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habituallyred posted:Looking forward to "goons design a world beating custom race," followed by, "goons design the worst race possible." I'll tell you right now, the answers to both are centered firmly on whether you have a bonus or malus to science.
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Mar 16, 2019 23:59
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Thotimx posted:If you thought the six classes of ships in MOO1 wasn't enough - well, get ready to face the pain of only five. But with refit eventually becoming a thing. Also, you don't scrap designs anymore - you just directly replace them. MOO2 doesn't work quite the same way MOO1 does.. those five slots are simply saved designs and don't affect your existing ships. Plus, you always have a dedicated slot for Colony Ships. Let's say you build five recons, and then decide later on that this whole unarmed scout business is terrible, you've gotten a little miniaturization, and you want to upgrade the Recon to the Recon II, now with two shot missile launcher. When you go and update the design, you'll have removed your original Recon design from the saved slot. However, any existing Recons you have flying around (or any that are still in the build queue) will still exist - and, in the latter example where they're in the queue, will still build based off the original design. If you want to upgrade a ship, you need to send it to a colony and choose the "Refit" option - in which case, you select a specific ship and a design of the matching size class and it "builds" the new ship based on the difference in cost between the current ship and the new design. Why do this when you could just build another ship? A few reasons: - Thotimx talks about Command Points later on the post, but especially early on, running over your budget of Command Points can drain your reserve relatively quickly. - Scrapping an existing ship is kind of wasteful - you get a little BC based on the cost of the ship back as long as you scrap the ship at one of your colonies, but refitting an existing ship is more efficient. - It costs less to refit an existing ship than to scrap and build new. - Ships in this game have veterancy - when you refit it a ship, it retains all experience and veterancy upgrades it possessed, whereas scrap-and-replace just gives you a brand new crew On the other hand, once you commit to a refit, that ship is wholly committed - you can't undo the process if, say, a couple enemy ships turn up unexpectedly. Canceling the refit process deletes the ship entirely. Additionally, it can be tedious and time consuming to refit numerically larger fleets. Six command points may not seem like a whole lot right now, but that increases both with numbers of colonies, star bases (and their upgrades), and certain technologies. Swarming enemies with large numbers of smaller ships can be a viable strategy in this game, although size classes do matter quite a bit - two frigates are generally not the equal of a destroyer. Likewise, three frigates do typically not measure up to a single cruiser and neither four frigates nor two destroyers will be as effective as a battleship. Bigger is better, but on the other hand those frigates are a lot cheaper and faster to build. Which brings us back to refits - replacing your large, high quality ships with new upgraded models is expensive and time consuming, and refits allow you to perform upgrades relatively cheaply and quickly. It is possible to do a weird sort of "doubling up" on ship production, by having colonies spit out cheaper, empty designs which then get sent to other colonies for refit and upgrade, but this is inefficient and I can't really imagine a scenario where you'd want to do this instead of simply building them in parallel.
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Mar 17, 2019 09:54
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Torrannor posted:Outpost ships actually do more than just extending your range. Other races can't colonize planets that you have an outpost on, they need to capture it. This can really help if you're in a race to colonize a good system. Outposts are really good for this reason on larger galaxy settings, as you can expand further without explicitly needing fuel upgrades or having to build a colony that may not be profitable. You can also place outposts on anything - asteroid belts and gas giants included, which can allow you to occasionally expand in directions that would otherwise be impossible without fuel upgrades. The free marine barracks upon colonization also lets you funnel some production from your more established bases to negate the starting 20% morale penalty. However, it may be less than ideal to build outpost bases in advance this way - an outpost ship costs 100 production, while a marine barracks costs 60(+1BC/turn). Every five outpost ships you turn out is another colony ship (500 production), which in the early game is a substantial expense, and in the late game you can frequently burn a great deal of money to speed up the establishment of new colonies and would rather your productive colonies spend production on other things instead. Thotimx griping about space monsters posted:The predictability that great planets will always be guarded by one of these things though is something I can't just wave away. It's a heavy-handed approach that needs more variety thrown into the equation for me to really embrace it. There are other types of space monsters, and not every good or great planet is guarded by one. However, when the game generates a system with a space monster, it also guarantees a great planet to go with it. Without space monster planets, it's possible for the number of terran planets in the galaxy to be limited to only race homeworlds themselves.
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Mar 19, 2019 01:21
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Hydroponic Farms seem like a good deal - hey, you can put two food on the table anywhere - but Biospheres are the better long-term choice and depending on your race/picks, can be a better short term choice if you feel like you can successfully grow, feed, and sustain the increased population. Aside from the expensive startup costs of building colony ships, the biggest problem in early colonization is providing food. Only Swamp, Ocean, and Terran worlds are "viable" self-sustaining colonies at the start, as the 0 and 1-food biomes require you to ship food in to make the colony useful. As you get access to improved technology, the number of workers you need to dedicate to farming decreases and more and more it ends up being both efficient and practical to let your high food, low-mineral planets feed the rest of your empire. Eventually, food stops being a remote concern, but early on getting a lucky biome or a farming leader can be the difference between expansion being feasible without tech and not.
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Mar 22, 2019 00:05
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Fangz posted:The mirv upgrade works off tech tiers, not weapons unlocked. So definitely pick up pollution processor. This is true for all miniaturization and weapon feature upgrades. Chemistry gives you miniaturization and upgrades for your missiles regardless of whether or not you're researching new missile tech. Likewise with Power for your bombs and Physics for your beam weapons. You, unfortunately, have the worst neighbors to be competing with for space in the early game - the Klackons' Unification means they have the food and production bonuses to colonize less-than-ideal planets while still getting profitable use out of them and stretch their starting Terran planet's good food production further. Silicoids' Lithovore and Tolerant status means that they have an effective production bonus due to the lack of a need for food or cleaning up pollution (as well as generally higher population caps) and thus can profit from nearly any planet. Meklars are cybernetic and have a substantial production bonus, meaning that they can make many more planets profitable - although they lose some of their bonus production to "feeding" themselves, they can stretch their starting Terran food production further than even the Klackons can. You might hang on for a while longer if the Silicoids can't get through your Star Base (and Fighter Garrison) yet, but this game is already over. The Silicoids have noticed that you are easy pickings, and your continued survival rests on the AI's willingness to actually construct and commit a fleet large enough to destroy your Star Base. Even if they choose not to, you're unable to expand and so you will fall further and further behind until one of them finally deigns to crush you
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Mar 31, 2019 21:37
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wedgekree posted:Ow. how effective do you find Fighter Garrisons? I tended to not use them a ton as they replaced fighters slowly and didn't have 'complete' wings each invasion. Let's talk about fighters - the overall discussion here applies to both Fighter Garrisons and the Fighter Bays that can be put on ships. The basic type of "fighter" is launched by Fighter Bays and (initially) by Fighter Garrisons are called interceptors. Interceptors work similarly to missiles - once launched at a target, they can't be controlled and continue to operate automatically. Interceptors: - Always carry one of your best weapons that can be made point defense. Interceptors carry a NORMAL beam, but will only be equipped with the best one that has a PD version. - Always uses your best targeting computer - Always fires at 0 range - Always shoots the side of the target where shields are weakest - Each interceptor has 3 + (armor multiplier) in structure, so interceptors have between 4 and 13 structure points - Combat speed of 8 + (2x drive speed), ranging between 12 and 22. - Can make 4 shots before needing to return and recharge Fighter bays launch 4 interceptors per bay. Fighter Garrisons launch 10 interceptors (in two groups of 5). How effective Interceptors are depends largely on your available beam research - since they don't benefit from beam miniaturization, they're decent candidates if you've been stealing/trading for your beam technology upgrades. Since they always fire at range 0, interceptors rarely miss and stay out for multiple turns to do damage repeatedly. However, they do tend to get cleared out by drive explosions, making them difficult to rely on heavily. Fighter Garrisons will eventually replenish their interceptors, but I can't remember off the top of my head if Fighter Bays do the same. Interceptors can be sent out against any targets - ships, missiles, other enemy fighters, you name it. Two other types of fighters exist - Bombers and Heavy Fighters, but these are later technologies and fighters in general fall off in effectiveness in the late game as beams begin to reliably out-damage their structure and targeting computers improve to the point where they get shot down reliably.
