Target priorities in fleet battle

I'm surprised you are playing suicidal without knowing these details. No matter. I don't know the math off hand for fleet combat prioritization and I've been playing this game for years.

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The game prioritizes the destruction of ships based upon what it thinks will eliminate firepower as quickly as possible. For instance if a fleet had 2 cargo hulls (hp of 1 each), one having an attack of 1 and the other having an attack of 20, the opposing side will always target the 20 attack ship first. Defenses and hit points however, make it difficult to kill ships, so its possible for a high attack high defense ship to be given a lower priority than a moderate attack low defense ship, because it is possible to eliminate firepower quickly by targeting it first. Had the high attack high defense ship been targeted first, then the opposing side would have to deal with the damage from a high attack ship and a moderate attack ship for many turns instead of dealing with a high attack ship for many turns.

Ships without an attack rating are not a threat so they are always targeted last. They have no possibility of killing your ships under any circumstances so they are saved for last. This often includes troop transports as those saved for last (even though there are times where you might only care about killing troop transports and nothing else).

Fleet modules are weird because such modules seem to multiply the threat rating of a ship (or so I am told). I tend to find that any ship with such modules on it will get attacked first even when there are ships with greater firepower and weaker defenses. This is true even when the modules don't have any in-combat application (like fleet warp bubble). Such modules that messes with combat prioritization include fleet attack, fleet warp bubbles, and ZOC (zone of control bonus) modules. Having no attack on ships with such modules make them be targeted last, like ships that are not normally considered a threat. This is true even when they carry modules that actually boost the attack or defense of a whole fleet (and therefore should be considered worth targeting). Though I suppose the math for prioritization gets weird when you consider that you can have multiple ships that can all boost attack (killing just one wouldn't be enough to change things).

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I recommend that you don't use fleet modules to make a meat shield. I consider that cheating since you can do that in ways that make targeting the meat shield a bad idea, but you enemies must target it anyways.

If you are looking for a non-cheating solution, I suggest you invest in larger hulls and put powerful defenses on them. A single ship with powerful defenses (with proper defense type) can effectively defend itself well against many ships (lets say 5 or more) assuming the combined firepower (evenly distributed) does not greatly exceed the defenses (combined attack more than 2 times the defense). Don't forget hit points (or single moment of bad luck is all that is needed to kill such a ship).

Alternatively, you should invest in large fleets for combined firepower (to kill all enemies in one turn, there by eliminating damage in later rounds) and for their combined defenses (while you may lose ships, having many makes it difficult to kill them all quickly).

Thanks Divine for your quick answer

well the reaons for my disknowledge is that previously I played for MV score and also mostly ZYW and there you don't have to warfight at all. On very fast techspeed just build the SCC declare war, take all planets. Besides, for score, all the modules are completely irrelevant as they aren't taken into the MMR.

That's exactly what I intend to do^^ I don't know why that would be cheating anyway? Why should it? These fleet modules are pretty costly to research and also expensive to build so at least they can have a positive function. Usually I wouldn't bother because most of them are rather weak....

Your suggestions won't work anyway, first off on suicidal the boni the AI's get are so brutal that you can't keep up with that. you need at least 2 times more planets as all your current opponents combined equally developed and then it wouldn't even be even (you would still be at loss) but the way how a human player is winning a warfighting game is by micro managing and tactics.

Let me give you an example. The AI usually sends out fleets from their shippoints to clear out your guarded planets, once this is done he send out Troop Transports to invade (and will retreat them if you guard again). Now what you can do is let your central planets unguarded so he, with sufficient range (which you can provide him^^) he will send Transports to these planets and as they pass you terrain you can shoot them down draining his population.

The AI has no way of dealing with this tactic and it can be safely said that a human player won't make this mistake? So is that cheating? I'm pretty much using something for my advantage.

Another thing is that the AI's attacking fleets/ship will usually not alter their target destination (they are locked on target) so with sufficient speed you can lure him away at a great distance or circle around him. A good tactic if he's stronger ie you can't really beat him in a direct confrontation.

That's not a good solution but would actually lead to my downfall. Because of a number of reasons. I will name a few.

- Fleets are already maxed at around 45 logistical points. If you take 2 different builds of fleets - the first with an all attack build and the second with a defensive or mixed approach then in most cases the all attack fleet will pretty much destroy the second one even if their defenses match. Now I'm sure you know this pretty well.

- The AI has 10* the amount of research as me because I play an all-facs strat but he also able to outproduce/outmilitarize me because the aforementioned boni in a suicidal game are really brutal. On general planets he has a "normal" output of my specialized planets, besides the economic boni he gets from the suicidal factor means he don't have to build any Stocks Markets at all simply fill everything with Invention Matrix/Industrial Sectors and still make a surplus of money all the time. Maybe THAT could be called *cheating* but I don't complain since it is my choice. I played some games on masochistic (I'm new to some TA techtrees/races so that's why I reduced difficulty a bit) but found the AI pretty boring and non-competetive.

- My enemy AI's already have researched bigger hulls than me (Medium Hulls fo rme but Large Hulls for them) and they pretty much release a Frigate/Battleship EVERY TURN on every planet they have and tragically, they have 2 times more planets than me^^^^ so just researching something then building some ships and going into a normal fight doesn't work.  

