It is always good to know what you are up against. One way to fill out the information of what your enemy is capable of is to reverse engineer his ships. This can give you a general idea of his technology level,what doctrines/traits he may have, his ship-design philosophy, and perhaps most importantly of all it will allow you to recreate his fleet precisely in the battle calculator. Whenever you have a battle with an enemy a combat report is generated. This combat report is remarkably detailed and will allow you, with a little deductive reasoning, to figure out exactly what your enemy is bringing to the table. The key is the tooltips, when you hover over certain areas of a combat report it will break down the information for you in a tool-tip. Here is a stylized battle report which hopefully makes clear the information you can get from each area. I went ahead and anonymized it even though both players were using fake names.
So lets go ahead and reverse engineer one of these ships. Right off the bat it is obvious that the most important ship design in this fleet is the destroyer that there are 42 iterations of. So that will be our victim. As you can see these ships have 1482 Light Firepower, 260 Heavy Firepower, 0 Bombing Firepower and 817 units with no shields. Now right off the bat the 1,482 light firepower should tip you off that some kind of doctrine or civ trait is at work here. The reason you can tell this is no weapon or combination of weapons will end in 2. All weapons either end in 5 or 0 so anything that deviates from that is indicative of a trait or doctrine. The same thing can be inferred by looking at the shields of the other ships, there is no way to make a 45% shield with stock items. Now unfortunately there is no way to exactly recreate this players ship unless you have the same traits and doctrines as him. There are, however, a few workarounds. You can use the test-bad galaxy(if it is available to you), use an Excel based ship calculator, or you can just do a little math and figure out what the base stats should be which is what we are going to do.
First thing is the shields, there is only one thing that effects shield-strength and that is the doctrine lightweight. So thats one doctrine. This is not pertininent to the ship-design we are reverse engineering but it is good to know. Next lets look at the units, the 42 ships are listed as having 817 units each but a total units of 49,766. If we take 49,766 and divide it by 42 we get a result of 1184.9 so there is something effecting the ships hitpoints and its not shields. There are only two things that can do this and its the doctrines Juggernaut and Dreadnought. They increase ships hitpoints by 25% and 20% respectively. We can see that 817 plus 45% gives us a result of 1184.65. Already we can see that our opponent has both of these doctrines. Dreadnought also gives a 30% bonus to heavy ships firepower so if we apply this knowledge to the listed firepower of the ship we get a result of 1140/200/0. A Beam Laser has the base statistics of 285/50/0. Guess what 4 of those equals? Thats right 4 Beam Lasers matches up exactly with our base statistics. If our opponent had civ-traits that effected firepower we would have another step but he does not.
So if we start with an empty Destroyer hull and put 4 beam lasers on it we get a leftover space of 330 units. We know there are no shields so the only possible changes are engines, scanners, and modules. There are no modules that really make sense to add so we will assume none. The most logical scanner would be a neutron scanner since this is a fighting ahip. Neutron scanner takes no space so we still have 330 space to fill with engines. At this point you need to add and subtract engines until you come up with a combination that equals 817 units total fo the ship. The only combination that yields this is 11 anti-matter engines. Congratulations, you have now reverse engineered your first ship!!! If you are in a Basic Galaxy this becomes much easier since you do not have to worry about doctrines or civ traits.
If you do a military scan on an opponents fleet you can drag this into the battle calculator. This allows you to do some quick and dirty simulation and is obviously much easier than reverse engineering. Unfortunately this gives you an inaccurate result. This is due to the fact that the battle calculator treats the enemies fleet as a single unit so there is no lessening of firepower as individual ships get destroyed. This will make an enemies fleet appear much stronger than it really is. Reverse engineering will give you a much more accurate result. One drawback is that you are unable to select your enemies traits and doctrines in the calculator . I sincerely hope this will be fixed in the future. Until then altering your ship design with more shields/weapons and less engines to more accurately represent your enemies combat capabilities may be the only solution. This will make the speed inaccurate but for battle calculations this is irrelevant.
This guide has been created by uncountednose. See the forum contact information.
. I sincerely hope this will be fixed in the future. Until then altering your ship design with more shields/weapons and less engines to more accurately represent your enemies combat capabilities may be the only solution. This will make the speed inaccurate but for battle calculations this is irrelevant.