how to deal with maximum weapons tech?

Discovered a massive stuffup in the way combat works during my game since posting above...

Now i ended up with 12 fully upgraded military starbases (ship assist wise), and i was building timy hulled ships with +1 attack and defence. I was using maximum logistics to confront enemy Drengin fleets which is like 30 odd tiny ships. Now with the starbase support, my tiny hulled fleet was getting massive overall readings, total defence and attack was dwarfing the Drengin fleets but with each battle, the Drengin fleet will win?? They have 1 ship left with just 1 hitpoint each time.

So i tried an experiment, instead of using 30 ships in my fleet, i cut it down to just five ships and guess what, same result! Drengin fleet wins with 1 ship left on 1 hitpoint!! I find it astounding that i can get the same combat outcome if i use five ships or if i use 30 ships!! seriously absurd

Similar thing happened with my cargo hull vessels - only at least by then i knew the anomaly wass present in the game so i made sure i saved before testing. I attacked a Drengin fleet with 10 cargo hull vessels heavily armed and the Drengin fleet wone with 1 ship left with 1 hitpoint. I reloaded and reduced my fleet to just 3 cargo hull ships and got exactly the same outcome!! Amazing, anyway, that was handy for me because then what i did was..... i went around and hit Drengin fleet with a couple of cargo hulls then finished of the last ship with one of my powerful ships. This strategy was extremely devestating to the Drengin and before i knew it, they were finished as a superpower in the game. Talk about a serious backfire on the cheating combat result mechanism!!! mmmwwwwaahahaha

Anyway, this is a serious exploit which is able to happen because maximum weapons technology is way too powerful compared to maximum tech defences. I should not be able to come along with cargo hull ships and use them to steamroll all enemies!! The only way to fix this is to add a few more defensive techs..... but on the tech tree they should be branched off from the weapons side, so people cannot get overly powerful defences too early in the game.

I believe this behavior has long been known.

There are older threads discussing how hard it is to killl the biggest DL ship.  They would report taking it on all sorts of ways but the DL ship would always be left with one hitpoint, and all their ships would be dead.

IIRC, it was explained that mutual annihilation was not allowed --- and all ships were allowed one shot.  In cases where all ships in the battle died per the combat results, the ship involved with the highest DF or maybe the highest hitpoint would be the last one standing, with one hitpoint.  Thus, the way to beat that DL ship was to have in the fleet at least one ship with greater of whatever it was than the DL ship ... even if that ship had just one weapon and nothing else other than defenses (and all the other ships did the killing).

In summary, in cases of mutual destruction, one ship is left ... always.  Thus, if one fleet could kill 10 or 30 ships and it fought another fleet that cold kill 10 or 30 ships, the biggest defense ship would be left, no matter if it had been 10 against 10, 10 against 30, or 30 against 10, or 30 against 30. 

Yea i understand the logic behind it, as you say, this has long been known and i have heard it before. I just did not realise how truely massive an impact it can have where 30 or 5 fighters can get the same combat outcome!! But now that i understand this is the way it is, i am fine with it. But none of this changes the fact that the game definately needs better defences to prevent the player from decimating powerful enemy fleets with a couple of cargo hulls!

Okay, I have to ask.  What are the DFs on the ships?  And, are the the "right" defense tech?

I'm in a couple late, full-tech games and I get multiple survivors, losing maybe one-third of my ships in major fleet battles with full AI designs in fleets.  Generally, I have several 200 - 200 ships, which are 400+-400+ after bonuses.  I lose one of those each battle, and maybe one other, and waste the enemy fleet leaving me with perhaps 4 others who survived.

Well the fighters in question have +1 attack and +1 defence, but backed up with 12 military starbases at maximum... all the defence values are in the 900+ range and all the attacks are off the chart each category. That is for a full fleet which will be forced to loose to a much weaker Drengin fleet because of the magic rule. It just means i need to cut the number of attacking fighters down to minimum, enough to leave 1 Drengin ship with low hitpoints. Then one of my powerful ships can take advantage of the no mutual distruction rule to take it out in 1 on 1 combat.

Same trick works away from starbases using cargo hull ships. My cargo hull ships register 400+ mass drivers each and Drengin ships currently focus on missile defence. So i may confront a Drengin fleet with a mass driver attack rating off the charts and i can bring it to its knees with just 3 or 4 cargo hull ships then use my powerful ship to pick off the serviving Drengin ship using the 1 on 1 no mutual distruction rule.

I also discovered i can pair up 1 cargo hull with 1 powerful ship of mine to take out a lone Drengin powerful ship which is at full strength. Without the cargo hull ship, there is a chance i will loose my powerful ship, but with the cargo hull ship included, there is no chance of me loosing my good ship!

Conclusion - I do not need to loose any expensive ships at all, even when the enemy has more powerful ships!!

I generally do not use mil starbases, so I missed out on the implications there.  Their main uses have always appeared to me to be to increase Metaverse score (which does not interest me) and to defeat the DreadLords in the campaign (which I have never played).

