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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
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Simon_Jester said:
Combat has been (arguably) nerfed by the combat engine change. Basically, the high-combat side of a fight used to have not only a higher chance of hitting the enemy fleet, but a lower chance of being hit in return. Now, Combat has nothing to do with hit probabilities, and only affects how much damage a ship does when it (by random roll) hits the enemy.

The problem is, (in the original iteration of this fight, I think) Saratoga inflicted nearly as much damage on the Cardassians as the Cardassians inflicted on her. But ConnieBees have slightly lower health totals than Jalduns to begin with, and their combat power starts declining faster when they start taking hull damage.

It also didn't help that the Jaldun dodged four of our shots while we dodged NONE of theirs. Evasion percentages are really important in close fights like this, because our shots doing 25% more damage each time makes a lot less difference when they get to go "EVADED" on 10% of the shots that hit them and we don't.

Jalduns have a durability advantage, and the firepower advantage isn't THAT large. Combat 3 is a lot stronger than Combat 2, but Combat 5 isn't all that much stronger than Combat 4. The margin of superiority is enough that a few more 'low' damage rolls can cancel out the high firepower.

Also, with all ships having shield regeneration of some degree or other, and the new randomized damage values meaning that sometimes you only deal 'chip' damage to the enemy no matter HOW good your Combat score is... I think that high-Combat, low-durability designs are no longer very viable anywhere, really.
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so basically, combat used to be the one stat to rule them all in combat, but now it's no more or less important than say hull. Given we have been mostly building for the old system, is thins going to hurt us? Also, does this make combat kind of weak? if it doesn't matter more than hull shield or defense in a fight, and less outside of combat, wouldn't low combat score ships make more sense?
 
random_npc said:
so basically, combat used to be the one stat to rule them all in combat, but now it's no more or less important than say hull. Given we have been mostly building for the old system, is thins going to hurt us? Also, does this make combat kind of weak? if it doesn't matter more than hull shield or defense in a fight, and less outside of combat, wouldn't low combat score ships make more sense?
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We're only actually starting on our first custom ship, while other powers do have ships optimized for the old system. See: The Lorgot, which went from having a serious advantage over an Excelsior to being about even with one.
 
I personally don't think that high combat score has been rendered irrelevant. I don't see any evidence that it does not affect the firing chance of each side, and the amount of damage high-combat ships deal including hit rate is about what I would expect from proportionate increase in combat score.

e: In the Deva battle, our larger ships fired about the same amount as our smaller ships but did far their expected amount of damage. The two Excelsiors combine for C13 and did 186.62 damage, 14.36. The two Miranda-As combine for C6 and did 85.64 damage, 14.27 per C. The two Connie-Bs combine for C10 and did 114.02 damage, 11.40 per C. This is within variance, therefore I would expect a ship with higher C to have exactly proportionately higher chance of winning all else equal.
 
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So, judging from the proportion of those casualties and the length of fixing... At a guess, Saratoga took the heaviest damage to the center of its saucer section. I'm guessing it got cored vertically, actually, from the bridge to the sensor dome.

Which would also mean that there isn't enough captain left to courtmartial, or even to put in a decorative jar on the mantlepiece.
 
SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
e: In the Deva battle, our larger ships fired about the same amount as our smaller ships but did far their expected amount of damage. The two Excelsiors combine for C13 and did 186.62 damage, 14.36. The two Miranda-As combine for C6 and did 85.64 damage, 14.27 per C. The two Connie-Bs combine for C10 and did 114.02 damage, 11.40 per C. This is within variance, therefore I would expect a ship with higher C to have exactly proportionately higher chance of winning all else equal.
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Well yes, if you look at it hit power is clearly random number in [0, 1] * C. Actual damage is bonus * hitpower, but currently both sides seem to get the same bonus, probably erroneously.
 
random_npc said:
so basically, combat used to be the one stat to rule them all in combat, but now it's no more or less important than say hull. Given we have been mostly building for the old system, is thins going to hurt us? Also, does this make combat kind of weak? if it doesn't matter more than hull shield or defense in a fight, and less outside of combat, wouldn't low combat score ships make more sense?
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I'm very worried for the apiata, if this is the case.
 
It's still profitable to reduce the enemy to hull before they do the same, because they then start to lose the ability to do damage in return. Therefore high-C, high-L ships should still be king.

e: Not counting burn-through. That's going to be hilarious to try to figure out. Also the Apiata likely have higher evasion than normal.
 
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SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
It's still profitable to reduce the enemy to hull before they do the same, because they then start to lose the ability to do damage in return. Therefore high-C, high-L ships should still be king.

e: Not counting burn-through. That's going to be hilarious to try to figure out. Also the Apiata likely have higher evasion than normal.
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Yeah. Penetrating Nadions just jumped up in research priority, I think.
 
