Unused weapons causing me to lose battles

[skigrinder]

Sorry Arkcon.
I missed a couple of questions from your original post.

My 'Planetary Defense Missile Spread' component has a range of 20 and a reload rate of 1.

I've seen the problem (available missiles not firing in combat) even when the attacking ships are sitting right next to the planet so I don't believe it's a range issue.

It looks like the automatic targeting algorithm is calculating how many missiles to send based on ship size and shield strength. It seems to fail to take point defense capabilities into account.

These missiles get fired, reduced in number by the attacking fleet's point defense, and finally do substantially less damage than was originally intended (because point defense was not taken into consideration). Meanwhile, lots of available missiles sit idle in my WP's.

I agree with your point that the AI should not be able to see a planet's defenses until it actually attacks. This makes for a difficult challenge. I lose lots of planets and the strategic implications become complicated. Fast transports are used to distribute extra WP’s ahead of attacking fleets.

However, WP's are not the only line of defense.
I devote a tremendous amount of energy towards Intelligence.
Crew Insurrection and PPP are very effective ways to persuade the AI toward my way of thinking.
When the game gets big, I build fleets of heavily shielded ships with Allegiance Subverters and Computer Viruses.
Converted AI ships end up helping my defense.
I suspect that this throws off the AI’s calculation of my defenses and they attack with less might than they thought they had.
Very large AI fleets have been defeated using these tactics and it makes for some very interesting battles.

I’ve never tried this philosophy against a human but I believe that it would be tough to beat.

Thanx,
skigrinder