Choice: 3 defenders or 1 battleaxe?

from Stardock Forums
Costs the same maintenance for 3 defenders as 1 battleaxe, but 3 defenders have total of 9 points of defense and 75 hitpoints between them while battleaxe has only 40 hitpoints.

How do you figure out when it's better to have more ships and hitpoints, or fewer ships with more defense on each one? I'm assuming the 9 points of defense don't add, but other than that the manual doesn't go into much detail about how battles work so it's hard to figure out what to do.
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Go with the Battle Axe. It'll be cheaper, and depending on what is attacking you, probably more effective too. There's a battle simulator in the metaverse that might be of some help to you. As far hit points go, don't forget that attackers get the first strike. In the course of a full assault, your 3 Defender setup may miss up to 2 counter attacks before yielding, whereas the Battle Axe will not miss until it's dead.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Cool I just found that simulator in the Metaverse and it's going to be extremely helpful.

Now the only question is.. How does stacked battle work? On the simulator I did a simple test of one fighter against one defender, with 1000 attempts and the fighter never won even once. It did say that 7 fighters could take out a defender, but didn't go into how or why, and there's no option to simulate such a battle in the simulator.
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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
I like that tool too but I hope someone could update the ship stats in the Simulator based on the latest patch (eg. Starfighters).

7 (pre-1.03A.054) fighters in a 1000 simulations could defeat 1 defender based on sequential attacks made by each fighter. They would simply wear it down over the 7 attacks (doing roughly 3 damage to a 20 hp defender for each attack). There isn't fleet combat per say where they attack simultaneously. Stacking just relieves you of the effort to click on the defender 7 times.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Oh man, that sucks. I think fleet combat would be cool. That would add a whole new level of strategy to the game... Quality vs numbers.

Sheesh, if the GalCiv combat model were used in WWII, each German panzer could kill 10,000 American M1 tanks, but in the real world that didn't happen.

I wonder if proper "fleet combat" will ever be implemented in a patch. Hmm... :notsure:
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
You are not the first to say this Interstellar. Perhaps you would interested to dig into several old threads (under fleet combat) discussing this issue in greater depth.

Not that I would like to beat the old horse and revive this topic again but IMO there needs to be a fine balance between realism and gameplay (ie. majorly realistic games could be majorly unfun :) )