Ok, I haven't been ignoring this thread but I knew Zark was almost done with the test script and wanted to field test the numbers a bit more before making any more posts. Now that I've had a chance to do some pretty extensive testing of various scenarios I've updated all the numbers to reflect what I'm currently using in the test cases.

A few changes of note -

- Colonies have a lot more DEF / can target more ships but do less damage per attack. This is because with the old numbers it made more sense to just use a ton of weak units to overrun the planet's defenses. Now you -can- take a 400mu planet with a lot of small units or even a good number of high damage units but having a mixed group is the most efficient.

- Orbitals are more expensive / less powerful. They're still about 5x more cost effective than a ship of the same price but of course they're immobile so I think that's a fair trade off.

- Instead of using a priority list ships prioritize the strongest target that they can kill in a single attack so they opt for destroying as many targets as possible over doing the most damage possible. This winds up working pretty well for maintaining the desired balance in terms of keeping a mixed grouping of ships for optimal performance without having the ships be overly dumb.

- Defenders get +5 initiative on the first round of attack always if they're in orbit of a planet they own.

So far from all the testing these numbers / system feel pretty solid / balanced and I haven't really seen an battles where one side was wiping the other unexpectedly. With the (1-10) initiative variance you do get some upsets every now and again when the numbers are close but I like that it's not deterministic down to an exact number of ships.

Supamand - As for non combat ships / orbitals currently anything that doesn't do damage lives or dies with the planet.