A Newbie Question about Ship Combat
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I RtFM on the subject of ship combat mechanics, but something bothers me about the use of attack and defence factors.
Let's say you are defending: if the attack goes for two rounds, then your defensive status becomes irrelevant as both your defense factor (1st round) and then your attack factor (second round) would have been used. To me, and only in my newbie opinion, this seems to weaken or defeat the idea of building defensive ships, particularly if combat goes for just 2 or 4 rounds (which seems pretty common). It also seems to weaken the idea of thinking about them as defence or attack factors, rather than just two arbitrary factors.
I would have thought it would give more motivation to focus on an attack or defensive strategy of ship building if the defender only ever used the defense factor, and attackers the attack. This would also make warmonger strategies suffer if ship's attack factors were more expensive per unit than defense factors.
I'm sure the game designers have a good reason for doing it this way, but it isn't obvious to me.
Thanks, John
Let's say you are defending: if the attack goes for two rounds, then your defensive status becomes irrelevant as both your defense factor (1st round) and then your attack factor (second round) would have been used. To me, and only in my newbie opinion, this seems to weaken or defeat the idea of building defensive ships, particularly if combat goes for just 2 or 4 rounds (which seems pretty common). It also seems to weaken the idea of thinking about them as defence or attack factors, rather than just two arbitrary factors.
I would have thought it would give more motivation to focus on an attack or defensive strategy of ship building if the defender only ever used the defense factor, and attackers the attack. This would also make warmonger strategies suffer if ship's attack factors were more expensive per unit than defense factors.
I'm sure the game designers have a good reason for doing it this way, but it isn't obvious to me.
Thanks, John