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Apr 3, 2019 21:23
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Planetary Supercomputer seems like an obvious choice - lots of research means lots of other toys - but in general, Holo-Simulator tends to be a better pick because 20% morale is a 20% boost to everything - research, farming, and production. Also a factor in the decision is that the Meklar, with whom you're currently at war, have both Mass Drivers and Planetary Supercomputer, which means there's a decent chance you'll end up with one or the other if you successfully invade. I have no idea what factors in to the chance to steal technology upon invading an enemy planet, but I generally find Holo-Simulator to be more valuable anyways, so I'm usually pretty happy to take Holo-Simulator even without the reasonable chance of acquiring Planetary Supercomputer through other means. The fact that neither the Silicoids nor the Klackons have taken the opportunity to grind you into paste is nothing short of mystifying, but if Sol is the only thing they can reach, they may not feel confident attacking the Star Base. Early shields in this game can feel pretty underwhelming for a couple of reasons - missiles are very strong in the early game, and early shields don't do much of anything to soak missiles. However, Force Fields is an extremely strong branch of the tech tree. Let's look at what options we have for Advanced Magnetism: Class I Shield: - Negates 1 point of damage from each incoming attack. - Each shot from a beam weapon, missile, fighter, etc, is treated as a separate attack, so if someone fires and hits with 5 laser cannons, Class I shields knock a total of 5 points of damage off the top. - Also adds a pool of regenerating shield HP equal to 5 * the ship's size class. Frigates get 5 shield HP, Battleships get 20. Each shield facing has its own pool of HP, and shields will regenerate 30% of the max shield value every turn, although if I remember correctly this is spread out across any damaged facings. - Since beam damage isn't actually random*, shields are dramatically better at protecting ships when fighting long-range engagements. Mass Driver: - A "beam" weapon that does a flat 6 damage with no range dissipation** - Has Heavy Mount and Point Defense modifications, as well as unlocking Armor Piercing (1) and Auto Fire (2) after the listed (#) of additional levels of Force Fields tech. - Has no range dissipation built in. Counts as a beam weapon for all relevant purposes - fighters will equip themselves with Mass Drivers if it's the best available "beam" tech. Probably the best PD weapon available for a while, although there's an argument to be made for Fusion Beams. ECM Jammer: - Ship Special system, gives +70% missile evasion*** to the ship carrying it. - This is actually a lot. Without an ECM Jammer, missiles have a roughly 90% chance to hit. With an ECM Jammer, missiles have a roughly 30% chance to hit.**** Mass Driver is really good. It's a fantastic workhorse weapon that can be relied upon well into the mid-game. However, ECM Jammer is incredibly strong against the strongest early game weapon (missiles). Class I shields are the only meh pick here. In general, Force Fields has a lot of difficult decisions to make like this and the decisions should be based on your situation - there's usually no one size "best" pick. *, **, ***, and **** are a separate discussion. Suffice to say that the way beam/missile offense/defense work is not intuitive - 50% is neither a flat nor a relative 50% increase to your chance to hit - and the numbers the game displays are either incomplete or flat out wrong. For a quick summary, though, when offense and defense are equal, the chance to hit is 50%, and missiles by default have a "missile attack" value of +50, giving them around a 90% chance to hit. Olesh fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Apr 4, 2019 |
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Apr 4, 2019 23:06
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You don't get techs every time you take over a territory. I'm not sure what (if anything) factors in to it. My doomsaying would appear to have been inaccurate; capturing Meklar worlds gives you more territory and you can leverage your Meklar population (which are overall superior to your 0-pick Normal Humans) to substantially boost your own production. In a brutal eugenics sort of way, at this point you'd actually want to replace your population with assimilated Meklar wherever possible; they're no worse at farming or science than your own guys and substantially better at industry. ECM Jammer was a solid pick; frequently when people play this game I see people taking Class I shields when really they ought to be taking ECM Jammers. Class III shields, which are the next shield tech, are the first shields that actually have a meaningful effect. Class I shields are better than nothing, certainly, but the opportunity cost for taking Class I shields instead of Mass Drivers or ECM Jammer is just too rough to justify, in my opinion. So here's a simplified breakdown of how hit mechanics in this game work: Hit Mechanics Any attack that has a chance of missing compares an attack value vs a defense value - for example, Beam Attack vs Beam Defense. I'm going to use BA and BD as examples, but note that missiles use the same general formula but with different bonuses and penalties. When BA and BD are equal, the chance to hit is 50%.When BA is greater, the chance to hit is something greater than 50%, and when BD is greater, the chance is less than 50%. The exact formula isn't given by the game, but you can subtract beam defense from BA to get a single number that I'll call "HIT"), expressed by this simple formula: code:So. Now that we've gotten the "simple" out of the way, what really goes into these numbers? code:code:code:code:A couple of key takeaways: - Missiles are very strong in the early game, because they hit 90% of the time, they're very difficult to shoot down with early game weaponry, and early on you can easily solve most problems by spamming tons of missiles. - Late game, missiles aren't quite so dominant - better computers and weapons make shooting down missiles much more feasible and ECM technology is extremely effective as a defense against non-ECCM missiles. - With drive upgrades, augmented engines, and other defensive ship systems such as ECM, you can make ships that are very evasive and extremely difficult to hit with beam weapons or missiles, even with all available offensive technologies. However, the inherent trade-off is that you won't have nearly the room for weapons, and overwhelming offense (provided you get the first turn) is a perfectly valid and effective means of reducing incoming damage. Races with preexisting defensive picks (such as the Alkari +50 Ship Defense) will find this a more worthwhile tactic in general. - It's much easier and cheaper to acquire an overwhelming offense advantage than it is to arrange for an overwhelming defense advantage. Olesh fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Apr 6, 2019 |
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Apr 6, 2019 00:25
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MechaCrash posted:Missiles also have beam defense, because they can be shot down. A faster missile is harder to hit, but "can go faster" doesn't help against being hit by missiles. This. I went and edited that section to be more clear. Fighters also use their combat speed to calculate their beam defense.
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Apr 6, 2019 03:56
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Gravitic Fields: Gyro Destabilizer is a very strange piece of equipment. On paper, each gyro destabilizer does poor damage relative to its size and cost. The spinning of enemy ships rarely has much use, as you can't control which direction the enemy ships end up pointing and you've got roughly 75% odds that the enemy can still turn to bring their forward weapons to bear. However, Gyro Destabilizers ignore shields and armor and do damage directly to enemy structure. It's possible to have a fleet attack strategy that relies exclusively on gyro destabilizers to blow up enemy ships, but it's not the most efficient or effective strategy. Inertial Stabilizers, by contrast, is very good - halving the cost of turning has obvious applications for hit and run strategies, but the real prize is the +50 Beam Defense (and the undocumented +25 missile defense). +50 Beam Defense is a substantial amount of defense, equivalent to two levels of computer upgrades. A ship with Augmented Engines and Inertial Stabilizers has a total of +100 Beam Defense over the base defense provided by crew and combat speed - 100 points of BD can be the difference between incoming fire operating with a +50 bonus (a roughly 90% chance to hit) vs a -50 penalty (a roughly 10% chance to hit). However, the size and cost of these systems is substantial without miniaturization, meaning that only larger ship classes can realistically equip them while still having a weapons loadout. But they're vital to the "large durable ship" strategy, and especially when paired with other racial picks making few, expensive, unkillable ships is a perfectly legitimate way to play. Magneto Gravitics: Warp Dissipater is incredibly situational, but if you're playing very aggressively, you might find this useful. Expensive and sizable to mount on ships, but preventing retreats can be useful. Planetary Radiation Shield is the first planetary shield. Useful defensively - any defensive structures on a planet has incoming damage from all sources reduced by 5 points, including missiles and bombs. Defensive structures (such as a Fighter Garrison) also come equipped with your best shields, so if you possess (for example) Class III shields, your Missile Bases and Fighter Garrisons under a planetary radiation shield would have incoming damage reduced by 8 points, rendering nuclear missiles and most early beam weapons entirely ineffective and providing good durability against nuclear bombs. Class III Shield is the first shield that provides reasonable levels of protection. All incoming damage is reduced by 3 points before being applied to shields, armor, or structure, and provides an additional regenerating pool of hit points (15 * ship size class). Both Class III shields and Planetary Radiation Shield are great picks, but will depend on your situation - Class III shields provide a substantial level of protection in early game conflicts. However, from an economic standpoint Planetary Radiation Shields can be crucial - while the difference between Barren and Radiated planets is mostly academic in the early game (you can't grow food and they have the same population cap), all maintenance costs are 25% higher on Radiated planets, meaning that a Planetary Radiation Shield will frequently pay for itself for any moderately developed colony and you can't terraform Radiated planets - only Barren and up can be improved. Rarely, if ever, would you want to take Warp Dissipater over either of the other two options. However, it seems like we need some clarification here: Thotimx posted:** Class III Shield - Absorbs 3 points of damage from any attack. We're getting hits of up to the low 40s, so that won't mean much to the high end. It'll mean more to the low-end though, some is better than nothing, protection against the more equal races, etc. Let's talk about Shields! Shields, as everyone probably assumes, absorb damage. They range from Class I (the weakest) to Class X (the strongest). Shields reduce incoming attacks by an amount equal to their class rating, and provide additional shield hit points equal to (5 * class rating * size class). Shields reduce damage from incoming attacks, then the leftover damage is applied to the appropriate shield facing, and any damage left over gets applied to armor (and then structure, if there's no armor left). Shields don't function inside a nebula. Also, some weapons ignore shields entirely, other weapons can be modified with shield piercing to allow them to ignore shields. There is a Ship Special System, Hard Shields, that increases shields' damage reduction by an additional 3 points, allows shields to function inside nebulae, and prevent shield piercing weapons from bypassing shields. So let's break down an attack here - I've got a frigate with Class III shields. My opponent fires and hits with 10 Laser Cannons. Without shields, I would expect to take somewhere between 10 and 40 damage. Based on the quote from Thotimx above, you might think that with Class III shields, the incoming damage taken is between 7-37 damage which gets applied to the shield facing. This is incorrect. While the damage total is displayed as a single number, shields apply their damage reduction to each individual attack. What this means is that a Laser Cannon, which normally deals between 1-4 damage, is mostly ineffective against Class III shields, doing 0-1 damage. Nuclear Missiles only do 5 damage (and not 8), and so forth. Even Class I shields offer decently modest protection against early beam weapons, especially at range, since beam weapon damage isn't actually random. Wait, what? You heard me. The listings for Laser Cannons say 1-4 damage, and Fusion Beams say 2-6, but these numbers are lies, lies, lies. But how come when I shoot, the damage numbers that pop up aren't always