5 Frigates with no marines and combat xp of 0 stars vs. 3 xebecs with full marines and combat xp of 5 stars
This gives the frigates about 85% chance of winning. If the xebecs would not have any marines and 0 combat xp, then the frigates would have more than 100% chance to win. Autoresolve takes everything into account and I think it is this that gives out results that players see as broken. Even though they are not.
To remedy this, we'll be adding power bar to pre-battle screen, so you can see your odds and also give ships of the losing side a chance to escape from the battle.
Fair combat is important if you are trying to hold people's attention. The AI should be coded to play as best it can on the tactical screen, and ideally the un-shown battles should be played according to the same rules.
If you guys are trying to simulate the outcomes of those tactical battles by computing a win/loss ratio and rolling a dice, this will always be unsatisfying, especially given the sort of company your game is keeping with the rest of the Paradox games, which feature simple combat, but more importantly
fair combat. With the other Paradox titles you get the impression that the computation happening behind the scenes is the same that is happening in battles involving your own units. This is not 100% true but close enough.
It would be one thing if naval combat was not so significant in this game, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of real depth to the game (it plays like a well-designed 1.0, which it is), so that part of the game is important. If using the tactical system is an exploit in favor of the player, that takes a huge amount of fun out of the game.
If you are going to make a combat outcome function and have the program use that in AI vs AI battles and in "auto-resolve" battles when the player chooses to use it, you may as well rip tactical mode out and throw it in the trash, and force everything to auto-resolve all the time.
It would be sad for people to perceive that 50% of this game is an enormous exploit.
