If youve already paid for the energy how can it cost credits to actually use it?

Energy costs 0.4125 credits per energy (ignoring the constant value) - system costs are independent of the energy consumed - so your comment still doesnt make sense.

A special or weapon costs from 1 to 9 credits - just put the extra energy there.

OK - thanx FTP that clears it up for me.  I didnt understand what constituted a successful boarding attack, now I do.

So, check my understanding here again Ill paraphrase you.

1.  A successful boarding attack occurs when you reduce enemy marines to zero during the attack, or if the ship(s) has/have no marines.

2. After a successful boarding attack there is a probability that the ship will self destruct (this is independent of the starting number of marines, other unknown factors may influence this probability)

3. If the ship doesnt self destruct it becomes "captured".

Hmm - looks right.  Ok - didnt know you had to eliminate all the enemy marines to make a successful boarding attempt.  I rarely use marine attacks - I usually just shoot the enemy ships down - a lot less messing around.

Nice ideas - can see anything here I dont like really.

In the interface upgrade suggestion warp travel and mining items are also covered to make thm more user friendly and useful.

Really theres a lot of trash in the items at the moment - being able to do something with them apart from selling would be nice.

- Chance of capture / exloding is not affected by marines on board.


Ok - so expounding the above sentence, it means (?);

When a ship is captured, there is a chance of it exploding, or being commandeered - the probability either of these two events occuring is independent of the initial numbers of marines.

Is this what Emi meant?

So the chance of capture is still related to the number of marines, but after its captured its chance of self destruct is independent of the initial number of marines - sounds like its possibly a fixed percentage, not affected by any variable?

Kenq

Using your sum of fractions formula then 1x36% shield, and 20x31% shields gives 62% absorb.

However if you build it in the game youll find its exactly 66% absorb.  The more iterations you do, the worse that formula result is.

Theres a bit more to the eqn.

Correction - you can get the best HP ratio out of superswarmers - but the attack power is very low compared to a small swarmer.  Superswarmers cant compete because small swarmers get thier attack power for free - you simply arent paying any energy for it - theres a positive constant value in the weapon equation, its quite a large value, especially when you multiply it a billion times.

Thats how PShips work - they have free energy for their guns.

Which was exactly my point. 

If I send a a small ship in with 1 billion marines against a large ship with 5 trillion marines - your telling me my chance of capturing it isnt related to the fact that Im outnumbered 5 thousand to one?

I dont quite understand why this would be so, or why you would want it to work that way?

THis comment doesnt make any sense at all.  All the energy and space on a ship should be utilized - youve already paid for it.

Put it into the special or weapon as Jessie suggested.

You need 10 fleets of ships, you can certainly start with 3 or 4 and successfully do missions - but ultimately you must have 10 mission ships.  When you launch a new lead ensure its cost lies between 25% to 50% more than your previous most powerul ship.

With a properly structured fleet and well designed ships you can do any mission thats less than 3 times the fleet power of your leading ship - as your a beginner, Id suggest dont tackle missions or encounters with more than double the fleet power of your lead. 

If you often lose ships following those instructions then your ship design or fleet set up is very poor and needs to be adjusted.

Theres always a remote chance of losing a ship to a rare type of enemy spawn - high defence swarmers or tinymen can both cause unexpected losses of ships.  Its better to budget for the losses and attack the higher encounters rather than play ultra conservatively.

Whats funny is the number of threads on this topic that people arent reading.

Emi made a post today on one of the threads indicating he is working on a fix, and there are already some good suggestions.

Due to the differences on Main and Wars - maybe each server needs a different solution.

I dont think its productive to create further threads on this at the moment, unless you have a new idea/insight into a solution.

Silence -

Generally swarmers in the 15 to 30 size range are the most cost effective.

For those size swarmers you only use; Armour, Powercore, Weapons.

If you want to use a swarmer with a special - then I suggest you go for a larger ship design.  However, in general they arent going to be competitive with the small swarmers.

Theres a fairly short list of components that you can put into a small swarmer - if you mess around with the designer a bit you will likely stumble across the best Powercore and Armour sizes.

Installing weapons on a small swarmer is probably the trickiest thing - you have to decide what kind of fleet power profile versus attack power suits your fleet set up.  But again - just experiement with the designer. 

For ships this small, you dont really need any equations - you can happily use trial and error because the components all have to fit into a small hull - so theres a finite number of good variations.

Kenq - I see this as a very important poll.  Im sure Emi wants to understand what players want the most out of both whats being discussed in suggestions and what he has planned - then its easier to prioritise changes and updates.

Good work on producing this poll Jessie - a good idea.

Very good idea, I hate to put any design into public, but you want to help Alliance members for sure.

Hmmm - I did it fairly simply - but maybe Ive over simplified - anyhow, the difference is negligble.  I didnt really test that one at all - so could be an error.

Excel wasnt able to resolve it completely - it still froze the machine a couple times.

Id almost be tempted to advise you to keep this kind of stuff to yourself because folks dont know how to do it - but Im guessing 99% of people reading your post dont know what the hell your talking about anyhow - so its np really