What is compared in ship comparisons

[contributor]

So I learned an important lesson the hard way today. My June Community Challenge captain met a xeno. I was flying a fully upgraded Palace Interceptor and wrecking all human opponents. Still I wasn't planning on messing with any xeno. I should have skipped as soon as possible. I looked at the ship comparison though and I outclassed the xeno in everything but range change. He was below my level too, so I thought, "If the comparison says I'm better than him in pretty much every sense, I might as well fight him." Well turn one, I buffed my defense (because it's always good to have a nice margin). He didn't even buff his accuracy but then proceeded to hit me with 3 torpedoes. That was pretty much the beginning of a slow death. 18 turns later my captain bit it. I found I had to have about +75% defense for him not to hit me at all and then hitting him was also pretty challenging. So long-story-short the ship comparison tool failed me pretty hard.

Rather than giving the TBs more tears to fill their cups though, I want to be pragmatic and figure out what happened here. So what is the ship comparison screen actually comparing when it comes to Accuracy and Defense? Obviously those can change significantly based on ranges, so how do we get those nice simple phrases "Our defense outclasses the enemy ships accuracy." My big question is whether it's taking dice from weapon accuracy into account. The pools that are the most static are standard dice pools so it would be easy to compare those, but they would give pretty skewed results especially if the enemy is packing high accuracy weapons. Is it somehow making an average composite score for all weapons ranges? If so that would be helpful to know, because that would mean that they could still hit regularly at certain ranges, but would be significantly handicapped at the other ranges. In my case the xeno still hit decently at range 3 compared to range 4 and 5. Anyways, insight into how those numbers get produced would be very helpful.

[fallen]

Yes, that is true -- weapon accuracy dice (strong dice) are not compared in the ship comparison because we don't know which weapon you are firing. This was one of the primary reasons we original compared attack to attack and defense to defense, because they were really clear comparison.

Perhaps we need to add the average of each ship's weapon accuracy into the mix.

[drspendlove]

Or at least add the minimum. but yeah, average makes more sense.