Endless Space 2 Combat discussion

[glythe]

I'd like to talk about some of the finer points about ship design with Endless Space 2 with anyone who has done some thorough testing. You can pretty much use whatever you want when playing the AI (even on endless). But playing against a person is a completely different story. With that in mind please be mindful that this thread is more of a disccusion about what works vs an intelligent opponent and not an AI.

These are my personal observations from testing. If you have evidence to the contrary I would like to hear how you arrived at a different conclusion.

1. Endless Space 2 Combat makes any hull less than a carrier irrelevant.
2. Fighters/Bombers are completely worthless
3. Evasion modules do not stack
4. Forced combat lanes lead to silly fights
5. Ships with more weapon slots kill ships with fewer slots

Other user Observations (needs testing)

6. When you battle the game only care about hits. You can be defeated by having less hits.
Higher amount of hits stacks toward your victory.

[HellSlayer]

Originally posted by glythe:

I think if you are having trouble with ground battles you might want to start making siege ships. Make protectors and give them one mobility engine with everything else being a siege module. If you so choose you may add a siege/turn module but I would advise against it. Nothing will stand in your way when you attack with 1400+ tanks per turn. And because you also have a full fleet of regular ships with the siege stack you have reserves... not that you will need them.

In the case of the Unfallen home planet you might want to consider siege/turn modules as it can save you a turn sometimes. Just about everything else will fall on the first turn - but sometimes something will not quite be a decisive victory on a large system with lots of bunkers and what not.

Thanks for advice. ES2 skill tree is much harder to memorise compared to EL..
What about ships before protectors era.. which is better to research . i forgot how they called.. :D one is like support another is attacker.

[chefcook90]

Ok, I did a quick word search for the terms "debuff" "buff" "support" "boarding" "crew" "EMP" and "manpower", and the only one that came up was "support," and it was in Sublustris' post.

Again, what kind of testing did you do, man?

Did you even test Boarding pods, crew-killing weapons, weapons with debuffs, and fleet-wide support mods?

Did you try 5 Carriers vs 4 Carriers + 6 CP worth of support ships with fleet-wide buffs?

I'd do it myself, but apparently my opinion doesn't matter unless I have another human player to test it against >_>

BTW, what IS this "unbeatable Carrier" setup that you keep going on about? Is it a singular build, or are you trying to argue that 5 carriers will always defeat 30 small ships regardless of what their loadouts are?

[glythe]

Originally posted by chefcook90:

Again, what kind of testing did you do, man?

Did you even test Boarding pods, crew-killing weapons, weapons with debuffs, and fleet-wide support mods?

Did you try 5 Carriers vs 4 Carriers + 6 CP worth of support ships with fleet-wide buffs?

I'd do it myself, but apparently my opinion doesn't matter unless I have another human player to test it against >_>

There is no need for hostility as I am not attacking you or anyone else personally. Allow me to explain why testing done with an AI largely does not matter. If you do not use controlled repeatable conditions then the test data is largely irrelevant. This is in part due to the fact that minor details can swing battles such as having more ships in a certain lane or having a certain battle plan over another.

Boring information incoming.

I played a game with a friend and we played just the two of us conquering parts of the galaxy.

We went through the entire tech tree and gathered resources to be able to make anything we wanted. We had the supremacy DLC off but the Vaulters DLC on - if that matters. We had the exact same space damage traits (Price of Perfection II, Big Fleets II and Deadly Weapons II).

Boarding pods don't work vs carriers that have 1400 crew. Neither of us had the crew killing battle plans on hit (are those part of supremacy?). We found that risking the use of support ships made you lose the fight because your damage was lower. You lost a carrier first and then there was a chain reaction where you kept losing more carriers at a faster rate.

We made ships with the idea of learning how to make more deadly fleets. While we were playing different races we often limited builds to something that we could both make for the sake of seeing what happens when you have 5 guns/4 shields against a mirror build. This was not done for every test as we did want to test offensive slots relative to defensive slots. I have not gotten to that point but sadly offensive slots are worth massively more than defenses.

