Combat System

[Supamand]

Also Lee, if you get around to this could you post the atk/def values of unprotected Outpost.

Thanks

[Supamand]

Jet, I agree with you about orbitals being a waste at least at the early stages. But once the players advance into big army's, then orbitals will be needed.

Because they are not just additional atk/def points, they serve as a way to hit more targets. Because planet can only hit 1 target per round. So in a way you could bring only 50 dreds and like 200 battleships. The battle ships could serve as a means of decoy targets for a planet to waste it's power.
But then I'm not sure how the AI works. If it set to attack strongest ships, than my strategy above is a fail.

[VanderLegion]

Not sure about orbitals early on for how useful they are, but as for usefulness of smaller ships, while they may not do much against a colony, you can easily capture undefended outposts with a small fleet.

[JetJaguar2000]

If combat in this game is about amassing fleets of hundreds of dreads or battleships, that seems nuts to me. If what I've read so far is to be believed, an undefended planet can hold off unlimited fleets of up to 15 dreads at a time, and that's with all attacking ships destroyed in the process. That means that attacking colonies is going to require maintaining fleets of literally hundreds of the strongest ships, which in turn means dozens of shipyards (assuming the ship limit is eventually enforced), etc.

It is currently day 6 or so on Aruru, almost a quarter of the way through the scheduled game time. I don't know about anyone else, but I am nowhere close to fielding that kind of power. In light of this, I'm not super thrilled with the progression of the game so far. I apparently can't even hope to take over the home system of a player who hasn't logged in since day 2. Oddly enough, a month is actually way too short a game time to have any meaningful interaction with other players. How many wars can you hope to maintain with those kind of fleet requirements?

This seems to justify my biggest concern about the game, which is that the easiest path to victory is to just hole up in your corner the galaxy and persue the largely "solo play" win conditions. Why would I waste resources trying to battle oth players when I could just focus on getting solar taps and nuking 12 stars without ever interacting with the other 150+ players in the game?

[VanderLegion]

The game lasts 2 months, not 1.

[JetJaguar2000]

Haha you're right, for some reason I thought it was June currently. That certainly helps, but I think my point still stands.

[AntiHaze]

That means that attacking colonies is going to require maintaining fleets of literally hundreds of the strongest ships, which in turn means dozens of shipyards (assuming the ship limit is eventually enforced), etc.

Aren't you forgetting the Advanced Shipyards skill in the Fleet skills tab? That will increase your cap by 10 * number of shipyards. Each rank up in this skill only takes 12 hours to complete, so if you have 3 colonies with shipyards now, you could increase the number of ships you can build by 60 in only one day.

Don't forget, we are all in this game facing the same decisions. What you choose is a trade-off for something else you could have, for better or for worse. You have to consider the opportunity cost of each option and make a decision based on that.

[Tsagoth]

Because planet can only hit 1 target per round.

That's not true. The planet will attack as many ships in a single round as it can with its attack value.

[making numbers up] So if a outpost has an attack of 11 and a probe has a defense of 1, then -each round- the planet will destroy 11 probes. Target selection continues until the attack value is all assigned.

[Supamand]

Aha! So is that a fact that outpost has 11atk? What is def of outpost?

[Tsagoth]

I think it's 35.