It just seems so unfair to me to use mil bases, as the AI seems totally clueless about them.  Now, on Suicidal, it might be necessary for some general strategies, but I try not to abuse the AI in 4X games too much with exploits, and mil bases feel like one such.  Among other accepted tactics are the files tweaking that help the player with planet setups by renaming, etc. and morphing the mega-abilities onto atypical races.  Both are accepted to the point of letting the results score in the Metaverse, but those do not interest me personally.

I would agree that military starbases are an exploit except for one thing.... money! When the AI can build factories on all his worlds and afford heaps of research and afford to support 10 times more ships than me while i have to build stock markets everywhare and be content with piss poor production in comparison and barely have enough funds to keep up in reseach..... Obviously i am going to need to make the most out of whatever number of ships the piss poor stingy finances of DA will let me support!!! Military Starbases, bring em on!

Heh-eh!  Sobeit.

As an aside, it is the mark of a good and deep game that it allows a lot of variety in approach. 

Perhaps? For me, the main part of the game is all about the ships, ship configurations and how they perform. Once there is no longer any powerful race to challenge me, i get bored and quit..... what is the point of my lovingly developed ships if there is no one worthy to fight??

Oh by the way, my cargo hull ship strategy turned out to be a mistake, The Drengin even on 'Godlike' setting completely flopped within the space of about 20 turns!! Because what happened, the Drengin were so powerful they had started wars with a number of races all at once. Then when i came along with my cargo hull strategy and started wiping out there powerful fleets, the other AI races came down HARD on them!! The game is ruined now, no worthy opponent is left.

Attack with only one powerfull ship.  Either the enemy will survive with 1 ship with 1 HP and you will lose only 1 ship or your lone ship will survive with 1 HP.  I had thought the ship with the greater HP survives but others have said it is the ship with the greatest attack.  That does not match my experience; likely the game considers several factors: attack, defense, and HP.

Hi!

From the wiki https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Ship_combat, paragraph "DA combat changes" the strongest ship is

sqrt( ( 2 * Attack ) + Defense + ( Current HP / 2 ) ).

BR,  Iztok

Yes at this point in the game, it gets a bit silly. I belive there should always be a defense, to counter the offence.
This is the problem with full tech, battles become a coin toss. because everything becomes one hit death.
It kinda stinks because I want a never ending empire, but at full tech it get pointless.
I guess there is no real way to fix this, except a starbase effect cap, and defences to match weapons.

Well, the AI seems unable to cope well with late game situations, as a general rule.

Actually, let me be a bit more general myself.  The AI seems to be optimized for a game that is in the middle in all respects.  That is, just as a gauge reads best in the middle of the display range so, too, does the AI seem to do best with all conditions in mid-range, whether it be early or mid-game or late, or small or medium or immense galaxy, etc.

In the larger galaxies, especially abundant ones, the AI does not seem to properly prioritize colonization choices.

With research victory turned off, the AI does not know to build over research buildings when the researching phase is done.

When wars get big, the AI has poor operational behavior, letting the human take planets with their defenders fighting one-at-a-time.  A human can create defensive fleets and could even park them at the nexi of multiple speed-assist equipped starbases.

I do not say this game needs multiplayer capability to be a good game.  What I do say, though, is that to have a tough opponent under all conditions, there is still no substitute for playing other humans.

I have won at Suicidal several times now, and using 3 different strategies, butonly in the largest galaxies with research victory tunrned off.  I have not been able to win Suicidal yet in a medium galaxy, with all victory conditions enabled, max AIs.  The game is faster, the AIs beat me down the research trees, they transition out of Colony Rush and into war faster, etc.

Yea, the AI runs best in smaller games.  It does more with less.  It's much harder to beat them in smaller galaxies with smaller numbers of planets.   It also depends on how many races you're playing with, mainly because it determines how many planets you'll be able to obtain. 

The AI wins fights by attrition.  If they understood the concept of blitzkrieg, there would be no way to beat them without totally dominant firepower.  They also have trouble with large distances.  In gigantic galaxies, you can declare war on a race opposite on the map and you'll never even see one of their warships near your space. 

It's true that if the game had mult-player, it would solve the problem of an ideal opponent, but I tend to agree that this game is not well suited for that.  For one, the games are just too long to have a good multi-player experience especially for internet play.  My shortest games are usually several sittings and I don't think I would have the attention span for that online.

Well, in support of the whole ridiculously powerful weapon thing, if you think about it, it does mimic real life to an extent.  I mean, is there really any defense against nuclear weapons?  Maybe you could have other missiles intercept them, but that seems like it would be of only limited effectiveness at best.  In addition, even the body armor worn by modern soldiers is only really useful for shrapnel and the like, if someone wearing a bullet proof vest gets hit with any sort of high quality bullet, he's going down. 

So, while the max weapon tech can be lame from a strategy point of view, it does mimic the modern day tendency for offense to be blow apart defense. 

If you want to minimize that, you could try setting your tech rate to slow.  That would make it take longer to reach the later weapon techs, and defense is certainly quite valuable against earlier weapon techs, though this might generate a problem with the AI not researching weapon techs at all ...

This is why I bought TA.