The first thing my friend wanted to test was to see if carriers would ever lose to a bunch of smaller ships that were not carriers.

As far as we could tell the answer was no - this has largely to do with the "thumbs up battle mechanic" where you get a huge buff if you are winning the fight. To explain this more readily you need to look back to some of our first tests where we had one carrier fighting another lone carrier with exactly the same stats.

We found that one carrier has trouble killing a ship built exactly the same as itself. But once you get that thumbs up damage boost you win the fight. For no discernable reason the fight goes from the ship having 95% health or more down to immediately zero health.

The expectation for this fight is that both carriers should be really close in terms of health/damage.... but that is not the case! One comes out of the fight with full health and the other is dead. In short this thumbs up mechanic seems completely insane. I can't see a reason why there would be an on/off switch like that where you arbitrarly just win.

In the first endless space if you had ships that did not kill each other the fight was declared a draw. As such the fight could continue more rounds later if one of the involved parties wished.

Why is there no video in any of this? Watching the battle has a high chance of crashing the game or causing a de-synch (which can really mess up the game in crazy ways).

Originally posted by chefcook90:

BTW, what IS this "unbeatable Carrier" setup that you keep going on about? Is it a singular build, or are you trying to argue that 5 carriers will always defeat 30 small ships regardless of what their loadouts are?

Technically the statement is: 5 carriers and 1 coordinator will beat any other combination of 33 comand points.

With the restrictions that no heroes are used for either fleet and you have access to the entire weapons tech tree.

[glythe]

Originally posted by HellSlayer:

Thanks for advice. ES2 skill tree is much harder to memorise compared to EL..
What about ships before protectors era.. which is better to research . i forgot how they called.. :D one is like support another is attacker.

I never use the protector.... except for siege purposes. An attacker is better in a fleet because you raise your DPS and kill the enemy faster (so he has fewer guns shooting back). I know how things are supposed to in theory work but that's not how things are working from wht I have seen.

Your first ship is the explorer.
The first damage ship is the attacker.
The first defense ship is the protector (has a square icon)
The second damage ship is the hunter (3 command)
The second defense ship is the coordinator (3 command)
The last ship is the carrier.

[glythe]

Originally posted by chefcook90:

The entire point of Fighters and Bombers is to negate the silliness of forced combat lanes.

That's sad then because they get obliterated by flak. Carriers that have some ballistic guns get to pretty much ignore fighters/bombers.

So much so that fighters/bombers are a complete waste of weapon slots.

Originally posted by chefcook90:

[ maybe you should try using small ships for point defense instead of Carriers?

So far as I can tell it doesn't look like friendly ships bother shooting down missiles/fighters/bombers for allies.

So far as I can tell it looks like point defense are massively more concerned with shooting the enemy (even at long range where they have at most 10% damage capability).

Originally posted by chefcook90:

Ok, did you really test this with another person?

All testing was done with another person. The last set of tests was 4 hours of what if we do this....

Originally posted by chefcook90:

Those attack power and defense power numbers are MEANINGLESS - what matters is DPS, absorbtion percentages, and health pools.

Maybe try clicking on that "details" toggle next time, and actually tell us what the numbers are?

That's not true at all in my experience. If you keep everything in the same "unit" then it's fine. What you meant to say I think is the second you have some number withut a unit then it becomes worthless information. You can for example go into the editor and build yourself a nice little ship with 90k damage if you want to convert that to DPS. I think either unit in this case lies very heavily about how much damage it does (which is why I arbitrarily chose sword/shield values).

The really funny thing is that both of us experienced a condition where the game lied to us about how much damage our fleet was going to due relative to our opponent. It always seemed to be the case in this game that the enemy's firepower was higher on an equal build. There might be something funny going on with this.....

I'm guessing you neglected to read the meat of the data from testing?

Originally posted by glythe:

An attacker worth one point with a listing of 2313 has that health pool inflate to 6554 upon creation. Meanwhile a carrier with a base health of 32832 inflates to 93024 once created due to the legendary modifier. Built with a similar style (as slot varies from attacker to carrier) the attacker had an attack value of 1796 (*6=10,776) while the carrier had a base value 72,718 for the same command points. Let's scale this idea up so we have 30 points fighting 30 points; that gives us (10,776*6)= 64,656 vs 363,590 = (72,718*5).

