@ Plant
Plant: Opening Post. Not much has changed,other than refuting Spideys arguments.
I don't mean to sound harsh but saying you've refuted something doesn't constitute a refutation. I've explained the potential problems in detail and if you still don't comprehend why I'm saying what I'm saying then the appropriate thing to say is that you don't understand it. Not that you've proved what I said to be wrong, which I'm sure you're also keenly aware that you haven't.
Spidey: Doing everything he can because his world view, like Deathball, that having loads of weapons on ship with little defences is superior over a more balanced ship has been overturned. His arguments mostly range from comparing impossible ship designs, being hung up over the use of the word "perfectly", and not understanding game mechanics such aspects of the ship design screen, the firepower rating which we are discussing, the diplomatic system, and attack overmatch. If I am proven right, he says discussing it is a waste of time or that I am beating his own strawman!
This is factually incorrect from start to finish. Every single word in the above is wrong. I have to ask myself if after all this writing you really got nothing whatsoever from the exchange other than what you wrote in this quote? If so, one or both of us has failed miserably.
Allow me to recap some of the issues. You're suggesting a combat strength formula that promotes a particular set of values as stronger but you have at no point managed to show that ship designs rated as stronger by your formula will in fact always be stronger in the game. Another problem is that you can't seem to make up your mind on whether the formula you're suggesting considers the amount of size dedicated to components or the actual component ratings. Another problem is that you're talking about "balanced" without actually defining it properly, though I'll give you that you've implicitly defined "balanced" as "using as much size for offense as for defense".
My preference is not berserker type ships. Quite the opposite, as I have written multiple times. I've talked about berserkers because they fall outside of your pattern in that they should be considerably weaker than "balanced" ships according to your formula, even though I've demonstrated that this won't necessarily be the case in the game. The claim that I don't understand aspects of the ship design screen is optimistic at best. There are numbers on that screen that I can't explain 100% but I do believe I understand the basics of ship combat. You've yet to show otherwise.
Final thing, if I intentionally write that some problem isn't necessarily important because it's not one that realistically comes up often then yes, it is a strawman to then bash my example for being unrealistic, since clearly I made no claim to the contrary. If you cannot understand why bashing someone for a claim he hasn't made is in fact a strawman then I fear this isn't the only time we're going to not see eye to eye on things.
For some reason, even though I explicitly stated my intentions, Spidey has gained the impression that the formula I proposed as a starting point, is a sacred cow. I originally contemplated posting instead, that the current formula of firepower to be changed to a sum of not only weapons but also of defence. Of course the problem with that would be to decide what numerical values should be attributed to shields and armour, whereas in the now suggested formula it would not matter in relation to weapons.
Starting points are not perfect, Plant. They are in fact the very definition of imperfect or they wouldn't be a starting point at all but rather an ending point. If you'd been willing to accept as much from the start then we could've saved a whole lot of time.
As for whether you sum attack and defense together or only the defense, you're still implicitly assigning weights to factors. In fact, no matter how you design the formula, you will by definition be assigning weights to factors. Currently the formula weights firepower at 1 and everything else at 0. You'd make firepower 0.5 and the abstract value of the sum of armor and shield 0.5. Those are in fact weights. Is an even split optimal? How about 45/55? How about 40/60? Those are weights too, weights that you've rejected for no clear reason whatsoever.
Your formula is to maximise the objective function of the biggest weapon effect value multiplied with the biggest defense effect. The defense effect is the sum of ratings for shields and armor. I originally thought shields would win this but it turns out that the ultimate shield has an effect of 320 for size 10 while the ultimate armor has an effect of 40 for size 1. What this means is that at the end of the tech tree, using your formula, a ship with 100 size dedicated to shields is decidedly less threatening than a shield with 100 size dedicated to UltraDense Armor.
You want a numerical example? Suppose we wished to use 200 size for combat components. To make that "balanced", we'd have to go with 100 size for attack and 100 for defense. For attack, let's go with 15 superflowing Titan Beams and 2 devastating Impact Assault Blasters. That's 100 size with a sum firepower of 479. On the defensive side, if we go with 10 exponential Meridian shields, we end up at a total defense effect of 3200. Sqrt ( 479 * 3200 ) = ~1238. On the other hand, if we go with UltraDense Armor and use 100 size on that, we'd have 4000 defense effect. Sqrt ( 464 * 4000 ) = ~1384.
Would you skip shields entirely on end game ships? Of course not, because armor can in fact leak damage against anything while shields only leak against certain types of weapons.