However, I appreciate your input. So I think I'll in the future put my Troop Transports into the fleets as well and maybe design a special unarmed support class of ship which has those fleet modules on it - might safe me some maintenance cost.

I do not recall advocating cargo hulls for defensive platforms, as I have never tried that.

I have, however, seen folk suggest kamikaze cargo hull attack ships, and have tried that once or twice.

The way such would be used would be to attack a fleet with such ships one or two at a time since (unless attacked by a super warrior race) they would always get off one salvo.  

The best result I had with them went as follows:

- fleet heading for a key mining base (red or green)

- near a planet with a shipyard

- I did not have a fleet able to beat them (my logistics value was too low, IIRC).  So I built several relatively cheap cargo kamikazes with no engines

- then hit the oncoming fleet one at a time until I had whittled them down enough for my fleet to take them in a "real" battle.

The problem I found with cargo kamikazes was that the weapons systems are expensive, making the cargo kamis not cheap at all, and only practical when I could use engineless ones with a weapons system the AI had no defense for.

On having a dedicated high-defense ship, some battles have both sides lose all ships, so the game engine leaves the toughest or highest-HP ship still standing with 1 HP.  That's how the Dreadlord ships are so hard to beat in some games.

In regards to cheating using fleet modules. An example where you should not target the ship with fleet modules is when an entire fleet is armed with nothing but guns, except the ship with a module that boosts defenses. There is no defenses in the fleet, so there is no point in wanting to target that ship first because it has a module, yet the combat engine will give a much higher priority to target that ship with the fleet module. Fleet warp bubble don't have any in combat benefits, yet they will be given a much higher priority anyways.

As for the other advice I suggested, I don't know the details of your game, so I can't really evaluate if it really wouldn't work or if you don't know how to use it well. I usually find that large fleets with strong defenses tend to do very well. However, its been a while since I last played a suicidal game, so I might be out of touch. I'll worry about it another time as my current game, me as the Yor with tech trading off is proving to be quite difficult.

The actual formula for calculating a priority value is:

Sum of Attack/(Sum of Defence + Hitpoints)

Higher values go to the top of the targeting list, low or zero values to the bottom.

This also means that if you have any damaged ships that you want to keep, you need to remove them from the fleet and get them repaired, otherwise they could be destroyed in the next battle.  You can also use this against the enemy, turning a damaged ship into bait for the first few rounds while the rest of your ships smash the enemy ships to pieces.

Thanks Marvin, it seems like this is the general formulae for MMR? Because it won't consider these fleetmodules at all so I think there must be more to it.

In my current new game I tinkered around with it a bit but generally it will work. Sometimes very strong all attack ships are still set on #1 of the list although if I add some extra HP to them they fall below again.

I think for 1 time fight ships would be better to take tiny/small hulls as generally these are cheaper/faster to produce and the attack-per-logistical point usually remains the same. This depends however alot on your preferred weapon and miniaturization level.

And yes, you absolutely want to only equip cheap weapons, in such a scenario sometimes sub-tiered weapons can be better (if you are going to produce them consistently)

Usually I play alot with defenses too (when I play all-lab strat where you don't have much ships around but good tech so a few strong ships that never die do it there) however I changed to all-fac or sometimes even mixed approach with TA now and there I can produce alot of ships.

My general problem with defenses+fleets is that once the battle start vs another fleet, only the defenses of the attacked ship is in use, the other defense type of ships have 50-90% of their capacity *not* in use and therefore a much higher attackvalue to the enemy. In an all-attack fleet every ship uses it's full capacity in every turn, although granted, they die pretty fast. However, they also kill fast^^. I think it depends alot on the level of defense researched.

However, I have to say that I don't really know how these mechanisms in TA work or how they have been changed. In DA I usually would get Luck+50% and max the appropriate defense out to the value of the opposing attack and take literally no damage at all.

Now in TA this isn't working anymore.... I've gone to war very early and my superexpensive Def+20 Cargo Hulls get easily destroyed by 2*2 Att Fighter fleets in the second round. Don't really know what's happening here.

Then went back to build up huge fleets and there seem to be some errors with these fleet modules. If I click on "manage" on a fleet where one ship has a 30% defense fleet module, one ship has something like 40 defense and the rest is attack only, then every single ship in the fleet will be shown as having 13 defense...(?)

It also seems that defenses are now soaking up damage from other weapon types? 

Yes in DA and onward, off-type defences do work to a limited degree, I think the value is the square root of their on-type value.  In addition, when defences soak damage, they are weakened by that amount of damage for that round.

Attacks from weapons roll individually against a roll of defence.  It is possible to take hull damage without the relevant defence fully degrading, if attack rolls higher than defence.  So the higher the individual weapon's damage, the more chance of an attack getting through defences.  However if you can't fit very many weapons, you don't get as many chances to get lucky.

If you have cargo hulls and an attack gets through to damage the hull, then it's only got 1 HP (unless you have a hull module to boost it) and dies very easily.

The defensive fleet modules don't give the correct value on the fleet screen, but they do work.