identical, you might ask? Beam Damage is not random See, beam weapon accuracy is random. In the previous effortpost, I talked about hit chances - if Beam Attack and Beam Defense are equal after taking everything into consideration, each attack only has a 50% chance of connecting. This means that if I shoot with 20 Laser Cannons, on average I'm only going to hit with 10. Sometimes I'll hit with 8, or 9, or 12. I might get lucky and hit with all 20. Regardless, the damage dealt per beam isn't random. Beam weapons only have one damage number - it's the "top" end of their range. Laser Cannons do 4 damage, Fusion Beams do 6 damage, Neutron Blasters do 12 damage, and so forth. However, the actual damage dealt to an enemy ship is a function of distance. At point blank (from 0-2 "squares" away), beam weapons do their full damage*. As the ranges get further away, the damage dealt by beam weapons falls off to a minimum of 35% the listed value, with the damage numbers being rounded to the nearest integer. Laser cannons at max range will always deal 1 point of damage, Fusion Beams will always deal 2 points of damage, and so forth. All "beam" weapons (with a few notable exceptions including Mass Drivers) use the same calculations for damage falloff. Yes, this means that the "x2 range dissipation" property of Fusion Beams doesn't actually exist. At 15-17 squares away, Laser Cannons do 50% damage (2 points) and Fusion Beams do 50% damage (3 points). Both are completely ineffective against Class III shields at that range. * Heavy Mount and Point Defense weapons operate under the same general rules - Heavy Mount weapons start with a 1.5x damage multiplier (point blank being from 0-8 squares away), down to a minimum of 0.85x the listed damage at 45-50 squares. At max range for regular beams (21-23 squares), Heavy Mount weapons still have a 1.2x multiplier. Point Defense weapons start with a 0.4x damage multiplier at 0-2 squares, do 0.2x damage at 3-5 squares, and do 0x damage from 6-8 and -0.125x damage at 9-11 tiles. Wait, WHAT? Well, okay, there's a minimum 1 point of damage. But that multiplier is there for a reason: High Energy Focus, is a special system that purports to claims beam damage by 50%. What High Energy Focus actually does is add a flat 0.5 to the damage multiplier after range is factored in. With High Energy Focus, a regular point blank beam does 1.5x damage, while a regular beam at max range does 0.85x damage. Heavy Mount weapons likewise get upgraded to doing 2x damage at point blank, and 1.35x damage at max range. Point defense beam weapons get upgraded to doing 0.9x damage at point blank, and 0.375x damage at max range. Some Key Takeaways: The listed damage ranges are worthless; only the higher number has any meaning. Beam weapon damage depends on exclusively on distance. If you are having trouble getting through enemy shields, use Heavy Mount weapons and/or get closer before shooting. Heavy Mount weapons suffer dramatically less in the way of damage drop-off compared to normal weapons. PD weapons are nearly useless except at point blank ranges without High Energy Focus. The Leader skill Ordinance applies as an additional percentage to the damage multiplier, similar to how High Energy Focus works. An Ordinance skill of 10 adds an additional 0.1 to the damage multiplier at all ranges, while a skill of 15 adds 0.15. Olesh fucked around with this message at 11:48 on Apr 23, 2019 |
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Apr 23, 2019 11:37
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One thing I didn't include in the "key takeaways" is that, if you look at the numbers, I wouldn't blame you for thinking that point defense weapons are pretty worthless. That's because for the most part, they are worthless outside of point-blank range. Without the benefit of the Ordinance skill or High Energy Focus, ALL* PD beam weapons do only 1 point of damage at 6+ squares away. The sole exception are PD Mass Drivers, which don't suffer range dissipation and do a flat 3 damage at all ranges.
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Apr 23, 2019 12:07
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Torrannor posted:Shield Capacitors increase your shield recharge rate from 30% each turn by 70% points, making you regenerate 100% of your shields each turn. Correct, but potentially slightly misleading. There are four shield sides - front, starboard, larboard, and rear. Each individual facing has the full listed number of hit points (it's not divided among the facings). Shields naturally regenerate 30% of a single side per turn, spread more or less evenly throughout all damaged sides. Shield Capacitors increase this to 100% of a single side per turn, but you still have four sides, meaning that you might not regenerate all of a single side if you have shield damage to the other sides. If you have class 3 shields on a size 2 ship, your shields have 30 hit points (total 120 hit points across all 4 facings), but you'll only regenerate 9 hit points per turn normally - and that's 9 hit points total, not 9 hit points per facing. With Shield Capacitors, you'll regenerate 30 hit points per turn - this is, again, 30 hit points total. Ion Fission: When considering drive upgrades, it's important to note that drive upgrades don't just affect map movement, but also affect combat speed, meaning that every level of drive upgrades is functionally another +10 to Beam Defense. Whether or not this is relevant and worth pursuing depends, largely, on your situation. However, in this case, Ion Drives are almost never worth taking over the alternatives and it's rare that I select anything other than Shield Capacitors here. Honestly, I think the biggest factor in your defeat WAS the race issue - there's a reason why operating with 0 picks gives you a 200% score multiplier, after all.
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Apr 24, 2019 21:41
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my dad posted:Yeeeeeah. The first time I tried to play this game with a friend, I customized my guys (not even particularly munchkiny) and he picked Darloks because they looked cool. End result: I had 3 systems fully colonized before my friend got the first colony ship out, we called it quits there. Someone else mentioned this, but ultimately the most important thing is that you have strengths and you play to them. It's possible to win games with 0 racial picks. It is not possible to win every game with 0 racial picks.
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Apr 25, 2019 04:55
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GuavaMoment posted:Penalties to spying and ground combat are the free-est 5 points you'll ever get. Those penalties will get wiped out by tech advances in no time. For the other penalties the farming one isn't as bad as you think; it'll slow down the early game a bit, but you won't even notice it entering the mid-game. Then take either ship offense or defense penalty for your max 10 points to spend on other fun things. Democracy, creative, +1 science, rich homeworld would work. For the core set of Creative + Democracy, offsetting 5 picks with Ground Combat + Spying is, as Guava says, the free-est 5 points ever. Those picks are perfectly fine as-is. For the remaining +/- 5 points, here's my take on each: + picks: For 3 point picks, +1 Science is the choice if you want to slam all the way into the research gimmick. Racial Science picks are most valuable in the early game, where you don't have technologies boosting your scientists' outputs +1 Production, on the other hand, is probably going to be more valuable as your ability to produce and expand, even with the aid of technologies, is going to be starkly limited in the early game. Warlord is the weird generic runner-up - it functionally provides a minimum of +15 Ship Attack and Beam Defense over non-warlords (and for top-level crews, this rises to +25), but you also get bonus command points for every colony Large Home world / Rich Home World are okay ways to spend extra points - Rich Home World is a little more useful in my experience, but you should never really take both as you could instead get a bonus to Industry or Science for the same cost. Likewise, Artifacts World is rarely worth it since for the same price, you can get a bonus to Science that works everywhere. - picks: For a Creative race, Ship Attack is very nearly a free 2 points, as you will almost certainly be operating with better computers at any given point than a non-Creative race. Ship Defense, unfortunately, is a little less appealing, but combined the two pair with Warlord for a very minor net penalty (-5 of each) while also giving you a bonus to Command Points. The penalty to Farming, likewise, is made significantly less severe by the fact that as a Creative race, you don't have to make compromises in your research, and the increased BC income from being a Democracy means that supplementing all your colonies with Hydroponic Farms/Soil Enrichment to free up extra workers/scientists is far more affordable than it otherwise might be. Low-G world is another option if you want a full 5 points.
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Apr 25, 2019 10:09
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No matter who you are or what kind of start you have, it seems like early industry is always suffering for the player. I did a couple games over the weekend (first a Creative/Democracy, then a Creative/Subterranean) and the most recent one was a pre-warp start. After gunning straight for Research Lab then Automated Factories, I started a race to build a colony ship for a nearby good planet before any of my neighbors could snap it up. Not only did I lose that race, the Gnolams (who had no bonuses that would meaningfully help them research or produce) were escorting their colony ship with a battleship. I've never been exactly clear on what bonuses the AI gets in an attempt to make them credible opposition, but the early game always feels really dicey, especially on smaller galaxies where you're pretty much guaranteed to be in contact with nearly everyone from the start.
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Apr 29, 2019 21:17
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Obviously you can't do everything. Grabbing the planet behind the space hydra would be a nice coup and double as an excuse to get your military up and running pre-contact, but it's worth mentioning that so long as your fuel cells outrange the enemy, you can get a bit of a buffer - they can't send ships to bomb your planets if they can't reach them. Expanding is of critical importance, as the larger your population base, the more income and production and research you have overall. But you also need a fleet presence, and Quercia I is looking very attractive - I'd split my focus between expanding and also building up a fleet that can take out that Hydra and guard your frontier when you finally make contact with the AI. My suggestions for planets to colonize, in vague order: Quercia I (blocked by the Hydra) Enoch II Bogina III Bogina IV Pund II Unuk V Enoch II and Pund II are actually really good pickups here. Being an Aquatic race, Ocean and Terran planets are great for food generation. You may feel like your food production is sufficient with the existing planets you have, but in practice I find it works out much better to only grow food on planets where you get the biggest bang for your buck. Basically, workers you have farming on a less-than-ideal habitability planet are less efficient because you need more workers to generate the same amount of food - dedicating more workers on your best habitability planets and feeding your entire empire via freighters gets you more production and research than letting every planet feed itself. As previously discussed in the thread, Hydroponic Farms are generally more expensive than simply shipping food, but the side benefit of Hydroponic Farms is every one you build frees up 2 food worth of workers, so if your economy is strong enough to eat the cost building Hydroponic Farms everywhere can be a worthwhile tradeoff to squeeze out some additional research and productivity. Ideally, you still want some production free on your farming planets, so as to be able to continue developing them as you research improved technologies, so you want around one pop worth of farm planet for every 1.5ish pop worth of non-farm. As you get better technologies, you need fewer farmers to feed the same number of people so you can assign fewer farmers and get more overall production/research. In the long run, of course, you want every planet you can afford... Every planet with good productivity should be dedicated to focusing on production and snapped up so long as you can feed it (regardless of its habitability) Every planet with bad productivity but good habitability should be feeding the rest of your empire; snap these up as needed when you can't afford to feed future expansion without sacrificing productivity Any planets that don't have good production or habitability should be passed over until all the good habitability/productivity planets have been snapped up; these are tailor-made research bases and population sources, so that you can later populate new, better planets quickly without impacting your better planets. That doesn't mean you don't want these planets at all, but grab the better ones first.
