Lesser ships owning my greater ships???

One example is modifiers like starbases. And if the ship is in orbit of a system it gets some def bonus depending on what social imrovements the system has.

~SDC~

Yes but those bonuses will show on the enemy when I click their ships.

~SDC~

Unlike CivIII, both the attack and defense value of both the attacker and defender are used in all combats. In CivIII, attacking something with a 12 def with an 8 atk, you'd expect to loose quite often. However, even the combat transport has an attack of 0. Now, on ships where the defense is higher than the attack, when they're attacked, half their defense gets added to the attack, so in the first case, the combat transport (assuming no bonuses apply) would have an attack of 4 and defense of 8, against the frigates attack of 5 and defense of 4, things would still favor the combat transport, but if the frigate has been upgraded to 8 and 7, then unless the combat transport has been upgraded, it's in trouble.

Also note that there are techs and such that can increase the number of hitpoints, and that is quite important as well. If your ships didn't get much of a HP bonus but this particular AI did, then that's even more of an advantage.

Oops, forgot to mention that on some pages here (the Metaverse, for example), there's a "Simulator" tab on the left of the page that lets you try out various combinations of combat to see who would win more often, and how many hitpoints the survivor is expected to have when done.

ah yes i did forget about the attack being added. not to mention, attacks are based on rolls they aren't always what the number of the ships defense is.

~SDC~