You are suggesting a fleet with 196,620 health and 64,656 damage will be able to defeat a fleet with 465,120 health and 363,590 damage. Just so we are clear here let me point out that the attackers have one of each defense which gives them 50% hull plating and 80% shields (972 shield value). While each carrier has 74% hull plating and 84% shields (7776 shield value).

My testing partner and I went though a few combinations and quickly changed test paramaters as we found no possible way for a carrier fleet to lose to a sub carrier fleet. The health and damage values are a proof to that end.

Pick a single weapon to slap on both ships... the carrier is massively more efficient. Here's what I made in about 30 seconds.

You can make a glass cannon hunter that has 1985 DPS
You can make a well balanced carrier that has 5919 DPS.

The carrier gets more than triple the health when it is legendary (22k vs 92k).
The carrier has more shields and more hull plating.

Things might have been far more interesting if Hunters had been 2 command points...

1985x3 = 5955.
22x3=66k

Originally posted by chefcook90:

Tell me, how many flak batteries does a carrier need to completely wipe all 6 bomber squadrons on a Sophon carrier?

I do not have that data sorry. But if you go heavy on bombers you should expect to lose. Look at the DPS values when you have 4-6 bombers with all support modules leading to damage. Note it is far lower than just picking one weapon type with crit modules.

In the case of the extreme mismatch where you have maximum bombers (sophon/UE) vs a carrier hull with -2 weapon slots total you will do almost no damage to the enemy fleet if the enemy ships all bring ballistic weapons.

[chefcook90]

Alright, now I'm not gonna call the TC a liar, but I did some actual testing on Missiles vs Bombers vs Point Defense, and came up with VERY different results.

Here's what I did: I found a static AI-controlled poacher fleet that was spawned during the endgame Academy Quest, parked a bunch of my own ships in a nearby system, then saved the game.

I then experimented with different loadouts and battle tactics and took screenshots of the post-battle screens.

To test Missiles vs Bombers, I started out with 3 Coordinators to match the 3 enemy hunters and outfitted them so they had roughly equal Bomber DPS and Missile DPS
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630963610
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630963348
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630963868
If Bombers really are countered by Flak just as hard as Missiles are, then the resulting damage output should be about the same, right?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630964996
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630965129
Nope, turns out Bombers were twice as effective.

I’ll let the screencaps tell the rest of the story.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630968029
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630969551
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630969766
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630970031

[chefcook90]

cont.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630976788
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630977392
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630977167
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630977583
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630976212
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630976411
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1630976557

[glythe]

Why did you test with non Carriers?
Please try again with Carriers.

Did the AI pick exactly the build you requested? And the battle order?

Do you know what parts the AI was using on his ships?

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by glythe:

Why did you test with non Carriers?
Please try again with Carriers.

Did the AI pick exactly the build you requested? And the battle order?

Science is about constants and variables - YES the AI used the build and battle order I requested, because all I needed was for it to use the same ships and tactics during every test.

Saving the game and reloading after each engagement let me test under the exact same conditions. Every. Single. Time.

As for why I didn't use Carriers:
2 Carriers vs 3 Hunters is hardly equitable - you're getting an extra 3 CP out of that
Send 1 Carrier and the missiles fail by default because the AI will spread their ships to as many flotillas as possible for the morale bonus.

I guess I could goof around until a 12 CP fleet shows up and test against that?

EDIT: In response to your edit - no I did not know the exact loadout of the AI's ship.
And that's fine. In a normal PvP game you will never be able to tell the exact builds your opponent is using anyway.
What matters is that I knew those ships had slug modules on them - enough that they could gun down a whole lot of missiles and/or a few bombers.

[HellSlayer]

Thats what I wanted to ask.. hunter or coordinator?

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by glythe:

I'm guessing you neglected to read the meat of the data from testing?

