defaultuser wrote:I have been trying to get familiar with some of the game mechanics, so I was wondering what the combat algorithm looks like for one fleet of ships battling another. Ignoring stealth (sorry Mat) and just looking at Fleet A with a collection of ships totaling a certain damage level and structure, versus Fleet B with its own set.
No need to apologise, stealth still confuses me
Is combat fairly deterministic, or is there some randomness?
Mostly deterministic, you hit what you shoot at and damage is decided entirely by published stats
How is targeting determined?
Randomly, each
weapon selects a valid target completely independently of all other weapons.
Do some ships get destroyed before firing?
No, they used to, we changed it.
There are three rounds of combat per turn. In each round, all weapons fire at a random, visible, opposing target. (stealth touched on below). Each shot will hit and do damage according to capacity vs shields. the shot's power has the shield strength of the target removed then the residual is removed from the ships structure.
At the end of each round, the structure of each ship is compared and any that are at or below zero are destroyed. In addition, any ship that has fired now becomes visible to all enemies and a new round of targeting and firing is resolved. If you look at the graphs of a combat log, you'll probably see that some ships 'dead' in the combat have displayed stats of -25/40 or similar, that means that they soaked up 25 more damage than was needed to kill them.
We're hoping to have either 'targeting computer' parts or 'leaders' or something, and to improve targeting options with an easy UI at some point but that's way above my paygrade.
The system allows for a smaller fleet to do damage but gives an advantage to a larger fleet. A fully stealthed fleet gets a free round of shooting before it can be targeted, drawback is one or more unstealthed ships will draw all enemy fire so you do need to be careful.