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May 1, 2019 23:41
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Thotimx posted:Another excellent post of specifics. Regarding this, you may not be aware that the places I'm getting food from right now are: Double back to my post, and my colony suggestions - after Quercia I (which you're not in a position to grab yet), you'll notice that the first pickup I suggested was another food planet. That's not because you have insufficient food right now, but because as your population expands (and as you grab more colonies), you'll want that extra food so you aren't forced to devote ALL your pop on those planets to farming. Edit: Freighting food is cheaper than Hydroponic Farms everywhere, and generally speaking even though I'll usually prefer Biospheres over Hydroponic Farms given the choice, once I have Hydroponic Farms I'll frequently build them just to free up more population away from farming so I can get more people working in industry or research. The Democracy bonus to BC income gives you more economic muscle, so why not use it? So what if it costs more to ship food where it's more population efficient to farm it, that's BC spent to buy production/research. Olesh fucked around with this message at 10:56 on May 3, 2019 |
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May 3, 2019 10:43
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Habitable Area and You: A guide to Maximum Population (and Food) On Planets There are two base factors that determine exactly how much population you can fit on a planet - it's size and its habitable area. We'll start with size, because it's simplest. Planet size is displayed as a descriptive text. In order from smallest to largest, these are Tiny, Small, Medium, Large, and Huge. Mathematically, you can describe the planets as Size 1 through 5, with 1 being a Tiny planet and 5 being a Huge planet. The maximum population (100% habitable area) of a planet of Size N is equal to 5 * N, so under normal circumstances a Tiny planet caps out at 5 population and a Huge planet caps out at 25. However, normally you don't get to benefit from 100% of the habitable area of a planet. The available habitable area of a planet is restricted by the planet's biome. There are ten habitable biomes in the game - Toxic, Radiated, Barren, Desert, Tundra, Ocean, Swamp, Arid, Terran, and Gaia. Under normal circumstances, only Gaia planets have 100% habitability. Terran planets provide 80% habitability, Arid planets allow 60%, Swamp planets provide 40%, and all other planets only provide 25% habitability. In addition to its habitability, each biome also features a base of between 0 and 3 food per worker. However, racial picks (such as +1 Food) don't allow you to grow food on a 0 food biome, so keep that in mind. Toxic, Radiated, and Barren planets are 0 food biomes. Desert, Arid, and Tundra planets are 1 food biomes. Swamp, Ocean, and Terran planets are 2 food biomes Gaia is the only 3 food biome. Now, Thotimx is playing an Aquatic race. This means that his race treats Tundra and Swamp planets as if they were Terran, and Terran and Ocean planets as if they were Gaia. Let's break down what this means for those specific planets: Tundra 1 food -> 2 food 25% habitability -> 80% habitability Swamp 2 food -> 2 food (no bonus here!) 40% habitability -> 80% habitability Ocean 2 food -> 3 food 25% habitability -> 100% habitability Terran 2 food -> 3 food 80% habitability -> 100% habitability As you can see, Aquatic is situational, but pretty strong! Two planets that are normally poor colonization options (Tundra and Ocean) get fantastic upgrades, to the tune of +1 food and 3/4 times as much maximum population space out the gate. Swamps get upgraded with double the habitable area (but no extra food), and Terran planets, already a good pick, get +1 food and 25% more max population. It can be a little bit of a gamble, since there's no guarantee that you'll find any planets that allow you to benefit, but considering that the "+1 Food" racial pick is 4 points, Aquatic gives you all that and more for only one more point and a little luck on planet availability, if you're willing to freight food around. There's two other racial picks to discuss here, and we'll start with Tolerant. Tolerant is a 10 cost genetic pick. It eliminates the pollution penalty for production and also claims to increase the maximum population of all colonies by 25%. This is mostly accurate, but misleading. What Tolerant actually does is provide a flat +25% bonus to the habitability of each biome, up to a maximum of 100%. This means that bad habitability biomes that normally only have 25% habitability, instead provide 50%. Swamps go up to 65% habitability, Arid planets provide 85% habitability, and Terran planets cap at 100%. For Gaia planets, of course, Tolerant can't increase the habitability beyond 100%, so it does nothing beyond eliminating the pollution penalty. Then, we have Subterranean. A 6 point genetic pick, Subterranean gives all your colonies a 10% ground combat bonus when defending a colony, but more importantly it also gives a flat 40% bonus to the habitability of all biomes. Unlike Tolerant, Subterranean does not cap habitability at 100%, meaning that for all intents and purposes, Subterranean gives you an extra 2 population per size class on every planet. This means that the shittiest Tiny planet still supports a minimum of 3 population, and the worst Huge planets support 16 - as many as a normal race could support on a Large Terran world. These modifiers can be stacked, of course. You can't normally have an Aquatic Tolerant Subterranean race because that's 21 picks, too many to get without shenanigans. Lastly, any colony upgrades or researches that apply increases to the maximum population of a colony apply at the very end - Biospheres will always increase max population by 2, and Advanced City Planning will always increase maximum population by 5.
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May 3, 2019 21:09
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Rappaport posted:Invading Orion does still get you some of their technological goodies, and in MoO 2 gaia worlds are rather rare I think? Gaia worlds are the rarest biome - you can spawn a galaxy and have no gaia worlds spawn outside of Orion. You can also start a new game and have a gaia world in the same system as your home world. Thotimx, did you consider politely asking the Darlocks to stop spying? As frustrating as the current situation is, it's not unsolvable. The more defensive agents you have, the harder it is for anyone to succeed at stealing your precious, precious technology, and if you demand that the Darlocks stop spying, they probably will - buying you precious time to build up a nice wall of a dozen+ agents. So long as you have a decent stock of defensive spies, you should be able to leverage a bit of spy technology research to keep your precious Creative surplus safe. I've avoided talking about or mentioning the Orion technological goodies, but I will say that the technologies you get are not part of the research tree and can't be miniaturized. Claiming Orion is also a risk, because the technologies you get can be stolen from you, which can range from an annoyance to a huge hassle depending on what you got from Orion and what gets stolen.
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May 4, 2019 06:42
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Huh, I completely missed that the Darlocks were Repulsive this time around, my bad. Unfortunately, there's not exactly a good source of reliable data on how the systems in this game work, and spying is incredibly opaque. I can't provide a giant effortpost because I don't really know how it works. Here's what I do know, though - you cannot have more than one successful spy action against a given race per turn. This leads me to the understanding that spying is some manner of opposed roll. It seems like the number of agents assigned serves two purposes - additional spies/agents provide bonuses to the spy roll (offensive or defensive), and also provide a buffer against enemy spy actions killing your spies and reducing your bonus. If you're operating at a disadvantage, not only will your spies be less likely to be successful, but you're more likely to lose spies in the process. This can make it hard to build enough spies to protect yourself, since you have to be able to build spies faster than they get killed to make any headway.
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May 4, 2019 09:49
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Torrannor posted:It doesn't say so in the description, but Orion still has an Artifact bonus. I don't remember if it's the same bonus that you get throuh the artifact homeworld start, or a double bonus, but it's there. Realistically, though, when the counter to the drawback is "you need to build more spies", that's a relatively trivial drawback. Same with -10 ground defense and having to build more transports to invade planets. They are the lightest drawbacks in the game because compensating for them only requires you to spend production. my dad posted:If the mechanics work the way you say they do, then the best that can be done in this situation is to beeline espionage techs. EVEN if Darloks steal every single one of them, we'd still end up at a net positive espionage-wise, especially starting in the negatives like this. My experience is that the relative difference in spy technology is what matters - because it's an opposed roll, having -10 vs +20 should come out the same as +0 vs +30. If Thotimx researched spy techs and then they were stolen, yes it would be a net positive against everyone except the Darlocks, against whom the same situation would apply. Beelining espionage techs would help if you can guarantee that they wouldn't be immediately stolen, which as of the most recent update isn't exactly the case. Spy success is random, but you can reduce the enemy's chance of success down by hiring enough defensive agents that it's unlikely that any incoming spies will succeed and may not survive the attempt. Somewhere at around the 10-15 spy mark is the point where it should be safe for Thotimx to invest in spy-boosting tech, at which point the combination of the existing spies and the boost to Agent effectiveness should mean there's no further need to build more. But it'll be a little painful to get to that point.
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May 5, 2019 00:18
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The Mrrshan are potentially going to be a huge problem in an early war. They're Warlords with +50 beam attack, meaning that at a comparable level of technology/experience, they'll be sitting at a net +65 bonus to their Beam Attack. This is problematic because it means they're actually really loving good at shooting down missiles and interceptors. Decently miniaturized Fusion Beams (for the Enveloping upgrade) could make them more or less impervious to any reasonable amounts of missile spam, the preferred early solution to wars. On top of that, they're Feudal, so any warships they crank out they get a 1/3rd discount on. With the bonus Warlord command points, they can afford to maintain a much larger fleet, which makes it harder to attrition them down.
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May 6, 2019 11:06
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I said potentially a problem! Basically, if they reach the point where they've got Env Fusion Beams, your ability to prosecute a war with the early missile spam tactic is going to take a hit. If they have a big enough fleet that you can't wipe them out without taking substantial losses in the process, even if your missile spam is effective, you might need a bigger initial fleet (and eat the maint costs) while you do a big push to wreck their main industry - if you take and secure their homeworld, you've set them back far enough where you can then ignore them and focus on the Darloks (or infrastructure). What you don't want to happen is to attack them and find out that you didn't bring enough ships to take down their missile bases/star bases, because the AI will take any opportunity to hit undefended systems it can reach/claim, and it's not like you've got star bases and missile bases on the frontier.
