Quote Originally Posted by Tsagoth View Post
No combat is not a single event, like rolling dice and saying x wins. Say Player A and B are at peace, and A flys ships to B's planet. B's possessions do nothing as A is not a known enemy. A says attack B. A combat AI is launched for A. AI(A) then finds all of A's ships that can be used for the attack. It then locates all the targets that B owns. It then attaches individual combat AI to each attacking ship. Then it runs through all of the attackers and assigns them their targets, using as many ships on each target as it deems is necessary to kill the target outright. Finally it gives the signal to each ship to start shooting. After that AI(A) goes to sleep. When an attacker destroys its target, it notifies AI(A) that it needs a new target, at which point AI(A) will run through target selection again for that ship. If an attacker is destroyed, AI(A) removes the ship from the attacker list and makes its target available for other ships to attack. During all of this each of player A's ships are shooting on their own schedule as dictated by their indvidual AI routines. The process is essentially the same for player B. When one of ships take damage, it launches a combat AI for player B and it also alerts all of player B's other assets, so that even if it is destroyed by the first strike, whatever remains of B will continue to attack. The shooting of the missiles/energy beams by the attacker is separate from the application of the damage to the target. The defender can't know what the attacker has done until the damage begins to appear, and this is always going to be the case. Sorry for the long paragraph, but the stupid editor is borked and I can't put in blank lines.
That sounds incredibly convoluted. It's strange to me that you are modeling combat as if it were a simulation when it is (or should be) an entirely deterministic event based on simple input (the ships present at the site of the event), especially given that combat itself is non-interactive.

In any case, this is very different than what the combat tutorial describes. Having one side fire first completely changes the dynamic of the battle. Couldn't you just have the first shots fired after an attack order be "dummy rounds" that do zero, or some fractional damage? Enough to trigger a response but not enough to give an advantage.