Leila Hann said:
Yeah. Penetrating Nadions just jumped up in research priority, I think.
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This is exactly why the weapons fabrication division is on phasers now. A couple of weeks ago I was considering putting them on torpedoes to unlock burst launchers faster, but after seeing the new combat system in action it was obvious that shield burnthrough would be even more important than in the old system, and the advantage decisive enough not to need to put the choice in a task.
 
Apatia almost certainly have boosted evade chance. Apatia ALSO have wtfhax br/sr to stats ratios, and are very shield heavy. They've been de facto buffed until shield pen becomes common because a stinger has plenty of punch and shields.

Stingers are not particularly glassy for escort scale ships thanks to their 4 shield score.
 
Leila Hann said:
So, what does combat actually do now? What are the formulae for attack chance and damage?
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I just posted the formula for damage? I'm reasonably sure attack chance is independent of combat now, probably just based on the number of ships and tactics. Most, possibly all attacks that fail to hit have been avoided due to the evasion chance ships have, and that is a visible stat on the new design sheet.
 
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It seems to me that the best answer to who shoots is to take all the ships from all sides and throw them into a RNG, and then roll damage once a ship is picked. As long as damage is proportionate to combat scores this should work. Side-based attacking then picking a ship on that side requires weighting which would bias things.
 
I find it a bit funny people are complaining about this battle and not about the much bigger fluke of Enterprise beating Lorgot + Jaldun in back in 2307.

I mean, I think there's something a bit fishy too. But let's put this in perspective and look at this objectively, shall we?

Simon_Jester said:
Combat has been (arguably) nerfed by the combat engine change. Basically, the high-combat side of a fight used to have not only a higher chance of hitting the enemy fleet, but a lower chance of being hit in return. Now, Combat has nothing to do with hit probabilities, and only affects how much damage a ship does when it (by random roll) hits the enemy.
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To elaborate more on this, the net impact of combat has changed in two ways:

First, average fleet combat impact in the absence of any modifiers:
old system: <fleet hit rate> * <mean hit damage> = fleet combat / (fleet combat + enemy fleet combat) * 1
= (fleet ship count * mean ship damage) / (fleet ship count * mean ship combat + enemy fleet ship count * mean enemy ship combat)
new system: <fleet hit rate> * <mean hit damage> = fleet ship count / (fleet ship count + enemy fleet ship count) * combat
= (fleet ship count * mean ship damage) / (fleet ship count + enemy fleet ship count)

Second, in the old system, combat was taken to the 1.15 power. I don't see any equivalent power function in the new system. So fleet hit rate used to actually be: fleet combat ^ 1.15 / (fleet combat ^ 1.15 + enemy fleet combat ^ 1.15)

In both systems, damage decreases with hull damage, though the new system is more granular in the damage.

Altogether, this had two major consequences in the old system compared to the newer one:
1) It further emphasized the need to out-power the enemy from the start.
2) To take a gaming term, battles were more snowbally, and thus potentially more decisive (depended also on retreat mechanics).

The new system lessens the advantage of total combat difference between fleets. In principle, I consider this a good thing, because otherwise smaller nations would be even more helpless against larger nations, beyond the innate exponential growth factor. That might be more realistic, but it's boring from a gameplay standpoint. In fact, I suspect that this plus the ability to attach ship-specific combat behavior (like shield burn-through) was the driving impetus behind this change.

The devil is in the details though, and while I like the principles of the new system more, there could still be bugs.

Ship targeting mechanics that were shown in the Battle of Deva also were ...interesting, but that could've also been applied to the old system.
 
Torgamous said:
If that had been the second combat result after a similarly impressive first result I expect people would have been asking if the system was biased towards us, but by the time that happened there had already been enough combat that everyone knew it was a fluke.
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Well my point is that there is a bias. We like good things happening to us. We don't like bad things happening to us. Despite Oneiros showing examples of how this battle could have gone either way, there's still a good amount of gnashing going here, and no such complaints after the Enterprise won.
 
there is also the fact that every combat log we have seen running the new system has us taking it in the teeth. Even the battle we won had us taking far heavyier losses than we would have under the old system.

now so far it's just 2 data points, but in those old systems the combat advantage we held in those fights would likely have made them a lot less painful. It could be RNG, but people are starting to worry that some quirk of the new system favors the other guy.
 
Combat is not meant to be safe, guys. It certainly isn't meant to be painless.

Edit: This is part of the intent, really. Four years go into an explorer, three into a cruiser, and you can lose one in a day. Every time it comes down to battle it is meant to be a crisis.

The Federation is dangerous because it owns the peace, but can also absorb losses like no one else.

Not because it can scour the battlefield of all before them. When you fight, it will not be bloodless.

This is why the Caitians and Dawiar danced around each other for two years rather than commit to a battle that could lose the war in a day.
 
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