Originally posted by glythe:

An attacker worth one point with a listing of 2313 has that health pool inflate to 6554 upon creation. Meanwhile a carrier with a base health of 32832 inflates to 93024 once created due to the legendary modifier. Built with a similar style (as slot varies from attacker to carrier) the attacker had an attack value of 1796 (*6=10,776) while the carrier had a base value 72,718 for the same command points. Let's scale this idea up so we have 30 points fighting 30 points; that gives us (10,776*6)= 64,656 vs 363,590 = (72,718*5).

You are suggesting a fleet with 196,620 health and 64,656 damage will be able to defeat a fleet with 465,120 health and 363,590 damage. Just so we are clear here let me point out that the attackers have one of each defense which gives them 50% hull plating and 80% shields (972 shield value). While each carrier has 74% hull plating and 84% shields (7776 shield value).

My testing partner and I went though a few combinations and quickly changed test paramaters as we found no possible way for a carrier fleet to lose to a sub carrier fleet. The health and damage values are a proof to that end.

In my defense, that data was not part of your OP and was a response to another poster much further down in the thread.

Even then, when you say "damage" in that post, you're talking about Offensive Power and not raw DPS.

I can tell you right now that it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ impossible to build a carrier that deals 60,000 damage per second, even if you outfit it with nothing but Annihilator Beams - it might have 100,000+ offensive power, but the DPS will only be in the 4200+ range. (I'm using the Vaulter Carrier as an example, because yes, it kinda sucks)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1631035096

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by glythe:

We went through the entire tech tree and gathered resources to be able to make anything we wanted. We had the supremacy DLC off but the Vaulters DLC on - if that matters. We had the exact same space damage traits (Price of Perfection II, Big Fleets II and Deadly Weapons II).

Boarding pods don't work vs carriers that have 1400 crew. Neither of us had the crew killing battle plans on hit (are those part of supremacy?). We found that risking the use of support ships made you lose the fight because your damage was lower. You lost a carrier first and then there was a chain reaction where you kept losing more carriers at a faster rate.

All of the advanced Missile and Beam weapons that require strategic resources to equip also deal crew damage (except for the EMP ones) - this was definitely a thing before the Supremacy DLC came out.

Open up your tech tree and do a search for the key terms “improved fusion,” “pinch,” “positron,” “gluon,” “entropy,” and / or “shrapnel,” and you’ll find them.

Annihilator Beams also do a whopping 100 crew damage per hit, but it’s dumb luck whether or not you’ll have access to them because they randomly appear as a legendary deed reward.

Also, did you actually try to capture a Carrier using Boarding Pods, or did you just ASSUME it was impossible? A proper boarding pod loadout goes all-in on boarding pods, except for heavy slots since those can't mount pods.

I can capture 3 hunters with 900 crew split between them using only 2 Hunters armed with 4 boarding pods each – I feel like a Carrier that's been fully loaded with boarding pods ought to be able to handle 1400 crew, what with their boarding pods being twice as strong from the size multiplier.

Granted, I did have to use Prudent Positions to do this – it cuts the weapon damage of both fleets by 50%, but doesn’t affect crew damage.

EDIT: wait, scratch that - those ships only had 56 crew each for some bizzare reason.
lol damn.

Double EDIT: Ok, I found another fleet of 3 medium ships that have maximum crew compliments, but unfortunately they also have 100% slug loadouts (I can tell because their range accuracy is set at exactly 10% / 50% / 85%

Not a single boarding pod from my Carrier made it through

I managed to overwhelm their point-defense by combining my Carrier with the 2 Hunters, but at that point it was 12 CP vs 9 cp lol
It also only works when all three ships are stacked in the same flotilla.

(Using 1 Carrier and 1 Hunter for 9 vs 9 resulted in a draw with only 1 ship captured)

[Groo the one]

Omg. Need more free time to follow this interesting discussion.

[glythe]

Chef I am well aware of the crew killing weapons. I was asking if the crew killing battle tactics on hit were part of supremacy or if they were the result of scanning curiousities.



If anyone is interested in doing some targeted testing I would be willing to go though another end turn fest