[TA] Military Rating (Not Score)

I believe this is calculated as (total attack + total defense) + (total hitpoints / 10)

Even ignoring the hitpoints piece, the Drath ships will have a combined attack of around 5000, whereas your total attack and defense add up to about 2320.

I can't give you "the right number" of ships to have in a huge game as it will depend on your number of planets, the AIs' fleets, which ships you use, etc.
Maybe helpful: your fleet should be sufficient to:
-  take on an enemy fleet (or more than 1, in case you get caught up in a war versus multiple AIs)
- defend your borders to prevent any of your planets being invaded. An example: put 1-2 defending ships on each planet, more on border planets and in addition have a few strong, big enough fleets at your most important borders
- as you noticed, give you a sufficient military rating: you won't be able to impress other races with a handful of super ships if they have huge fleets
In fact, if your economy can support it, the bigger & stronger your fleet, the better.

Some ways to improve your military rating:
- Build a spin control center (don't know by heart whether the Krynn can build this; you should research the Majesty tech all the way to the end to get access to the SCC) which multiplies the military rating of all ships on that planet by 10
- Build military starbases near your biggest fleets; with the right add-ons, these will give significant bonuses to the ships in that fleet
- Churn out a lot of decent quality ships with not-too-high maintenance. They won't harm your economy as much as ships with more expensive components. They can also serve as first defenders against small transport fleets that invade your space.

Ill look and see if I can build a spin control center. I haven't put a lot of effort into starbases (they seem to pop even with lots of armor).

Thanks

Actually, hit points is /4, not /10, and it's per ship, not totaled.  But you're right-we were told it was /10.

Then there's depreciation per ship...

Did you want an exact formula?

Each ship:
trunc (attack * (racial attack bonus + 1) / 100) * 1.25 if in orbit (round this part up) + attack from SBs
+ trunc (defense * (racial defense bonus + 1) / 100) + defense from SBs
+ trunc (hp/4)
*5 if in orbit of an SCC

Ship depreciation:
100/(number of ships with attack + 1) * 2 ^
(1 + 0.75 * (log (number of ships with attack +1),2) -1)
/ 100

Military might:
trunc ((sum of ships' might) * (ship depreciation) * 2.1022411)

I'm sure someone will let me know if I missed something. 

And that's a log2, in Excel format.

SCC is available to the Krynn, from Total Majesty, but it only applies to up to 10 ships orbiting the planet in question, and it only increases the effect those ships have on your military might to 5x, not 10x.

Provided all 467 Drath ships are attack ships (i.e., no constructors, colony ships, transports, whatnot running around, and no ships with only defense, as the AI is sometimes apt to do, which don't contribute to military might -or- score), the Drath have a military might of 2761 (tinies), 3012 (smalls), 3765 (mediums), or somewhere in between (mixed).  Notice this is without any racial bonuses to attack or defense (military resources add -both-).

You, on the other hand, have a rating of 2529 (tinies), 2568 (smalls), 2687 (mediums), or somewhere in between (mixed)

You're competitive, you're just not competitive -enough-.  Furthermore, the AI tends to attack you unless you're significantly more powerful than them-it's good to have 3-5x their military might, but it's better to have 10x+ their military might.

You'll roughly double your MM by raising your number of ships to 100, and 125-150 is sufficient to get you to twice the Drath's MM, whereas you'd need a minimum of 200 ships to have triple their MM.

However, if you're able to pop their ships at least as fast as they're building them, then I wouldn't worry about it too much-just destroy their military might and you won't need too much more.  You'll probably need to reduce them to below 150 ships, though-provided you don't build any additional ships to raise your own MM.

But it's possible they'll get sick of it before then.

The bottom line is that it's the *relative* military rating that's important here not any particular absolute value so you need to check your civ manager under the stats tab and the bar graph reflects your relative military rating. If yours is at least 3 to 1 above anyone else then it's very unlikely that anyone will directly attack you although they will still complain and possibly go to war if you do things to provoke them like park a stack of transports near their planets.

