can't understand battle results in 2.6

[Expanding Man]

I've always had a really hard time figuring out why some battles go better than others in stellaris, but since the 2.6 patch, I really can't make any sense at all of what's happening, particularly in battles involving large fleets (>> 10k).

All I can really do is look at the damage efficiency in the post battle reports. There are many cases in which I get completely pasted, but I have better damage efficiency in all categories. It's not at all clear to me why things go so badly when watching the battles either... it basically just looks like my ships get destroyed a lot faster than the enemy ships.

My fleet constitution is pretty mixed and so is the enemy fleet.

Any advice as to what the hell is going on? A link to some sort of comprehensive guide would be hugely appreciated. Any guide I've seen online basically just says obvious things like have good shield damage if you're facing enemies that are largely shield-tanks, but I rarely seem to get an advantage that way anyway since the AI fleet compositions are *usually* (but not always) mixed enough that it's not at all clear what I should build. Again, I've always been pretty confused about what was going on in battles, but in 2.6 sometimes it's gotten so bad that I lose every battle without any understanding as to why.

[Astasia]

There are typically three things that will make you lose a fight against the AI you think you will win based off the power ratings: Evasion. Missiles. Strike Craft.

Evasion is heavily over valued by the game's power rating system. A corvette with 90% evasion has a massive power rating compared to it's actual effectiveness in combat, and that evasion is almost completely negated by destroyers, or mostly countered by other corvettes and cruisers, even battleships with L weapons will hit a lot more than 10% of the time. If you use any number of high evasion corvettes in your fleet you just have to be aware the strength of that fleet is a bit lower than the game indicates.

For Strike Craft there are two things you have to be aware of with them, the first is similar to evasion in that the game heavily over values the power rating for them. They aren't a bad weapon choice to use, it's just the game considers their power as if all of the strike craft are always out at the same time doing max damage, which is rarely the case. If you take a 20k carrier fleet against a 20K any other fleet, the carrier fleet will lose no question, but if you actually look you will realize your 20k carrier fleet is significantly smaller in ship numbers/capacity than the 20k fleet it lost to.

The second issue with Strike Craft also applies to missiles. You can't just throw a few of them into a big mixed fleet and expect them to do anything, they will be hard countered by the amount of PD the AI fleets always have and do 0 damage. If you want to use either SC or missiles you need to really focus on them and put them into a lot of slots to overwhelm the enemy defenses, otherwise they just pad your fleet power rating without actually helping in combat.

There's a fourth, it doesn't really apply to your case, but starbase hull is also overvalued. The power rating on a starbase is like 95% hull health and 5% damage output, that 5% damage output isn't nearly enough to protect it from an equal fleet power fleet, without loads of defense platforms adding more firepower.

[bea.hirtes]

Maybe this helps.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=705465925

[Nightmyre]

To add on to Astasia's great summary - one other factor to take into account (although this relates more to the player than to the AI) is the range of your weapons.

The reason that most people suggest sticking with battleships with long-ranged weapons, is that if your fleet can get a volley, or even two, off before the enemy gets into weapons range, you'll gain a significant advantage in your chances of winning. You'll wipe out a big chunk of the enemy fleet before they can even get a chance to fire.

Since the AI tends to make mixed fleets, their range is less relevant - but it does still apply, especially in the case of the Contingency endgame crisis, where their ships are all long-ranged, and so can get just as much of an alpha strike as you can.

[Expanding Man]

Thanks for your help all! This definitely gives me a few things to think about.

I still don't think I fully understand why sometimes my battles go so badly, but I have identified a few major issues

• I had completely inappropriate combat computers on my ships. I had forgotten the extent to which these determine ship behavior. To make matters worse, I had a fleet that was pretty decent at range, but they were all closing distance as quickly as possible! So far this is the biggest issue I've been able to identify.
  
• The AI had more ship designs than I'd realized. I had checked a few of their fleets, but to my surprise, some of the others had very different setups. My ships were pretty balanced, so I think this probably wasn't too decisive, but it didn't help.
  
• The enemy fleets had lots of high-evasion corvettes which I don't think my tracking was quite good enough to counter. This was compounded by the inappropriate combat computers.

I'm still pretty confused/frustrated that it's so hard to glean anything from the combat report stats - the tables from my most disastrous battles would have you believing that I should have done just fine. I think I'm starting to be able to glean more from actually watching the battles, however, this is how I realized how screwed up my combat computers were. So, making some progress!