Update from some more testing:
Decent PD overwhelms swarm missiles, which, by the way, are actually doing focus.
Corvette spam reigns supreme.
Optimal Meta:
No-PD Corvette > PD Corvette > Missile Corvette > No-PD corvette.
However, the amount of PD needed to go in counter land is tiny, and the effect overwhelming. a No-PD will have a ~20% advantage over a PD build, while the PD > Missile counter is hard to the degree of ~100%. Missile > No-PD is a nearly as heavy counter, but is nullified by a small amount of reinforcements carrying enough PD for the entire fleet.
Crystal plates recommended.
Results not final when evasion admirals aren't involved. Evasion admirals are broken.
Who wants to play some Endless Space MP?
In general, combat balance is completely, utterly out of whack to a degree i wouldn't expect out of a first draft.
Additively stacking dodge is a complete rookie mistake. Dodge is multiplicative, period. If it isn't purely multiplicative, it's because you, designer, put further softcaps on it.
Range as advantage doesn't really make sense with the average ship EHP, damage and speed. Full range won't net more than two hits out, usually 5% ehp.
Missiles have an hard counter (PD), but lasers and physical projectiles don't. In general, there's no reason to use anything that's not a laser, even against shields - mainly because using any kind of missiles is exposing yourself to getting hard countered for very marginal gains.
Armor being % doesn't really make any sense, it never did.
Crystal plates are generally better than anything else.
Large and Medium weapons have no real business existing, since armor is %. An equivalent amount of small weapons is
strictly superior. (Note: Someone on the forums is claiming his testing reveals that large is actually strictly better, so it may be just a case of the tooltips somehow lying.)
That i've managed to gather, hangars have no practical use.
Destroyers and Cruisers have no practical use at mostly any stage of the game, except perhaps destroyers carrying more weapons when evasion isn't stacking up enough yet - which means t1 engines and no evasion admiral.
The only real use of battleships is taking down stations faster.
In general, most problems would be fixed if evasion stacked multiplicatively, really. That's the root issue and i can't really wrap my head around nobody in the chain of design, even the programmer that wrote the code in, not having ever encountered a 100% evasion exploit.
Technically there's a pretty well defined counter circle in Battleship > Cruiser > Destroyer > Corvette > Battleship, but the last two > break down when enough evasion is involved.
I think there's also somewhere the belief that balanced fleets over meta-countering is a good choice.
I honestly think that's completely misguided, because warfare gameplay is much better when big roles are given to intel, positioning and countering over being a more dakka game - which balanced fleet v balanced fleet is.
It's unfortunately spot on. The more you play, the more you notice. It's a game that was rushed out, but also could have done with more player feedback to begin with.
I strongly disagree that defects you notice 20h into playing a game warrant giving a complete bash as review, though.
Disregard the fact that i just posted a very through bash, i guess.
