Quote:
Originally Posted by Vainglory
I would have thought that a moderately damaged ship should make it home, whereas heavy damage would be where it starts to get dicey - but I'm only new to the game and I could simply be misinterpreting what "moderate" damage means.
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The various named damage states shouldn't be taken as absolute status definitions. They should instead be considered as general indicators of how bad the situation is AT THAT MOMENT. This takes a bit of getting used to.
Ships in our games don't have "hit points", as in take some fixed amount of damage and sink. Instead, they have a number of systems that affect the ship's ability to control various forms of damage, and each of these systems can be damaged and repaired at least some. Ships eventually sink because water is coming in faster than the pumps can throw it back out, and is spreading throughout the ship usually due to shell holes in key bulkheads.
As a result, 2 ships in the same battle rarely have the same exact damage from the same type and number of hits. Usually, they'll be hit in different places so will have damage to different systems, different rates of flooding, etc. Thus, the only way to give an overall status like "moderate damage" is add and average the amounts of damage to all the individual components. The amount of flooding in a ship, however, carries more weight than other things.
The pump capacity of a ship is largely a function of propulsion system damage, plus crew casualties. Both of these can be damaged by the spread of flooding and ongoing fires, as well as further hits. It can therefore happen that a ship be right on the edge of its pump capacity at a relatively low overall damage state due to not having shipped too much water yet. But a fairly large fire is raging, which kills some crew and/or damages the propulsion a bit, and that suddenly makes flooding exceed pump capacity.
When a ship exceeds its pumping capacity, it's probably going to sink unless the propulsion gets repaired, the fire goes out, or whatever, which allows an increase in pump capacity back to safe levels. But such a ship might still show as "moderate" because it hasn't shipped significant water yet. The only place to notice this is on the ship info screen where "flooding exceeds pumping capacity" will appear in red.
Anyway, I'm guessing this is what happened to your ship. She was right at the limit of her pump capacity, then the fire took out a few more guys and/or hurt the engines a bit, and that put her over the line. But because fire damage is somewhat random, this wouldn't happen every time you restarted the game.