Three Miranda's are also not likely to be at the same response, and even if they are: an enemy equivalent to an Excelsior would also likely pop a Miranda in the battle.
That would be true if the enemy could reliably focus
Excelsior-equivalent firepower on one of the
Miranda-As while totally ignoring the other two.
Suffice to say that the evidence suggests that this is not normally something enemy fleets will be able to do.
Leading to Combat Capabilities of the formation being reduced by 1/3rd. An Excelsior would be preferable to 3 Miranda's because it has a better retention of Capability in a Long Firefight...
90 hit points of damage in the new combat engine will reduce an
Excelsior to a disabled wreck.
Distribute 90 hit points of damage more or less evenly across three
Miranda-As and you have three intact ships with no shields left, and an aggregate of 60 hit points of hull left to go.
Furthermore, the
Miranda-As will dish out damage significantly faster than a lone
Excelsior can hope to- in the new engine, they give you three opportunities to hit instead of one, which more than offsets the halved damage inflicted per shot.
In other words, Combat 9 Hull 6 Shields 9 is generally going to beat Combat 6 Hull 4 Shields 5. Concentrating all the C/H/L of the weaker force on a single platform doesn't fix that.
A question, would it be possible to sneak a hospital ship in over one of the Miranda-A's ?
I do think we could use the escorts, but I'd also like to point out that we'd probably also like to have our medical arm operating to a point where it can dedicate a ship to ongoing actions rather than having the regional one doing so rather than responding to call outs. Also, since the build time bonus works in pairs, would we be losing anything vital?
We're not finished designing the hospital ship yet, and honestly we have a whole dedicated yard opening up for building ships like that in 12-24 months. I'd rather save the Starfleet regular berths for building ships that fight and respond to normal events.
Your probably correct here when it comes to the Miranda-A vs Excelsior fight but there's a small variable that we should now keep in mind. The damage per hit is now tied to the shooting vessel's combat stat, so larger combat ships now have a very small advantage over a combat equal group of smaller ships, if the smaller ship's greater evasion stat doesn't compensate.
Thing is, hit probability now
DOESN'T depend on the opposing team's combat stats. The side with twice as many ships hits twice as often, which compensates for only doing half as much damage per hit. If you bring three times as many ships, each of which hit half as hard, you will inflict 1.5 times more damage on the enemy. So you're right about the effects of one change to the combat engine, but there's a second change which would appear to cancel out the first change.
In other words...
If two ships with Combat 6 duel for 30 rounds, they each hit 15 times for 6X damage per shot (where X is some average expected amount of damage). Each side dishes out 90X damage (ignoring evasion).
If one ship with Combat 6 fights two ships with Combat 3 for 30 rounds, the heavy hitter only hits 10 times out of 30. It still does 6X damage per shot, but that only adds up to 60X damage. Meanwhile, the Combat 3 ships score 20 of the 30 hits, and dish out 20*3X equals 60X damage. The results are still a tie (although interestingly, this suggests that the battle will take longer to be resolved).
If one ship with Combat 6 fights THREE ships with Combat 3, then the heavy hitter only hits (on average) 30/4 = 7.5 times. It's doing (on average) 7.5*6 = 45X damage. The smaller ships hit (on average) 22.5 times, delivering (on average) 67.5X damage.
So in the long run, 3*3 still turns out to be 50% larger than 1*6, which is exactly what you'd predict.