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May 6, 2019 23:55
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Cloning centers everywhere! Cloning centers everywhere! That +100k pop per planet is huge, because it means the moment you colonize any halfway decent planet, you can go down the line of your existing planets, swiping one pop from each, and completely populate the new planet and pretty much by the time the colonists get there, those planets have halfway replaced the population you spent, and the new planet is generating a decent profit based on its population. You're not wrong in that you're on the strategic track to victory. But the game isn't entirely won yet - you're not immune to a loss through hubris; see the previous notes about the Bulrathi. The most likely scenario that would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory would be something like letting one of the AI take Orion (at which point, all of the Exotic techs gained would end up being stolen/traded around freely amongst the AI and out of your hands) or taking Orion yourself and having those extremely high-value technologies stolen from you.
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May 10, 2019 12:34
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Thotimx posted:Counterpoint: On the other hand, that much population on the new colony isn't going to do much for a while until you get infrastructure going, and meanwhile all those Cloning Centers are sucking up money from the treasury, not to mention the extra travel time and cost in freighters for shipping them from suboptimal locations. Which is why I personally don't like using them unless I have a population problem, which I don't right now. I'm growing the population faster that I can acquire the planets to send them to, and until the end of the last update I thought I was mostly done expanding the peaceful way. It's all about the opportunity costs. As a Democracy, leveraging your expansive BC income to jump-start colony infrastructure should be standard practice, and one of the few ways to increase your economic might is to maximize your population wherever possible. Cloning Centers aren't free - 2 BC per colony adds up - but getting your population up faster means getting everything faster - more money, more production, and more research. And you don't need to actually build them on new colonies to experience the benefits - like I said, ship population out from your existing planets with Cloning Centers, and in roughly a half dozen turns those planets are back to full population and ready to ship out more colonists. Realistically, you don't need that many cloning centers to be able to maintain a population growth faster than you can colonize new planets, so once all your planets are full up on population you can sell off any cloning centers that are no longer needed.
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May 12, 2019 15:13
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sebmojo posted:So is the idea here just to defend our turf or is there merit in picking targets for eventual destruction? There's kind of a balancing act. When you're engaged in a war, you ideally need to be out of that war as rapidly as possible - either via capturing and destroying all enemy planets or by forcing concessions or just being able to succeed on diplomacy (usually you need a position of strength to get a peace treaty, though), because being at war makes you vulnerable and the last thing you want is every AI to decide they want a piece of your empire at once. So going full-scale production, throwing up defenses everywhere that the AI can conceivably reach and fielding the largest fleet you can manage between your command points, finances, and BC reserves while cranking out transports and replacements/refits is probably the order of the day, but there's a maximum useful fleet size - going into the negative on command points starts draining your coffers very rapidly. Thotimx has no choice, now, but to show the Mrrshans that they hosed up. However, technologically, he's not in a position to actually easily succeed. My recommendation at this juncture would be for Thotimx to push out the cruisers you're already building and cap out command points, fortify any place that the Mrrshans can actually reach (rush buying Missile Bases as needed), and do a hard research push up to Class III shields and maybe another computer upgrade. This serves to both provide some credible level of durability to the ships you're fielding as well as miniaturizing Mass Drivers to provide extra punch (via the Auto Fire upgrade). Regular (non-PD) Mass Drivers can shoot down missiles and fighters, so bringing a mix of Heavy Mount and regular Mass Drivers is recommended. Once you have the upgrades you want, having existing ships you can refit is much faster than building completely new designs from scratch, and your existing ships will probably be higher level. For a variety of reasons, Point Defense Lasers and Fusion Beams are garbage and should be avoided - PD Auto Fire Mass Drivers are okay, but unless you really need the bonus to hit chance from making weapons systems PD, you're otherwise always better off using regular weapons and manually shooting down fighters and missiles.
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May 15, 2019 11:53
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quote:But it should be harder for the Mrrshan to hit - they're deploying more beams than missiles it seems, so it appears worth it to me. Let's not forget that Inertial Stabilizer also gives you +25 missile evasion. It's helpful! As a general rule, remember, the ideal goal for protection against beams is for (their Beam Attack - your Beam Defense) to equal -50 or less. The net effect is more significant when you're pushing someone from 0 to -50 (50% to 10% hit chance) than you do from +50 to 0 (90% to 50%). You get more mileage out of your ships when you tailor them to your enemies. Heavy Mount weapons don't just have greater range, they also have much more favorable drop-off. You generally start combat at around maximum range for normal weapons, which do 35% of their listed maximum damage at that range (21-23 squares). Obviously this isn't an issue for Mass Drivers or other weapons with no range dissipation, but at that same range Heavy Mount weapons are running with a 1.2x multiplier, down from their point blank 1.5x. If you were using regular, dissipating beams, your Heavy Mounts would be doing 3-4x the damage per cannon at max normal range compared to the normal mount versions, and this is all before shields come into play. Ship design is a weird balancing act where the correct decision is, ultimately, "whatever works". As long as you aren't deliberately shooting yourself in the foot by building a design which is outright ineffectual against your enemies (for example, relying on heavily miniaturized laser cannons vs anyone with Class III Shields or better), it's not hard to come up with a design more efficient than what the AI fields. That being said, my general ship design at this point would be something along the lines of: quote:Class III Shields, best Computer available I like bombs instead of missiles to compensate for ground installations. Beam damage against planets is halved before shields, so heavy Mass Drivers do 9 damage, divided by 2 (and rounded down) to 4. Ground installations are protected both by any planetary shields present and the best shield technology available (so no planetary shields and Class III researched means that even heavy mount Mass Drivers only do 1 damage to a planet). Missiles and bombs do full damage, but I've run out of missiles before clearing defenders/planetary installations plenty of times. Putting a bomb or two on every ship just ensures that you won't have to spend a turn retreating and restocking missiles to actually break through, say, a missile base under a planetary shield. Additional notes on Rangemaster Unit - this system only affects the hit chance reduction based on distance. It has no effect on damage drop-off due to distance. It's hard to say exactly how much benefit this system actually provides, except that Battle Scanners are superior in every way - a flat +50 at all ranges is better than a 2/3rd reduction in range penalties, even at max range with Heavy Mount weapons.
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May 18, 2019 03:46
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Thotimx posted:That I get, but what I don't understand is why I don't get any military leaders offered (I only have one) when all the domestic slots are taken. There's plenty of openings still on the ship officers side. I can speculate, but take this with a grain of salt - military leaders seem to be less prevalent as the game goes on - you don't get offers from leaders that are dead or already hired, and the AI takes no special precautions to preserve their own military leaders. Also even though you can't hire any more domestic leaders doesn't mean those domestic chances aren't being rolled. As far as the battle video goes... Something that you overlooked is that you're equipped with 2 Heavy Mount mass drivers, and you never did more than 2 damage a volley. Work backwards with me from that - Since you did at most 2 damage per volley, it fits that each mass driver only does 1 damage. Planets are treated as immobile ships, meaning that their beam defense is a -20, but that doesn't mean you can't miss - especially firing at very long ranges. Had you advanced up close, I suspect you would have seen your 1-damage shots disappear more or less entirely. Which brings me to my other point... You fought your battle from an almost entirely stationary position - while that makes sense to a degree when the station was up, to reduce/eliminate the effectiveness of its own beam weapons, you can also be more effective at eliminating incoming missiles by moving your ships to aggressively combat incoming missiles. If a ship isn't being targeted, you can turn it/move it closer to incoming missile fire when taking your shots, letting you leverage shorter ranges and a greater number of ships (and therefore guns) to shoot down incoming missile fire (and fighters). Also, if you had bombs on your ships, you'd have to advance closer to the planet to use them anyways, but you didn't have any this battle. As previously indicated (and you may have solved this since), you don't really have a fast option for planetary installations. Star bases will shoot down incoming missiles, so you might want to actually hold off on firing missiles (relying on your other ships to defend them) for a few turns while you've got your current loadout. If you destroy the station/other ships before launching, you'll need to spend less time plinking down the planet at 1 damage per Heavy Mount Mass Driver, which may be helpful for your sanity.
