Quote:
Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk
That's reasonable, however, there are other factors that make me uncertain whether a strategy that relies exclusively on exchanging defense would work out in practice.
First, defense fleets require a return journey whereas the home fleet does not, so all else being equal, it is twice as efficient to rely on your own ships than on those of others: 7--9 ticks staying home vs. (7--9) + 1 + (7--9) ticks defending. Additionally, you can make some use of your ships in the time between the attacker showing and landing. You could use it to fake attack with, or leech defense for a few ticks, or cover incomings on galmates with ships you need yourself, with time left to return home in time to fight your own incs (if they recall prematurely or do not do their research). Someone who has the fleet slot busy defending you cannot do any of these.
Second, if you get 3 waves of incomings, your own ships work against all 3 waves, but defense from others can only help against 1 wave at a time. Essentially, with a balanced fleet, you basically get a free defense fleet on every wave: your home fleet. If you have gaps (as opposed to mere weaknesses) in your defense, you give up that home team advantage, requiring more defense than you would if your fleet were balanced.
Third, if you rely exclusively or nearly-exclusively on defense to cover certain incs, attackers can send more waves than they otherwise could, because they don't have to worry about countering your own ships.
You make a good point, but I don't think it outweighs the 3 factors I listed above.
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All valid factors at face value I agree. I think good defence can be a lot more complex tho.
Being able to fake bigger fleets, activity of galaxy defence and build of it, leaving gaps also gets you smaller incommings of what you are weak to.
Not always ofc but a lot of the time a greedy attack team will put more smaller waves against someone who has no def ship against rather than throwing all their eggs in 1 basket on one wave, although you get more waves the waves end up easier to cover than 1 giant fleet sucker.
A lot comes down to defence efficiency, if you can rely on your team to recall promotely when their not needed then your defensive turn around greatly improves. Also the less fleets used to cover a wave leads to more incs being covered. Plus if you are self covered vs one type (apart from an uber wave) then your fleet will always be free to help others.
This is the other alliances suffer, they use to many small fleets to cover incs draining the available defpool. It's all well that everyone has equal amounts of 2 ships but when you only have 1 slot free and it's taking 4 of you to cover a wave there is a lot of idle ships and not many available deffers very quickly. This compounded by low response to incs and is why they get roided hard on w2-4.