Can someone explain defensive upgrades please?

at the most basic level, without upgrades, each defense type halves the damage of the weapon.  It rounds up.

basically, double-hit-points against a single type of attack.  Tech will make hitpoints more valuable.

Edited: bad math

No, it doesn't, unfortunately in my opinion.

Unless this has been changed (I admit that I haven't checked in a while), there's a two-step process with defense:

The damage of the attack is immediately cut in half (rounding up). Your 6-point beam attack would become a 3-point hit against a shield.

The game then does a 1-N die roll, with the halved damage value as N. In this case, it would be a random 1-3 result.

That amount of damage is applied to the defense. If this reduces it to 0 (or lower), then none of that damage bleeds through to the hull, but the defense will no longer be there to offer protection against future attacks.

This means that having the relevant defense results in a roughly 3/4 reduction in damage. Some techs negate elements of this.

Defenses only apply against the relevant damage type. ECM counters missiles, but it does nothing against beams or kinetics.

Your description does appear to still be correct in latest crusade

frickin quote button

Thanks for the replies.

For further understanding are the calculations done per launcher hard point/defense hardpoint or (total offence)/(total defense).  I would assume totals.

examples:

6 point beam v 24 point shields (4 generators) would take between 6 and 24 (max at 1 dmg per shot) shots to knock down. (using the supplied example of 3-n randomness)

or

50 point (multiple beams) v 24 point shield = 1 salvo or perhaps at most 2 if the rng favors you.

I think I am concluding from this that more firepower is preferable to defensive  components at this time.  Certainly early in the game where components are heavy.  This also kind of explains why Starbase upgrades are just about worthless after about turn 100.

What size map do you play on?

How fast can you build ships?          How resource hungry are your ships?

How quickly do you research and build carriers?


Rule of thumb for me...  Captl ships get no defense...  pure fire power.     But they NEVER go into a fight without some escort/assult ships that are basically nothing but defense or cheap one shot wonder offense....      Defense is far less expensive to build...   so these ships are disposable and quickly replaced.  (also named things like "RedShirt"  "CannonFodder"  "Ablative"  "Kevlar1"  "Decoy"

The combat system of GC3 was never going to be its strong suit, but it really is disappointing just how pointless most of it's potential is.

Only 3 roles matter, defenses are generally pointless, if they did matter, it's better to get jamming anyways, and carriers are poorly implemented in my opinion.

Oh and the game generally favors large ships only and has no mechanic to balance fleets or individual designs. 

Perhaps things will improve when Frogboy stats looking at getting the AI to design it's own ships (he mentioned something about this recently).

Ideally, I think we may need to ditch roles and basically build those roles out as part of hull sizes. Similar to homeworld games. 

Tiny = extra effective vs large and huge

Small = extra effective vs Tiny

Medium = extra effective against Small

Large and Huge = extra effective against Medium

The above isn't a perfect system or anything, it's a 30 second idea... but it actually starts encouraging somewhat balanced fleets. Which I think would be more fun.

I view tiny hulls as effective in four key situations:  

1).Emergency, when you need a ship out in one turn, whatever help it can provide

2). Assisted by fleet modules and military starbases.  24 tiny ships get a lot more mileage out of a +1 laser/fleet bonus than two huge hulls would.

3). Late game, when weapons values are really high.  Better for a 50 laser to just kill a 7hp tiny than for a huge hull to eat it all.

4) inside carriers

In GCII I was very effective concentrating on defense and hit points.  My fleets would survive to shoot twice - a lot like having twice as many fleets.  Now I find that rather than a "next generation" of GC, in terms of combat it is an entirely different game where that strategy doesn't work.  IME even well defended ships will usually lose to a ship that is not nearly as well defended, but has some moderate edge in firepower. 

I do think the addition of roles and tactics in fleet combat is a good one.  But for SD to completely change the philosophy of ship design while maintaining the veneer of the old and not telling anyone is unconscionable.

You want to know what's missing from GCIII?  THE RULES.  There may be some, but they're secret.  I am becoming more an more disenchanted with this thing.  It's got so much potential that is being hidden under a bushel.

That is a bit of a over reaction in my opinion. While a lot of data about the game available through wikis etc. is out of date, the combat system has been unchanged since the beginning. There is ton of information about ship roles and how to abuse them to win virtually any fleet battle.

It is unfortunate that game manuals are now left to the player's to maintain via wikis and not generally well supported by their games, especially this is true for smaller companies and games... but it is basically fairly standard behavior.

The section on roles is good, as I mentioned in another thread.  But the section on combat is perfunctory at best.  The section(s) on ship design are little more than recitations of Designer mechanics.  And there are topics (e.g. Administrators) that just aren't there. 

The problem with depending on a player-maintained wiki is that the players rarely know the logic behind game occurrences.  As far as I can determine, what is in the wiki is, in most cases, little more than a best guess.  It really needs Stardock participation.

Perhaps some of this is contained in a player guide, but I haven't found one or had one pointed out to me.

AFAIK, this is how it works, although it would take a minimum of 8 shots (@ 3 damage each) to take down 24 points of shield defense in this scenario.

Defense is good on an escort (or guardian) ship to absorb incoming fire, and having some will help assault ships to survive long enough for the escorts to catch up. It's also useful in tiny quantities for ablating high-powered shots. A single 1-point shield defense will completely stop the first 500-point beam attack (since no damage bleeds over). Sure, the next shot will vaporize the target, but if that lets it survive long enough to do something, it's worth it.

Interesting summary.  Thanks.