Does fleet power mean nothing?

[Sticks]

Been watching a lot of streams and videos of this game and one common trend in all the combat is that there seems to be no way to tell whos going to win an engagement.

Things like 6k fleets completely obliterating 15k fleets of twice as many ships and still remain at 6k by the end, or a 15k fleet taking on 3 15k fleets and making all 3 of them retreat, if the power level of a fleet doesn't determine who wins then why does it even exist? Whats it for?

[markdb92]

fleet power I assume only matters to ai when to declare war or not. The 6k ships you mention must be really high tech ships to not lose one ship.

[Rathnaga]

It seems that fleet power makes sense only if both fleets have a similar ship size composition. A fleet with tons of corvettes seems to be vastly more powerful than a fleet made up of lots of cruisers, so you get these little 2k power corvette stacks beating 5k power cruiser stacks. Defense/attack types are a factor as well.

[DeadlyDanDaMan]

There is a lot more to battles than just fleet size.

[JErosion]

its deceptive, when the game says a fleet is equivilant its more or less a ballpark, It just calculates the damage output of the respective fleets and doesn't take into account what happens when one fleet is usign shields and the other has weapons that bypass those defense. Or how all those destroyers cant seem to hit those super fast corvettes that are buzzing around them

[Justin]

1. Remember that combat strength diminishes the more vessels that are sunk. If a number of corvettes with a total of 1200 combat strength takes on a single battleship of 1000, that 1200 is going to drop the more corvettes are destroyed. The battleship will remain at 1000 until its HP hits zero.

2. The game does have a technological counter system. Generally speaking, lasers are absorbed by shields but penetrate armour, projectile weapons overwhelm shields but have trouble with armour, and missiles are shot down by point defence. If you are using shields and are up against an equivalent strength fleet armed with cannons, the cards are stacked against you.

Neither case guarantees a victory or a defeat, but they're two (among other) reasons why combat strength alone doesn't tell the whole story.

[RodHull]

Originally posted by Justin:

projectile weapons overwhelm shields but have trouble with armour

Projectile weapons have nothing they are strong against, disruptors are the only thing that does extra shield damage to best of my knowledge and they fall under energy weapons.

Projectiles or Kintetics are imo massively underpowered and need love, they have the widest damage range meaning while they can do high damage they can also do the lowest, their accuracy is around 25% lower than missiles and 10% lower than lasers, they suck.

[Thorin]

Missiles and torpedoes have high (sometime 100%) hit chance, with ignores evasion, and topedoes ignore shields, also they have longar range, so you can sink a few ships before they can shoot back.

[George The Ork]

Autocannons are stated as having a high fire rate, which can still be handy at chewing though shields before the hailstorm of missiles arrive.

Smaller weapons also have more accuracy then larger ones, but do less damage and have less range.

Use small kinetics along with large missiles to have a fairly consistant accuracy.

But good luck hitting late game corvettes with the large guns, as their engines will make the bastards disterbingly good "Evasion tanks" for the other ships in a fleet.

[Michael]

Originally posted by Sticks:

Been watching a lot of streams and videos of this game and one common trend in all the combat is that there seems to be no way to tell whos going to win an engagement.

Things like 6k fleets completely obliterating 15k fleets of twice as many ships and still remain at 6k by the end, or a 15k fleet taking on 3 15k fleets and making all 3 of them retreat, if the power level of a fleet doesn't determine who wins then why does it even exist? Whats it for?

The number is just to give a rough idea of the size and power of a fleet. What matters are specific matchups. If that 6k fleet has a lot of point defense and the 15k fleet is heavily reliant on missiles/torpedoes... then yeah, the 6k fleet is probably going to mop them up.

Also, some default ship designs tend to include hangars for fighters/bombers. Those are basically useless offensively right now, as far as I can tell. They work in the exact opposite way a carrier group should by acting as very short range offense/point defense. They are pretty much dead weight until they get patched.

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Michael:

Also, some default ship designs tend to include hangars for fighters/bombers. Those are basically useless offensively right now, as far as I can tell. They work in the exact opposite way a carrier group should by acting as very short range offense/point defense. They are pretty much dead weight until they get patched.

After taking disproportionate damage from a numerically and technology inferior fleet armed with torps, I welcomed a fighter escort. My fault for being arrogant and having no point defenses.

[PingvinSalat]

it is because ships have evasiveness.
Small ships hit larger ships easily. Large ships have trouble hitting smaller ships.

If youve ever played eve online you already know how this works. Its called Gun Tracking and Angular Velocity :)

[Mistfox]

I see you have not used the flagella bombers before. Those things are murder machines. Average of 20.xx damage per time part. They're obtained from the tech dropped by alien amoebas, not part of the normal tech tree but once those things get into the field, ouch.

[Panda]

Here's an excerpt from a post by /u/Sevsquad:

...

WHAT COUNTERS WHAT

Every weapon and armor type in Stellaris has a direct hard counter.

1. Energy weapons are weak to shields, strong against armor.
   
2. Kinetic weapons are strong against shields, weak against armor.
   
3. Missles are strong against both however can be countered better than any of the others with point defense systems.

...

• Bombers and Fighters are very hard to hit, basically have to be shot at by small weapons.
  
• Corvettes are most easily hit by small weapons.
  
• Destroyers are most easily hit by medium and small weapons.
  
• Cruisers and Battleships are most easily hit by literally everything.

...

[VoiD]

fleet power is just raw power, composition weapon types vs hull types are just as important.

It's the same as thinking you should win EU4 battles with 30k troops just because the enemy has 20k without taking into account terrain modifiers, generals, technology, military ideas or military tradition, the raw number is just one of many variables.

Originally posted by Panda:

Here's an excerpt from a post by /u/Sevsquad:

...

WHAT COUNTERS WHAT

Every weapon and armor type in Stellaris has a direct hard counter.

1. Energy weapons are weak to shields, strong against armor.
   
2. Kinetic weapons are strong against shields, weak against armor.
   
3. Missles are strong against both however can be countered better than any of the others with point defense systems.

...

• Bombers and Fighters are very hard to hit, basically have to be shot at by small weapons.
  
• Corvettes are most easily hit by small weapons.
  
• Destroyers are most easily hit by medium and small weapons.
  
• Cruisers and Battleships are most easily hit by literally everything.

...

Wow, finally found some one else that's not just saying "SPAM DA BIGGEST SHIPZ!"

[mcsproot]

Fleet power is a rough example of how strong a fleet is. However, there is a little bit of rock-paper-scissors in the combat that means a strong fleet can lose to a weaker one if they are a counter.

Missiles: long range and high damage, but can be intercepted by point defenses.
Energy: good against armour, but is ineffective against shields.
Projectile: can bypass shields, but damage is massively reduced by armour.

So if you're stacking one weapon type, and the enemy has a counter defense, you're not going to do well.