attack value is around 17 (my base is higher but he has a 41% attack bonus while I only have 4%), per ship, and is about 1 more than his and I do have beam 3s rather than his beam 2s.  His shield values are about 2.1 times mine in these battles.

So, from a statistical standpoint, since his shields, per ship, are around 21 (including his 50% defense bonus) and mine is around 10 (including my 14% defense bonus), my shields would expire in about half the time his would, as our modified attack is almost the same and we both have 3 ships each, right?  So, my values would start lower and gradually increase until his shields deplete, in which case we should be doing around the same amount of damage (although mine should be slightly higher since I'm using beam 3 and my overal attack is a little higher).  His values would also start lower but would increase more quickly to this maximum attack amount.  However, in many battles (I have attacked with about 4 similar fleets to his one fleet, since I can't destroy it), this has not been the case.

My values would start low and stay low, usually a 0,1, or 2, with an occasional 4,5, or 6.  His attacks were almost always high, usually around 7,8, or 9, with an occasional 0 - 4 or a very high 12 or something similar.  Since his attacks seem to go to these higher values after about 1 or 2 hits of a low value, I would expect mine to get through his shields, and thus start doing a similar amount of high damage, in 2 or 4 hits (since his shields are twice as powerful as mine).  But this is definitely not the case... In the last battle, I watched my units hit him 4 times each, for a total of 12 hits, and still are only doing the low amount of damage, again with a rare 4,5, or 6.  His are always scoring high and destroy my first unit after that and then it's just downhill from there... usually at the end I only end up doing 20 hit points or so of damage while he does around 160.

Any comments or explanations?

Hi!

Please remember he gets the 0-7 roll only for the shot of the first plasma gun of 6 guns he has. The rest of them roll from 0-2.

Those are numbers I can work with. So lets' review the combat.

Your ships do on average 8.5 damage per attack, multiplied by 3 ships is 25.5 damage done. His single ship has 21 points of beam defenses. So after you bring down those defenses you do 4.5 damage per combat round.

His ships do on average 8 points of damage each, or 24 points altogether. Your single ship has 10 shields. So your average damage taken per combat round is 14 points. If I assume medium hulls (the weapon tech levels suggest them), should your 3 ships die in 5-6 rounds, dealing in first two rounds about 9 points of damage, but after your first ship is destroyed, the remaining two simply can't "burn" through his defenses and are slaughtered. IMO this quite corresponds to the combat results you've described.

In your case I'd either research next level of shields to put them on your ships, or go with full attack - no defense ships. You'll still be losing them, but you'll be winning the battles with one survivor. That's IMO better than what you're getting now.

BR,  Iztok

Hey Iztok,

Long time no see. Good to see you around again.

Ah, ok, I really do get it now!  The wiki was throwing me off by saying that every shot was calculated... I was thinking that when I saw a hit, it was for one weapon, and that's why I was so confused.  And so I was trying to work with that and the numbers were making no sense.  I guess my exams this week means my head just wasn't as clear hehe

Now that I understand what is going on, I am going to stop calculating so much and go back to just enjoying the game... after my exams of course.  My current game may be done for but I'll try to salvage it.  Everyone, except for my ally, turned on me because of my influence.  My economy is good though and I may be able to quickly pump out some units that will work against this threat.

I wasn't as prepared as I thought I was... mostly due to my thinking that switching to guns would have bypassed his shields.  Guess these things you just learn with experience.

Thanks Iztoc and Sole.  Appreciate it.