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May 23, 2019 21:34
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Lerion III battle: You didn't really grok the initiative issues you were having. With Augmented Engines, your Invader beats out all the rest of your ships on initiative. You used Wait on it so that your other ships could run in and shoot down the incoming missiles, which is good and correct, but once those were shot down you dumped the rest of your ships' turns. In short, initiative was happening like such: Turn start: Invader -> Wait Interdictors: -> Shoot missiles Remaining Interdictors -> Shoot planet fruitlessly Enemy Missile Base: Launch missiles Delayed Invader Turn -> Uh there's missiles here, wait... oh wait we're the last remaining ship. Uh, creep forward one tile and end turn? New Turn start: Invader -> Oh it's our turn again and we still have missiles in our face, let's repeat the last turn... (repeat the last turn) Had you used Wait on the rest of your ships so that they would act after the Missile base fired (but before a new turn started), you could have shot down the missiles then waltzed in and bombed the planet much quicker, avoiding the tedium you mentioned. You also mention at one point... Thotimx posted:SD 3521.9 - Several planets now have nothing useful to build, and we can't expand the fleet any more. There is no need for more Colony Ships. So, the only thing left to do is invest even more in research. In the early and mid game, Antarans can feel impossible to defend against, but they aren't unstoppable. As you've seen, missiles are effective against them (provided you can field enough). Fighter Garrisons also help more than you might think. Star Bases and their upgrades are also useful, in that they launch more missiles and also draw fire (giving your planet time to launch missiles). However, in the early/mid game it is highly unlikely that any beam weapons are going to contribute much of anything - even Mass Drivers, the best early-game beam weapon, does piddling damage through the Damper Field, and since all Antaran ships have the fastest engines, it's unlikely that you can reliably hit them. Treating them as something of a natural disaster is fine, but advancement in Chemistry (for better missiles*) is the easiest way to improve your defenses against Antaran attack. Later on, improvements in Computers (for, well, better computers) and Physics (for better beam weapons**) are key to leveraging the advantages *** you get over Antarans, but it's something of a race, as the longer the game goes on, the bigger the raiding fleets, and eventually your planetary defenses will simply not be sufficient to the task without fleet help. * There are only four missile types in the game: Nuclear, Merculite, Pulson, and Zeon. Thotimx already has Pulson missiles, and the early game missile spam fleets don't tend to work that well against Antarans - I can go into more detail if desired. Here are the stats on each type of missile: Nuclear - 8 damage, 4 HP/missile Merculite - 14 damage, 8 HP Pulson - 20 damage, 12 HP Zeon - 30 damage, 16 HP. All missiles have the same mods - with 1 level of miniaturization, you get Armored and Fast missile options, and with 2 levels, the MIRV option unlocks (each missile does 4x damage at the cost of 2x space, but no increase in missile HP). However, Chemistry doesn't have very many tech levels - Thotimx's next Chemistry researches are: Nano Technology (2000 RP) Molecular Manipulation (4500 RP; Zeon Missiles are here) Molecular Control (10,000 RP, last techs in the tree) and then Hyper-advanced Chemistry (starts at 25,000 RP, provides no new techs but continues to provide miniaturization for existing technology). This is part of why missiles tend to fall off hard after the early game - MIRV nuclear missiles are disproportionately effective, but their hitpoints don't improve and if you switch to more damaging and durable missiles (say, to deal with late-game shields against which Nuclear missiles are mostly ineffective), your damage per space efficiency goes into the toilet. ** Unlike Chemistry, which only has 7 techs to research before hitting Hyper-advanced Chemistry, Physics has more intermediate techs - 10 total. While this means that capping out all Physics research requires more total RP, Physics tech miniaturizes faster, which is part of the reason why beam weapons so rapidly pull ahead of missiles past the early game. Physics is definitely the tree that is most fleshed out for non-Creatives, giving you a variety of standard choices to upgrade depending on your needs: Beam weapons Rifle upgrades (ground units) Scanners (detection range) Communications (redirecting fleets and command points) The specific beam weapon upgrades more or less are chosen at-need; there's no need for a non-Creative to take a beam weapon upgrade until they need to overcome a higher class of shields, although there are uses for specific upgrades and you don't want to rely on Laser Cannons or Fusion Beams for long, since Class III shields come relatively early in the tech tree. In addition, Physics holds a variety of one-off upgrades, some of which are very valuable. Creative races are absolutely flooded with an overabundance of useful technology here. An interesting note is that there are relatively few Point Defense options in the game. The full list of beams that can be made Point Defense (and are thus valid options for mounting on Interceptors) are: Laser Cannons (worst option) Fusion Beams (Can be good upgrading with enveloping for 4x damage, but is basically useless outside of point blank range) Mass Drivers (generally better than the other early-game alternatives, as it doesn't suffer the huge problem with damage fall-off PD weapons has) Phasors Particle Beams (exotic, can't be obtained through research) Phasors are an extremely valuable research for anyone with Fighter Garrisons or mounting Interceptors/Heavy Fighters, as it doesn't get any better than this***. Intentionally mounting PD weapons on your ships is mostly a trap; you're almost always better off using the space for regular non-PD versions of the weapon and manually shooting down missiles/fighters. However, PD Auto Fire Mass Drivers are perfectly fine so long as you don't expect them to be useful against anything other than missiles and fighters. *** Exotic Technology Is Kind Of Crap Unlike the technologies that the player researches, Antarans use "Exotic" technologies, which can't be researched by the player and don't benefit from miniaturization. Those Particle Beams on the Antaran raiders? Yeah, they may be 30 damage weapons with inherent shield piercing, but they're not all that good. Most beam weapons have a base Size of 10 units, which then goes down with miniaturization. Particle Beams have a base size of 15 units, and never get any smaller. In the long run, miniaturization is what kills Antarans. Their weapons never get any better, while researching anything in the same tech tree lets you mount more or your existing stuff or newer, better stuff, for the same or reduced cost. While the Damper Field seems like a great technology (and it kind of is, multiplying their already impressive HP effectively by 4), it also means that even Laser Cannons and Fusion Beams can take them down, if you have the accuracy to hit them and you throw enough volume of fire their way. However, there's one notable niche exception - Particle Beams are the "best" available PD weapons, meaning that if you have access to Particle Beams, Interceptors (and Heavy Fighters, if you have them) suddenly get a huge boost to their effectiveness, since they don't modify or care about the miniaturization levels of their weapons. Olesh fucked around with this message at 23:26 on May 27, 2019 |
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May 27, 2019 23:14
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So near as I can tell, the AI will invade if they have transport ships available, and bomb if they don't. The AI doesn't do partial bombardments - when they bomb, they bomb with everything they have. What makes them decide to build or bring transports, I don't know - possibly the AI calculates the likelihood of winning the ground engagement based on Ground Attack scores. I don't think I've ever seen the AI fail to bring enough transports to successfully invade. Guava is generally correct about boarding star bases; being inherently immobile they can be boarded by any ship that gets close enough, and raids are highly effective at damaging components. Frequently after one or two raids you'll destroy the shields or computers, at which point the star base is highly vulnerable to incoming fire and/or its own outgoing beam fire becomes ineffective, on top of any weapons that you destroy. As far as boarding Antaran ships goes, uh, prepare for frustration. Every Antaran ship is equipped with a Quantum Detonator, which among its normal effect of multiplying the power of drive explosions, also has a 50% chance of triggering the self-destruct if the ship is successfully captured. Antarans have the best marines in the game, hands down, so the chances of capturing any given ship in a fair fight are usually hilariously low. The most reliable way to actually capture their ships, I've found in the past, is to outnumber the crap out of them. There's a relatively easy way to do this - create a couple dedicated capture ships, as big as you can afford, fitted with as many Assault Shuttles as you can. The important thing is to concentrate the shuttles onto fewer ships to increase your chance of success, since spreading your attacks out is less likely to work. Ideally, you want multiple ships to make as many attempts per raid as you can, because you'll lose all your assault shuttles every time a capture attempt triggers the self-destruct so you need to be able to stagger your launches. Assault shuttles will group themselves into a combined launch so long as they're fired as the same time from the same ship. Launching 10 assault shuttles at once will perform a boarding action with 40 marines (minus however many shuttles get shot down on the way). Launching 10 assault shuttles in two groups of 5 (from two different ships, say) will perform two boarding actions with 20 marines each, which in my experience is less likely to succeed than a single boarding action with twice the marines. Even successfully managing to capture a ship, you still need to win the combat while keeping your prize intact, which may be easier said than done. Edit: I gave the apparently contradictory advice of "make as many attempts per raid as you can" and "concentrate the shuttles onto fewer ships", so just to clarify: Your Assault Shuttle carriers should be the largest class you can field, and carry as many assault shuttles as you can manage. Some miniaturization helps here. You want to maximize the size of your "capture" punch as much as possible, and be prepared to take as many of those maximum-size capture swings at an incoming Antaran fleet as you can manage. Olesh fucked around with this message at 02:40 on May 29, 2019 |
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May 29, 2019 02:37
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I can't give a real effortpost about the mechanics of boarding, raid vs capture, or any of that fun stuff, because I don't have any source beyond my gut feels from playing the game. Here's what my experience tells me, though: Boarding: Normally can only be done to an immobile target - either a star base or a ship whose engines have been damaged to the point of immobility. Transporters allow you to board a target that is still mobile, but are blocked if the enemy's shields are up (only caring about the shield facing between the two ships). Hard Shields make a ship completely immune to Transporters, however. Tractor beams allow you to immobilize an otherwise mobile target, thus allowing you to board a ship normally with intact engines. Assault Shuttles function like other types of fighters, but a shuttle group will board the enemy ship in lieu of firing weapons. The enemy ship does not need to be immobilized nor have its shields down. Each individual shuttle carries one marine. Assault Shuttles launch in sets of 4 per "weapon". Raiding vs Capturing: Raiding attempts to damage ship systems. The ground combat ratings and number of marines for each ship are compared to determine success or failure. Marines on both side have a chance to be killed in the process (which is probably a series of checks), although having an advantage in ground combat/numbers makes it more likely that enemy marines will die and less likely that your own marines will die. Conversely, if you're attacking at a disadvantage, you are more likely to lose marines without accomplishing anything. Depending on the level of success of the raid, one or more ship systems may be damaged/destroyed. If the engines are destroyed in this fashion, it's possible for the ship to overload and explode. Weapons are damaged individually; if an enemy ship has 10 laser cannons, each laser cannon gets targeted and damaged separately (you don't take out all 10 at once). Most ship special systems can disabled through raiding, although some (such as Reinforced Hull) cannot. Additionally, a ship's shields, engines, and targeting computers can be hit during a raid. If a ship's shields are damaged, it loses both the temporary HP provided as well as the flat damage reduction on incoming attacks. Even at a disadvantage, raids have a good chance of damaging something. Capturing, on the other hand, attempts to take control of the enemy ship. Much like raiding, the ground combat ratings and number of marines on each side are compared to determine success or failure. Unlike raiding, however, capture attempts are all-or-nothing - the "marine" battle will always continue until one side runs out of marines. If all the attackers are killed, the capture attempt fails. If all the defenders are killed, the capture attempt succeeds and the attacker claims the enemy ship. However, the captured ship cannot be operated or controlled in the current battle* - it can, however, be fired upon by its former owners and destroyed, or possibly even boarded and recaptured. *Telepathic races can immediately operate a captured ship. While the AI isn't smart enough to capture ships except opportunistically, player Telepathic races can be very dangerous in space combat given strong ground combat ratings and some means of reliably boarding ships at will. Things that make capturing easier: Neutron Blasters and one other weapon have an effect whereby damage dealt to a ship will kill marines - for every 5 points of damage not stopped by shields, one marine on the target ship is killed (Assault Shuttles are unaffected). Raiding an enemy ship first can be an effective way to chip away at both defending marines while also reducing the enemy ship's ability to do damage. Scrapping captured ships: When you scrap a captured ship at one of your own systems, you gain a fraction of the cost used to construct it. In addition, if the ship you're scrapping utilizes any technology you don't currently own, you can learn that technology. (I don't actually know if this is a 100% chance). This is one of two ways to gain access to so-called "exotic" technologies possessed by the Antareans that can't otherwise be researched. Antarans are dicks: Antareans have nearly the highest possible ground combat rating in the game, making their ships' marines incredibly difficult to dislodge. Quantum Detonators nix 50% of all capture attempts by blowing up the ship on a successful capture. Damper Fields negate the effect of troop killing weapons - Neutron Blasters (and the other one) do not kill marines when used on a ship equipped with a Damper Field. While Transporters can always be used against a ship with a Damper Field (as shields and Damper Fields are mutually exclusive), Damper Fields have a 50% chance to kill any marine sent via transporter. Immobilized Antaran ships will frequently self-destruct at the first available opportunity, meaning traditional boarding methods can rarely ever be used. Typically, by the time you can actually capture Antaran raiding ships, you've already won the game and are in the mop-up phase. Edit: Fixed a broken tag.
