Geoff the Medio wrote:
I think what's happening is that since planets are essentially invulnerable during combat, a planet with nonzero defense gets dozens of rounds of free combat shots at enemy ships in its system. The planet can be attacked by the ships, but the only effect is to reduce the planet's construction meter, which doesn't affect its ability to continue battle. The planet's attacks against the ships, however, do damage and may destroy them, as is often seen.
I've checked the logs, that is exactly what's happening. The weird thing is that the planet's defense meter shows up as 0 in the UI, although the planet actually has defense 5. And that's weird because all the other meter values of the planet are displayed correctly, so it can't be insufficient detection on the attacker's part. Or does the defense meter have a different visibility than the other meters?
On a side note, there are some other weird things I noticed when examining the combat log: Battle rounds where the colonized planets in the system attack the uncolonized ones, battle rounds where ships attack the uncolonized planets in the system, ship part stats not showing up correctly (mass driver 1 damage as 0, ROF as 0?).