I agree the defences are weak, so mod them. It took me 30min to increase hit points and add defensive bonuses to the tech tree. 30 MINUTES! So dont be confused about balancing. Its up to the individual to tweak the game as he/she, lol, likes. I also deleted a few of the highest weapons to make the game more star trekkie. Its up to you.

In my current game leveling ships matters. Researching hp matters. Getting early defences matters. Hull size matters. Weapons still matter. Its so fun to have my correlion corvettes go up against the borg spheres and see which one can win. I usually stick with early phasors, photonic torps, and gravitron drivers to get the most out of firepower, also my corvettes turrets can swivel . The AI for me does better and smarter things to because I went back and edited the AI value of technology. This took a few hours for all of them but it makes them research engines and defences, unless their race is logically opposed to it, like the Borg should be. All these problems are solvable if you edit the problems you are having out of the game. Just a tip from a novice modder.

Whats really cool is you can have the rebel alliance only use tiny and medium sizes if you make them a new ship style!

I'd sure be interested in looking at some of your mods.  It would make sense to have different tech trees and AI settings depending on the galaxy size and number of enemies.  I've often thought of adding two more terran variants, since they're pretty adaptable.  humans are a quick study when it comes to war.

unfortunately, I don't use the mod folders to add in new data. I just replace the existing file to avoid a couple of annoying crash to desktop problems I have had with the current version of modding tools.

Modding the game this way makes it difficult to disperse it to others which isn't a problem because you me and son of sam's hole dwelling advisors are the only ones still hoping for the library to work. You can't really set up different AI variants unless you have a mod for each map type/size. For that matter I have never played a game on anything smaller than gigantic, I just decrease planet totals so I keep space big.

I didn't read every reply, but I have only two words...

Military Resources.

Get as many as you can and load them up with mining modules. Keep constructors near so you can reclaim them if they are destroyed.

Near the end of the game, when everyone has all the high end weapons, they are your only hope of keeping ahead.

As an addendum to this, weapons and defense bonuses only apply to the ship's base values-so it wouldn't help the original poster's original ships, which were 1/1's supported by MSBs.  Basically, you'd need "real" weapons on your ships to take advantage of it.

I hate to re-post your whole response, but Isimov, this really is one of the best summations that I have ever found for a relevant response to the Weapon v Defense argument...again one of those facts that are in your face but you never see it until it is pointed out (at least in my case).

In a more personal response from myself...Well, Isimov's second point really summed it up...if you like the idea of sticking to metaverse games(Grrr..way to steal my post! ): tech set to slow. Just to add some further input on this- I really feel that the game never meant for most techs to maxed...nor even most of the important ones. Focusing on one area shows great benefits in the area you have dedicated yourself to...diplo, influence, research, military...and it can be reached quickly....but to the detriment of all other parts of one's empire. It is a shame that the game does hit a breaking point...but research victory was implemented to stop this exact problem. This way no techs can be fully explored in one game, and mysteries abound! (at least for a time...but then random events...then mega...and what if there are some you haven't seen yet?)  This way you are continuously making choices/sacrifices in the game.

If you are happy to do mods...I am sure there are great ones out there, and I have heard of at least 3 that deal with longer research trees and many more than 3 that increase military options, just haven't gotten to them yet (This was in looking through forums...given, looking through the mods section can be a bit confusing).

Hope I added something...

--Scanian8

All you have to do is research enough to get the NLC, go Neutral and build a bunch of them, research econ to pay for them, and then get ahead of everyone else. Those econ resources help a lot.

The proper application of research will win the game every time. It will also make getting those max techs all the easier.

But you have to do it early in the game for the best bang for your buck, because the techs get more expensive as the game progresses.

Not really, no.

Techs increase in cost based on past techs researched.  There is NO time component.
-In DL/DA, inflation rises marginally [1 or 2%] per tech, and up to 5% or 6% additional per completed tree, with a cap of 170%.  But there are a certain number of techs that don't count towards this inflation counter; from memory it's between 30 and 50.
-In TA, there are breakpoints where the tech inflation modifier increases significantly (and it is separate for weapons and non-weapons tech).  This is also based on the number of techs researched.

But it doesn't matter whether you research everything in the first 6 months or if it takes you 10 years.  Assuming that you're researching the same techs (some techs/trees seem to be weighted slightly differently in DA), and therefore the same amount of techs, it'll cost you the same amount of research.

Do note that I haven't tested how inflation functions with regards to researching several techs in succession in one turn; that is, if inflation is factored in at the end of each tech, or at the end of each turn.  So it's possible that you could wind up saving some initial research by researching more than one tech per turn.  However, from my preliminary studies, I don't perceive this as particularly likely.

It could also be adressed that most end-tier labs/facs are really pointless in that they are waaaaaay too expensive to build or to buy. Actually, they distract a player from researching techs or building ships - you'll need to focus on SP alot or waste bcs that could have been otherwise spent. Of course there are exeptions to this, as when you free tiles are scarce, but if tiles are there - imagine how many Research Centers you could buy from the money of a single NLC - needless to say those RC will have *by far* more RPs.