How does Combat involving 2-hit battleships work? If you have 5 battle ships bombarding 5 infantry, and the infantry get all 5 hits, can you spread the hits out over all 5 of your battleships. If you can do that, couldn’t you just retreat and your battleships get repaired?
In a sea battle your example would work. Imagine 5 battleships attacking 5 destroyers. The attacker fails to hit and the defending destroyers score 5 hits.
The attacker can now assign the five hits to just damage all of the five battleships. After that round of combat the attacker may retreat - and the battleships are repaired.
HTH :-)