How/when do I see combat results?

[ThoonHulk]

Just sent a fleet of destroyers to attack an outpost, and it showed the combat animation for a short period of time. When I checked back in the system, all my fleet has disappeared, and the outpost is still there. Ships are also gone from the ship menu. I assume they've been destroyed, but I got no notification about the results of the combat or anything. Are these not active? If they are not, how do I know what happened?

Thanks,
ThoonHulk

[shadowkhai]

I believe there's a bug they're trying to squash with combat reports that was sending hundreds of notifications and because of that all combat reports are turned off until fixed.

[Leedot]

Yes, there's a problem with the battle reports spamming players so they've been disabled for the interim. Fixing them is a high priority fix for us they're just coming in after the connection / crash issues are fully resolved. In the meantime the best way to do what you did, check to see if they're still there or not once the fighting is done.

[JetJaguar2000]

This is a serious problem.

I have just apparently "suicided" several fleets in to a planet that appears to be an undefended OUTPOST. There are a number of issues here:

1. This is a jovian planet that originally had some number of FIGHTERS defending it. I could not determine the number of fighters because every time I sent a PROBE in to orbit, it was destroyed before I could even tell what had happened (apparently this guy is set to war with me?). It seems problematic that I can't tell the size of the force there either before combat or as part of a combat debriefing. But ok.

2. I sent a fleet of 4 cruisers as a follow up. I was offline at the exact moment of battle, and checked in to see my cruisers apparently destroyed, and the fighters APPEARED to be gone as well. I assumed the fleets had destroyed one another (a little surprised that the cruisers got owned by fighters, but ok).

3. When I look at the system in question now, I see ZERO defenders orbiting this jovian outpost. I assume this means I can now orbit safely. I send a followup probe, and a fleet of 3 destroyers to check it out. Again, I am offline at the exact moment of arrival. The probe and the destroyers are gone when I check in. I look at the system again, still shows nothing orbiting the outpost.

4. I send yet another probe, this time just to the system (NOT to the specific planet). Again, not online at the moment of arrival, but when I check in, THAT probe is gone too!

Without any battle feedback, what the heck am I supposed to make of this? I am starting to understand that ships are not as powerful in practice as I imagined. That's fine. What I don't understand is why this undefended OUTPOST is trashing fleet after fleet that I send there. Or is the orbit information being presented to me incorrect? For the record, the player I am attacking is almost certainly not actively playing the game, so I'm confident he's not doing anything sneaky in response to my attacks.

Anyways, again, please get some kind of battle feedback back in the game soon. As both attacker and defender, you need details of how the battles went to be able to make more decisions. Do I keep sending cruiser fleets to this planet only to have them apparently obliterated by some outpost miners? Or is this a bug?

For comparison, I have previously defeated an undefended outpost with a fleet of 9 destroyers without losing any ships, so I don't understand the math here. Are 9 destroyers more effective than 4 cruisers and 3 destroyers?

EDIT: Assuming there are no bugs here, from a gameplay perspective, I think there needs to be more clarity on the effectiveness of ships and colonies/outposts in combat. Intuitively (as far as one can intuit anything about a scifi universe), I would expect that an "undefended" outpost pose no threat to a small fleet of attack ships. One wonders, for example, what they are using to repel the ships? Whatever that technology is, if it is some weapon strong enough to destroy an explicitly built fleet of attack ships, one would expect that to have some parity of representation in the game. In other words, maybe outposts should come with a small array of "orbital defense satellites" or something.

Without something like that, it makes you wonder what the point of the explicit orbital defenses is. If an undefended outpost can wreck a fleet of, say, 4 cruisers, why would I build defense lasers? Or are we expected to be attacking planets with much larger, more powerful fleets? If so, what is the role of smaller numbers of these ships? You get where I'm going here?

[Tsagoth]

1. This is a jovian planet that originally had some number of FIGHTERS defending it. I could not determine the number of fighters because every time I sent a PROBE in to orbit, it was destroyed before I could even tell what had happened (apparently this guy is set to war with me?). It seems problematic that I can't tell the size of the force there either before combat or as part of a combat debriefing. But ok.

Tell me the server and the planet you are attacking and I will go pull the logs and see what is going on. The fact that you are getting spanked like this sounds like a bug, but I just read the logs for a fight on Aruru, dozen ships vs the outpost and the outpost died like clockwork. So until I can see what you're up against I can't say whether it's right or not.

[Leedot]

First off I absolutely agree that no feedback on combat where you can't see who's involved is terrible and makes it hard to make strategic decisions on how to best respond to a situation. We're working on getting this sorted out.