Can we please just have ships able to disengage if they would die?

[Xaelyn]

Ive noticed both sides of the argument. Stuff not dying and smaller ships dying by the droves; in the same game.

It seems that what effects it is wht kind of weapon youre beeing hit with. And things like fallen empires and endgame crisses obviously have massive damage boosts so you see it against them alot more to.

What baffles me though is how little you notice the 90% evasion. I regulary see enemies with 100% hit chances while I know that 1: those weapons dont have 100% hit chances and 2: I know those weapons dont have 90% tracking.

Now obviously the AI cheats. But it cheats so much that smaller ships have just about 0% survivability in the endgame. THe most ive seen my ships 'keep' in terms of evasion is 30%. Maybe 40% in some rare cases. And I would very much like to know how the AI got thoses tracking bonuses, lol.

I don't think the AI gets tracking bonuses. AFAICT regular empires get no combat buffs from difficulty, just economic ones, and other enemy types receive only health and damage bonuses.

Tracking doesn't get to added to weapons in the ship designer, so maybe you just don't realize how much tracking even your ships have after all the bonuses? Sapient picket (30) and tachyon sensors (15) together (45) wipe out half the evasion cap already, and there's quite a few other sources you can pick up too, subterfuge traditions (10), precognitive picket computer for psioncs (extra 10), Titan targeting grid aura 10), enigmatic decoder modules (5 each), and quite possibly a few other sources I'm not aware of. AI probably wont get all those things and stack it to 90, but both it and you can stack enough to make your 90 evasion corvettes look like a stationary starbase to most weapons.

 

[Druitt]

Just to throw out one more idea: if Fleet Manager were fixed -- in particular the trouble that upgrading causes to reinforcement -- it would make the OP's complaint a lot less painful. One button click and in a few ticks the fleet is back to what you wanted. The little guys build fast and travel fast.

Yes, tweak balance a bit, but in the long run a working reinforcement mechanism is probably quicker than emergency jumps in terms of getting your fleet back together after a battle. And the whole emergency jump mechanism is itself a bit weird and has odd mechanics and downsides as well. As would the idea that little guys are so evasive that only specialized weapons could endanger them.

 

[ASGeek2012]

Having the smaller ships of the fleet get blown up is not a bad thing. Every shot they took for the team is one less shot that your heavier capital ships took. This is why I always maintained mixed fleets into the late game even before the combat rework. Lighter ships always take the losses before my heavier ships. I can often go multiple battles with the same fleet before heavier ships start taking any sort of significant losses. Smaller ships are cheaper to replace.

 

[Osiris1975]

To be fair, I've never had the other problem, I've only had this one, so I can only speak to this one. I honestly wouldn't mind if the base disengage chance got reduced, I'm only saying that losing every frigate, and every corvette in every engagement feels bad. Another alternative I thought of is if evasion had an additional chance to cause reduced damage against large and x weapons specifically. Basically, high evasion would allow a % chance at a partial dodge so that smaller ships have the opportunity to get disengaged instead of overkilled.

Every time my main fleet gets into a meaningful battle, I lose at least half, usually more than half, of my corvettes/frigates. This is with my corvettes having max evasion. I'm not asking for every ship to survive every battle, but it's just so obnoxious having to replace most of your screen, and frigates after every engagement. allowing at least those ships to have some chance to survive getting insta-nuked by disengaging with 1 hp would make things so much better, so that I'm not having to constantly stop and wait for my screen to replenish, or so that I can actually use frigates without feeling like my alloys are being thrown into a black hole for a ship that isn't even going to survive the first few seconds of combat. (You could even set it to 50% of the normal disengage chance for a ship that gets sniped, and I'd probably agree that's a fair tradeoff) Note that this has no direct impact on the viability of any ship type in individual engagements, it only affects the long-term efficiency of building screen ships, which are basically single-use consumables right now.

You may be doing this already but you can also specialize your fleet to counter the opponent. Are you using espionage to get the designs of the enemy ships? If your Intel isn't high enough, you can analyze battle reports to get an idea of what weapons and defenses the enemy uses in their ships and retrofit your ships accordingly.t

My strategy is to make a balanced base design for every class of ship, and make kinetic or energy offense and shield or armored variants as the need arises. Particular useful against one of the crisis factions that use only shields and no armor. I was destroying their fleets with my own with nearly half the fleet power.

 

[orlykthxbai]

"There's no way to inflict losses in war, please remove this Disengage mechanic!" <- Some other thread

"Please buff the Disengage mechanic, it makes it impossible to use smaller ships!" <- This thread

The duality of man.

More to the point, if your smaller ships are getting one-shot by huge damage, that's good. That means the Huge Damage is successfully countering your fleet. Counter it back.

If the enemy keeps showing rock, stop asking Paradox to buff scissors.

Probably because it is both. Small ships die too easily and create too much warscore. Cruisers and up to early Battleships disengage way too easily causing battles to be meaningless. Once you get some decent tech and loadouts it becomes okay again.

 

[TranscendentalDragon]

Also, good fucking luck using frigates outside of multiplayer, because right now they only have a niche role of countering battleship artillery mono-fleets, and they get absolutely annihilated when used in any other capacity,

Not true, they kill leviathans just fine.