You miss the point: I am challenging the assumption that three M-As will reliably win against one Excelsior in the current combat engine. I do not believe that to be the case. It would be just over 50-50 one way or the other, depending on how you discount hull.
Assuming damage is distributed based on rand(0,1) * Combat...
The
Miranda-As get to fire three Damage 1.5 shots per Damage 3 shot fired by the
Excelsior. The
Miranda-As will inflict an average of 51 HP of damage (enough to bring down the shields ignoring regen) after 34 shots, corresponding to about 12 shots fired by the
Excelsior. Assuming no one evades anything (an assumption that favors the
Excelsior) the
Excelsior has done something like 25-50 damage
TOTAL by the time its shields go down.
Even if it were capable of laserlike focus fire on a single
Miranda-A, the
Excelsior's shields will probably collapse before it can destroy one of the
Miranda-As. Absent focused firing, the explorer will have accomplished nothing but shield depletion by then, and the
Miranda-As will be decreasing the
Excelsior's total Hull pool by an average of 10% or so per shot the
Excelsior gets beyond that point.
This is not going to end well for the explorer. And factoring in evasion only makes things worse.
Assumptions - the Miranda-A fleet gets 3 shots to every one from the Excelsior and the Excelsior has no control over with Miranda-A it fires at
Ignoring Avoidance and Combat strength dropping as the Hull takes damage:
An Excelsior (Combat 6, so average damage 3) requires (on average) 17 hits to kill a Miranda-A (H2 L3)
A Miranda-A (Combat 3, so average damage 1.5) requires (on average) 60 hits to kill an Excelsior (H4 L5)
3 Miranda-A vs. 1 Excelsior would actually favour the Excelsior under those assumptions, with the Excelsior being well into Hull when the last Miranda-A pops.
The
Miranda-As get to fire three times for every shot fired by the
Excelsior because of how the combat engine works. The ship which fires is chosen randomly, and 3/4 of the time that's one of the
Mirandas.
On average, in forty combat rounds, the
Miranda-As can throw 30 shots (averaging 45 damage total) in the time it takes the
Excelsior to throw 10 (averaging 30 damage total).
So even if the
Excelsior's shots are all hitting the same target (they're not, realistically) and if evasion is ignored (which favors the explorer heavily), by the time the
Excelsior knocks down the shields on ONE of the
Mirandas, its own shields are already on the brink of collapse. Once it starts taking hull damage from the other two (fully shielded)
Miranda-As, its own ability to finish them off is going to start dropping rapidly.
If we take the more realistic assumption that fire is spread out randomly or semi-randomly across all three
Mirandas, the
Excelsior doesn't even have a high chance of knocking down any of its attackers' shields before running out of hit points entirely- because it has to do MOST of a total of 90 damage (not exactly 90, but almost certainly at least 70 or so). In the time it takes the
Excelsior to do 70 damage, it would take roughly 105 damage in return,
even if its own combat score was not decreasing due to the hull damage it was receiving.
The most likely thing to mess this up is shield regeneration, but without more clear information on how that works we can't determine if it's relevant.
