"Firepower" vs. "Threat" on the resource bar

[Harry]

Hi all,

I understand the "Threat" meter on the resource bar; it corresponds to the number of ships threatening to jump at me.  (And I can see the same numbers on the galaxy map with the right filter.)  But for grins, I changed my interface option to display "Firepower" in that field, and the number there seems very tiny.  What unit of measure is it using?

For example, with "Threat" selected, I'll see something like Threat:152, but if I switch the display option to Firepower, I'll see Firepower:4, or some very small number like that.  Is that 4,000 or 4 million or something?  Can I measure the amount of my firepower in the same units?

Thanks in advance.  (I did search on "firepower" here, and in the wiki, and couldn't find an explanation.  Apologies if it's somewhere obvious.)

[Oralordos]

Firepower is an internal statistic that is supposed to calculate how strong a unit is. A fighter would have a much lower(understatement) firepower than a superfortress,

[Harry]

Thanks for your reply.  Hmm, so it's an internal statistic.  Is there any way I can see my units' "firepower" expressed by the same metric?

[KDR_11k]

There may be an option for the galaxy overview. Seeing the FP values for individual units wouldn't help since only heavy units have FP values >= 1, most fleetships and such sit in the 0.0x range.

[Harry]

Thanks; that gives me a sense of the scale of the units involved. 

I'll poke around with the display options.  I appreciate the help.

[Aeson]

For reference, a full fleet of five types of Mark I fleet ships and and three types of Mark II fleet ships runs at roughly 400 firepower, a single Botnet Golem runs somewhere close to 100,000 firepower, and a single spire cruiser champion with plasma modules might run at around 700 firepower, on High ship caps off of one homeworld.

I would say that firepower is not particularly useful as a means of comparison of fleet strength, though, since the firepower rating is so variable for various ship types, and the AI doesn't always release all of the ships on a given planet when you send your fleet in, and not all the threat ships necessarily attack the same world at once.

In order to see the firepower display in the galaxy map, the left-hand filter needs to be one of the filters with 'ships' in the name, and the right-hand filter needs to have one of the various options that have '[firepower]' in the name. The 'Mobile Military [Firepower]' filter is possibly the most useful of these, since it causes the galaxy map to display the firepower of your mobile military ships (blue number above a planet) and the AI's mobile military ships (red number below a planet).

[lemons]

Firepower is a good way to figure out what the AI thinks about your fleet. If you have certain uber-units like a Botnet Golem on a border planet you'll notice border aggression AI units piling up, afraid to go in because the botnet's firepower value is HUUUGE. Then as soon as you remove said uber-unit from the system those units usually charge right in.