If your relative military is less than an AI's that's when they'll start picking on you even if the reality is that your ships totally outclass theirs. If this is the case and you want them to stop bothering you then you can build a bunch of ships until your rating gets higher than theirs, or you can take either of the two shortcuts that Noctilucus suggested.

The quickest and easiest is probably the Spin Control Center and that's always a good suggestion. In that case you don't even want to build useful ships the best thing to do is to build a cargo hull full of nothing but the most powerful weapon you've researched and put 5 or 10 of these in orbit around the planet with your SCC. This pumps up your military rating however in a real attack the cargo hull based ships are really pretty useless. That's why most folks refer to these kinds of ships a "paper tiges".

However from your comment about starbases it's clear you didn't quite understand what his suggestion was there.

It's definitely true that putting attack and defense on any random starbase really doesn't protect it from attack. However that wasn't what Noctilucus was suggesting. Noctilucus was suggesting that you create military starbases and add starbase assist modules to them. Note there are two different kinds of weapons/defense modules that you can add to a starbase. There are starbase attack/defense modules that can be added to *any* starbase that are used when the starbase itself is attacked. As you say these aren't very effective because a decent fleet can almost always kill a starbase no matter how much weapons/armor you add.

But there are a different type of modules that can only be added to military starbases that don't affect the starbase itself but do add weapons and defense to any and all of your (armed) ships that are in their area of influence. These are the starbase *assist* modules and they can in fact be quite powerful. One military starbase outfitted with the max starbase assist modules can add 44 points of weapons and 9 points of defense to any ship as long as it has at least 1 point of defense and 1 point of weapons. So you can build 1/1 tiny fighters that look like 45/10 fighters as long as they are within the military starbases area of influence.

Note that a ship needs at least 1 point of weapons to receive the attack benefit and at least 1 point of defense to receive the defense benefit of a military starbase with ship assist modules installed.

This pumps up your military might as well as potentially provides a *real* benefit because if an opponents ship comes into the area of influence of the military starbase your 1/1 fighters fight like 45/10 battleships.

1. So does this mean that the starbase assist modules provide a flat bonus, not a % bonus?

2. In either case, is it a common tactic to pop up Mil starbases in enemy territory to aid in the attack?

3. If I park a fleet on the same square as a starbase, will the fleet interdict attacks (or will the starbase get hit).

Thanks again,

Jec

Ok I did try building a mil starbase and found the ship asst modules. However, I can only get +1 def assist. Didn't you say you could get +9 def? I couldn't find them in the tech tree.

If I remember correctly, the extra (not specific to a weapon or defense tech) military assist modules, which come from the starbase mobilization/projection/etc tree, are placed after the starbase fortification trees-which means you must research the attack/defense modules for the starbases before you can research the assist modules.

1) Flat, yes.

2) Common enough, and valid, yes.

3) In my experience, the fleet will be attacked first, but every so often someone complains that the SB was attacked first.  I don't tend to arm my SBs, though, which may make the difference when the ships placed above it to protect it are only lightly armed.

Besides the tech requirements that SS mentions many modules also require other modules to be placed before they can be placed. Many of these are obvious like you can't place Battle Stations II until you've placed Battle Stations, others may be less obvious.

The following is a table that was pretty complete and accurate for DL. There may be some errors as well as some changes made for DA/ToA but as far as I know this is the best information available.

Note the distinction between modules that affect ships within the Starbase Area of Influence (AOI) that can only be placed on military SB's versus Starbase weapons/defense modules that come into play only when the SB itself is attacked.

Also in my experience if an AI attacks a parsec that contains multiple fleets/ships then the AI must first attack and defeat the most powerful ship/fleet first and then the next most powerful ship/fleet and so on. Therefore if you arm your SB's then you run the risk of having the SB attacked before the fleet placed to protect it. As SS mentions I also don't arm my SB's because I consider it a waste of time and constructor modules.