Hello commanders!
Based on gathered information from the begining of the round and feedback from commanders, I was able to design a better fleet power formula that will improve gameplay a lot. I appreciate the patience in this matter, as it took time to test the new formula.
The new formula takes into account even the size of the ship, puts more points on size and ship cost, while decreasing the points added by shield / absorb and increasing defense. The end result is close to the original fleet power (most ships being at about 70% power of original formula). Hidden aliens and other missions become a more viable option to increase your power again.
shipPower = round( (shipSize*165 + shipCost*3 + shipAtt*shipAcc + shipDefense*5 + shipAbsorb*5000 + shipHitpoints/300 );
Then attack / HP penalties are applied.
About the aliens and combat missions and what ship to use:
The ships you encounter while fighting aliens are different models. By far the most dangerous are small alien / pirate swarms. Those swarms will take advantage of the low HP penalty and will be very dangerous when encountered. In order to protect against it, the ship used to fight should have Hitpoints about 50x times the fleet power you will face.
Example: 1 mil FP, good ship would need about 50 mil HP. 100 mil FP faced, use a ship with 5 bil HP.
Also put the best shield you can muster and improve your commander skills.
The attack is also important to minimize failed attacks, so after you've setup the HP buffer / tank, work on the attack.
It is also important that you should use at least 5 fleets to minimize potential swarming attacks. If you use just 2-3 fleets, it's possible that the ship could get swarmed and destroyed as they get damage from first fleets and tail enemy fleets and eventually blow up due to taking too much added damage. You can also use tails as decoy but that will also lower your damage and may fail the mission due to too low damage to meet the objective. It will _not_ be easy, you will lose ships sometimes!
Other changes: Improvement to Incursion!
- Incursion alien spawns max spawn now (150 aliens), some waves gather around existing commanders power in Incursion, the rest are around 500k-1.5 mil fleet power.
- multispectral probe max amount dropped from alien spawns 2x, pinpointer probe max amount droped 5x
- multispectral probe cost increased to 750k credits
- pinpointer probe cost increased to 500k credits
- there is now a chance to spawn Incursion alien wave Commander, and also a chance to the Queen will have some commanders with it. The Commanders drop valuable items, not as much as the Queen, but great items nonetheless.
Hidden aliens found by probes as always have a chance to spawn an alien Commander / Queen if you manage to kill all of the alien spawns.
Godspeed!