Tech V / Core ships have been added to;
http://arcengames.com/communitywiki/index.php?title=Relative_Ship_Strength
Tables showing the results of inter tech level battles have been added to a separate page;
http://arcengames.com/communitywiki/index.php?title=Inter_Tech_Level_Relative_Ship_Strength
I separated them because I felt that the original page would become too unwieldy.
Nice! That's looking really, really good.
x4000 - Thanks for allowing us to generate the xml file!
You bet!
The data show a few unusual results, notably things such as Anti-Armor IIIs should annihilate Anti-Armor IVs - whether this is accurate or not I haven't tested.
One thing I should mention, regarding that -- the relative strings DO include the relative ship caps. So in other words, the simulation would pit perhaps 3 vampires against 10 cruisers and give you the results, or 3 vampires against maybe 30 lazer gatlings, etc. That tends to give you reasonable results based on if you split your fleets up by pure percentages, but then if you group more (100% of your vampires all in one place, etc), then you can get really different results based on rates of fire and recharge, tactical positioning, combinations of ships, etc. So, while these numbers are very accurate in a certain sense, they also don't tell the full story. A very skilled player can use even a weaker ship type in a much more effective manner than the raw numbers might indicate.
As for the higher-level ships, those all have a slightly reduced ship cap compared to their lower-level versions. So it might be 9 Mark IV anti-armors against 10 Mark IIIs, or something along those lines. When the ships are powerful enough against themselves to one-shot each other or nearly so, then the raw numbers will carry the day in terms of the Mark III anti-armors against Mark IVs. The ships are not made for primarily fighting against themselves, however -- the extra bonuses and such of the Mark IV anti-armors make them a lot stronger against the ships they are designed to fight against, namely the armors and the other ships of that sort.
Additionally, with a few of the ship types one of the bonuses of the higher ship levels is a better cost-to-benefit ratio. So, in most of the ships that means that the benefits go up a lot, and the costs go up not quite as much, but in the case of a few ships that means the cost stays the same or even goes down a little (I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but I seem to recall one like that), while the benefit only goes up maybe %5 or 10%. These charts include relative strengths and ship caps, but the economic side of things is not taken into consideration with them. So that can also be a factor in giving some slightly strange-looking results when you look at this one dimension of ship performance.
That's the important thing to remember with these charts, overall. I actually went through a ton of iterations over months with this, trying different metrics and metric combinations in order to arrive at results that were as meaningful as possible. This is what I arrived at, but it's still just showing a few dimensions out of a multidimensional data set. Plus, there's that whole strategy tactics aspect that can really affect performance of the ships for better or for ill.
One thing I'd love to see sometime in the future, and which I think would be helpful for a lot of players, is advice on a per-ship-type basis. Clever ways in which players are using ships, or maneuvering ships, to get the best results. I've included a fair bit of that already in the official wiki, but that's just my own playstyle and I know I haven't thought of nearly everything. So when people come up with things that they think are particularly cool or effective, I'd love it if they would share, either here on the forums or else in the community wiki. I think those will tell the true stories of the ship strengths, but from a raw numbers standpoint these charts you've organized provide a great way to look at it. Much more easy to parse than my original xml!