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May 29, 2019 11:40
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PurpleXVI posted:Would a Raid attack against an Antaran ship have a chance of damaging their Quantum Detonator? I knew someone was going to ask that. It's a good question, but one I don't have the answer to. Presumably yes, but for all I know the consequences of damaging the Quantum Detonator is "ship detonates". Vague, half-remembered memories indicate it's possible that's actually what happens, but it's been a while since I bothered trying to steal Antaran ships. Next time I feel like firing up the game, I'll have to go with a capture gimmick again and do some more testing.
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May 29, 2019 13:05
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Thotimx posted:Sure, those would be really good but the point was there's really good stuff in most of the available options to research right now (and that one is more expensive than most). I'd argue that the fact that I'm keeping up in research (way ahead of all but the bugs) suggested that perhaps boosting research more wasn't the biggest priority when they have much larger fleets roaming about. You've more or less reached the stage of the game where a regular victory is a certainty if you push for it - you've grown large enough and have a sufficiently secure tech base that none of the AIs can compete with you on research, and despite the AI's inscrutable and substantial bonuses to industry, they're pretty dumb about building things or recognizing when they need to rapidly scale up to deal with a threat. The question isn't really can you smash the rest of the AI, the question is how you want to do it. If you stopped researching right now, odds are very good that you could simply build more and bigger ships and aggressively roll up the rest of the galaxy without much in the way of meaningful resistance.
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May 30, 2019 21:45
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I'm legitimately unsure as to why it's equipped that Star Base with PD Laser Cannons. It's a mystery! Normally, you get equipped with the "best" PD weapon available for the PD slot, which goes in the order Laser Cannon, Fusion Beam, Mass Driver, Phasor, Particle Beam* (if you ever manage to obtain it). It's possible that the auto-ship design sees that your Physics-based weapons are more miniaturized than Mass Drivers, but in that case it should still be picking Fusion Beams over Laser Cannons, and based on my experience Star Bases and Ground Batteries don't give two shits about whether or not what they select is miniaturized (it'll pick exotic techs even if regular but miniaturized techs would be more effective for the available space). Torpedoes are weird - in many ways, they are the real late-game equivalents to missiles, as they can't be shot down by beam weapons (or anti-missile rockets) and have unlimited ammo, but require a turn of not firing between shots. They don't miniaturize as well as missiles and beam weapons (down to a minimum of 40% vs 25%) and use missile evasion for hit calculation (and are effected by ECM). Some words about Structural Analyzer and why Creative Beam weapons end up vastly outperforming everything else late game.... In the early game, miniaturized nuclear missile spam is the order of the day. It's cheap, it's effective, and can be done reasonably well from range with minimal risk. Nuclear missiles are effective against early shields, and the AI is not reasonably capable of defending against this tactic. Missiles, however, don't get better fast enough - there aren't enough intermediate Chemistry researches to reasonably miniaturize-to-MIRV follow up missiles, and beam damage scales up faster than your ability to outlay missile HP, so the non-Antaran AI steadily gets better at defending against an exclusively missile-based strategy as it techs up. Fast Missile Racks can give something of a last gasp to a heavily missile-focused technology base, but eventually you can be forced to diversify if you don't win rapidly enough. Enter the Structural Analyzer - it's not the first example of a Special System that makes all of your beam weapons better (that would be Battle Scanner), but the Structural Analyzer is where you start to see a substantial jump where "big ships" start simply outclassing equal or greater CP worth of small ships - a Structural Analyzer costs the same no matter what size of ship it's mounted on, but it costs a much smaller proportion of total space on a larger ship, leaving room for more beam weapons to benefit from the Structural Analyzer, et cetera. It's a multiplier, it's a strong one, and it's not the only one. Late game ships can benefit from multiple special systems that improve the effectiveness of all beam weapons. The end result is that, pound for pound, beam weapons end up being tremendously efficient at dealing damage. They can be countered, but doing so generally requires purpose-building ships with a technology advantage (an advantage that gets less and less possible as the game continues). Creatives ALWAYS get to do this, given sufficient time. Non-creatives can choose all the same technologies, but at the expense of other useful techs, and may not have the defensive techs available to effectively counter another civilization with access to the same offensive technologies.
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Jun 4, 2019 01:55
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You're slowly killing me by not adding Auto Fire to your Heavy Mount Mass Drivers, I hope you realize this. Especially since your new ship designs do now include Battle Scanners. You haven't functionally upgraded your offensive capabilities in a long time; neither researching anything to replace your mass drivers nor done research to miniaturize them. But at this point, it's time for: Let's Talk About Missiles Some More Some of this information will be repeated from other posts. Bear with me! Okay, so missiles. Missiles are great! They launch independently, they have a really good base chance to hit (90%) before any modifiers come into play, and they do really solid damage and they get even better with upgrades. There are four types of missiles in the game - here's the damage and HP per missile. Note that missile HP is dependent upon the type of missile, and independent of any armor upgrades you may have researched. Nuclear - 8 damage, 4 HP Merculite - 14 damage, 8 HP Pulson - 20 damage, 12 HP Zeon - 30 damage, 16 HP There are five possible modifications that can be applied to missiles, and all missiles have access to them (although, as per usual, most modifications require some miniaturization before they can be used). Multiple modifications can be applied to the same weapon, and the stacking space/production costs are additive. Two modifications that are +100% (x2) together sum up to +200% (x3). They do not multiply to +300% (x4). No miniaturization required: Emissions Guidance - +300%. Damage that penetrates shields gets dealt to the drive system. Usually not worth the cost, but destroyed drives tend to explode and thus you usually don't require as much damage to actually take out a ship this way. 1 level of miniaturization: Fast - +25%. Adds 4 Combat Speed to the missile. This also affects the missile's Beam Defence. Armored - +25%. Doubles the HP of each missile. ECCM - +25%. Halves the defensive effects of any jammers protecting the target. 2 levels of miniaturization: MIRV - +100%. Each missile has 4 warheads, quadrupling the effective damage. Does not increase HP of the missile. -- Missile Stats: Missiles have a base combat speed of 10, modified by drive technology. Effectively, they're as fast as a fully loaded frigate. Each drive upgrade past Nuclear adds +2 to the combat speed, and then the Fast modification can add an additional +4, meaning that a Fast missile with Interphased Drivers moves at a combat speed of 24. "Missile Attack": Missiles use a formula basically identical in practice to the Beam Attack formula, but with an attack value of 50. Everything that modifies missile chance to hit does so by modifying Missile Evasion, not Missile Attack. Beam Defense: Missiles have a BD rating based on their Combat Speed x 5. In practice, this means that their BD ranges from between 50 (combat speed 10) to 120 (combat speed 24). Hit points - Each "missile group" has a shared HP pool, removing whole missiles as the pool takes damage. Visually, damage dealt to the pool is only displayed in terms of whole numbers of missiles removed. However, a single shot can remove multiple missiles - damage dealt in excess of any single missile's hit points rolls over and continues to destroy missiles. I feel a practical example is needed here - let's say there's a volley of 10 Nuclear Missiles. The whole group has 40 HP. I'm firing PD Laser Cannons at a range that isn't point blank, so each Laser Cannon hit only deals 1 damage. I have one ship that hits with 10 laser cannons on the missile group, dealing 10 damage. The missile group is reduced to 30 HP, and the group is reduced to 8 effective missiles - the combat display will show a "2" as the damage number, since 2 missiles were destroyed. Now, if I pull another ship in and hit with another 10 laser cannons, the missile group is reduced to 20 HP and the group is reduced to 5 effective missiles - the combat display will show a "3" as the damage number, since 3 missiles were destroyed. If, instead, I were firing regular Mass Drivers, each mass driver would deal 6 damage to the whole missile volley - every 2 mass driver hits would destroy 3 missiles. Missile Evasion: Hoo boy, okay. Ships natively have an ME of 0, and there are fewer things that modify ME than affect beam defense. Things that Boost ME: ECM - +70/100/130/(70), halved for ECCM missiles. ECM is the most obvious defense against missiles, although it's mitigated (but not completely countered) by ECCM. The best ECM system (Wide Area Jammer, at +130) also provides +70 missile evasion to other ships in the fleet. Inertial Stabilizer/Nullifier - +25/+50. Inertial systems provide half the listed bonus to Beam Defense as a bonus to Missile Evasion. Crew Skill - between +0 for Green crews and +37 for Ultra-Elite. Like Inertial systems, this is the listed Beam Defense bonus, but halved. Racial Ship Defense - +25 or +50 (or a -20 penalty). Unlike Crew Skill or Inertial systems, the full value actually applies here. Things that Penalize ME: ECCM - doesn't really penalize it directly, but halves the bonuses from ECM. Scanners - Tachyon Scanners, Neutron Scanners, and Sensors penalize enemy ships' Missile Evasion (-20, -40, and -70, respectively). Without factoring in Crew Skill, a ship with the best possible ECM system and Inertial Nullifiers has +115 ME against ECCM missiles, and +180 ME otherwise. Sensors can reduce this to +45 and +110 respectively, meaning that a ship that puts the maximum effort into improving its missile evasion is still going to get hit by roughly half of all ECCM missiles unless they also have strong crew skill and/or racial defensive bonuses. The Current Situation At Hand: Let's look at some numbers real quick. Regular Pulson missile: 12 HP Armored Pulson Missile: 24 HP The Missile Base fired Pulson missiles in groups of 20 (2x10, technically, but missiles fired like that combine into a single group), meaning that each group had a minimum of 240 HP to chew through in order to wipe them out. The Star Base was equipped with 7 Armored Fast ECCM Pulson missiles. Each Star Base missile group had 148 HP to wipe out (and an extra 20 Beam Defense) You had two ship designs in play - your new Silencer redesign (2x) and the revised Interdictors (5x). Each ship had two regular AF Mass Drivers as part of their armament. This gives you a total of 14 AF Mass Drivers. Your Silencers had Battle Scanners, which helped, but you simply did not have enough Mass Drivers on the field to shoot down the incoming fire arrayed against you. Without needing any additional technology research, your "better solution" really is bringing more Mass Drivers - nothing you have is as effective. Take a look at your new Obscenity. You've got: 48 space in Ion Pulse Cannons 35 space in Anti-Matter Bombs 130 Space in Heavy Mount (non-AF) Mass Drivers. (90 damage) 40 space in AF Mass Drivers. (72 damage) Total Space spent on weapons: 253 Heavy Mount weapons cost double the space for +50% more damage and range. Auto Fire weapons cost 50% more space for +200% more damage (and a -20 Beam Attack penalty, which is more than offset by Battle Scanners). Here's a suggested revamp: Ditch the current weapons and make sure you have Battle Scanners. Probably get rid of the Automated Repair Unit to make space. Using Mass Drivers, create three groups of weapons: Heavy AF Mass Drivers AF Mass Drivers PD AF Mass Drivers Then assign your space evenly between groups. This will give you a roughly 1:2:4 ratio of heavy/regular/PD weapons. This is actually a little inefficient - you probably should ditch the PD weapons and assign the space to the regular mass drivers, but you'll want the help against missiles. Then, assign a certain amount of leftover space for bombs. This should get you something like: 4 Hv AF Mass Drivers 8 AF Mass Drivers 16 PD AF Mass Drivers 2 Anti-Matter Bombs Longer term solutions include advancing your Force Fields research, which will give you better defense options, miniaturize your mass drivers (so you can carry more), give you access to Gauss Cannons as a long-term replacement for your Mass Drivers (although they won't be a better option until you miniaturize them), better shields and ECM, and some esoteric defensive options (like the aforementioned Lightning Field). Alternatively, a push into Physics will give you better beam weapons - Phasors are the best PD weapons you can research and make an excellent "workhorse" weapon, able to be upgraded with Auto Fire and Shield Piercing after some miniaturization, while Plasma Cannons are naturally Enveloping with the effective x4 damage multiplier that entails and are extremely solid out the gate (and only get better as you can mount more of them/upgrade them with Continuous).
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Jun 5, 2019 23:35
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It also occurred to me, watching the video, that you don't seem to know that your ships can rotate in place with the right mouse button. So, short summary: Get more mass drivers. Use fewer Heavy Mounts, turn your heavy mounts into heavy mount auto fire versions, and use more regular mounts (and also possibly some point defenses). Get closer before shooting missiles/fighters. Start researching improved weapons and defenses - even if you don't use them right away, the miniaturization in space and cost for your existing systems is extremely worthwhile.
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Jun 6, 2019 01:01
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MechaCrash posted:I just think that Mass Drivers are pretty far in the tech-tree's rear view mirror by now. Wouldn't graviton beams be getting better performance by now? I'm not sure how they stack up in terms of space used, but the damage has to be better. It can be tricky. One of the reasons Mass Drivers hold up so well is because they have no range dissipation. Beam damage isn't really random, so Mass Drivers get to hold on to their base damage at longer ranges, where other beam weapons are reduced to 35% of the listed value at max range (more or less where ships start in combat). Likewise, the Auto Fire upgrade is very solid - +50% space required for shooting three times. This effectively doubles your damage output for a given amount of space, assuming you can compensate for the -20 Beam Attack penalty. Beam weapons typically start with a base 10 size, and then miniaturization kicks in and reduces the size/cost down to a minimum of 25% (for beams and missiles; other systems miniaturize down to 40%). Graviton Beams are a "special" beam weapon that deal bonus structure damage, but they are base 15 size and lack the useful damage multiplier modifications to keep them competitive with other alternatives. When you first research Laser Cannons, Fusion Beams, or Mass Drivers, this means they all take 10 space. It's miniaturization kicking in that gives you the choice between a shiny new Fusion Beam at 10 space, or a Laser Cannon at 8. Most weapon modifications also have a certain level of miniaturization as a prerequisite. What this boils down to is that as a non-Creative, you don't have to explicitly upgrade your weapons in order to upgrade your armament. Auto Fire Mass Drivers do 6x3 damage, and at the current level of miniaturization each AF Mass Driver takes 10 space - that'll go down once Thotimx finishes the Electromagnetic Refraction research, as the space req of his Mass Drivers will drop from 7 to 5 and he'll be able to fit more on each of his ships. If he were to push all the way to Gauss Cannon, at Subspace Fields (2750 RP, after the 2000 RP Warp Fields), he'd have fully miniaturized Mass Drivers at the same time he unlocked Gauss Cannons. Sure, Gauss Cannons do 3x the damage, but each Mass Driver being fully miniaturized means they clock in at 25% of their original cost, making them more efficient in terms of damage per space spent even before you apply Auto Fire (which requires 2 levels of miniaturization to unlock). This means that, all else being equal, Thotimx is still better off using Mass Drivers until he's researched past Gauss Cannons to miniaturize them, probably as far as unlocking Auto Fire. However, all else is not equal. Mass Drivers don't do 18 damage (or 27 for heavy mount version) - they do 3x6 (or 3x9). The Class III shields that Thotimx has been rocking for a while represent a substantial decrease in incoming damage, chopping half the damage off his regular mass drivers and 1/3rd off his heavy mounts. By comparison, a regular Gauss Cannon shot would do 15 damage to Class III shields - five times as much per shot, and heavy mount Gauss Cannons would do 24 damage to shields - 4x as much as heavy mount Mass Drivers. On the other hand, missiles and fighters don't have shields - ships, starbases, and planetary installations do. So, a mix of firepower is warranted. Regular AF Mass Drivers are still going to be the most useful option for Thotimx to mass to shoot down incoming ordinance until he has the opportunity to research better beam weapon options, and incoming ordinance is the problem.
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Jun 6, 2019 01:56
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Thotimx posted:Well I was going by advice earlier in the thread to do heavy mass drivers for the long-range stuff and AF ones for anti-fighter/missile. Either I misunderstood said advice, or adhered too closely to it, or whatever. Auto Fire is a 50% increase in space/cost for tripling your firepower; there is no reason not to use it on every weapon that can be equipped with it. Likewise, Enveloping is a 100% increase in space/cost for quadrupling your firepower (but spread out across all four facings). It's like the MIRV upgrade for missiles. I prefer Auto Fire weapons because you don't have to chew through all four shield facings, but both upgrades represent a 100% increase in damage output per space used. In case it matters, Enveloping weapons still do 4x damage when attacking a target without shields or facings (such as missiles, fighters, and planets). Thotimx posted:Well I got Graviton Beams since then and I'm advancing Force Fields at the moment, so I think this might be a bit off. Still, I like to go very Force Field heavy; especially if I'm a Creative race, between Mass Drivers, strong shields, and the other ancillary defensive techs available in Force Fields, you can conquer the galaxy on the weight of Class III shields and Auto Fire mass drivers if you get there and start deploying them fast enough. You're past that point now, but there are some extremely good techs in Force Fields that can supplement any strategy. Offensively, however, there is no substitute for Physics. Thotimx posted:What specials would you recommend removing to remedy this? I've thought about going with a 50-50 split (weapons and specials space allocation) but ended up just doing a more 'tank' style. If you're going to go for a "tank" style, you should just go all out. Heavy Armor, Auto-Repair, ECM, Augmented Engines, Inertial Stabilizer... the problem with investing heavily in special systems is most of them occupy a percentage of the ship's total space, so packing in a bunch of special systems requires a fair amount of miniaturization. This, in part, is why you don't have any space... weapons occupy fixed amounts of space no matter what size ship you put them on. Guava's strategy is a good one, but there's a breakpoint where you can make your singular Titan ship basically indestructible by just no-selling most of the damage. You do this, in part, by having a big pool of armor and then reducing the success of incoming attacks such that you never take enough damage to overwhelm your ability to repair it. If you're not going to do that, however, you should go the other way - take Battle Pods and a Battle Scanner and Structural Analyzer, and just load up on guns. Take more guns to shoot down missiles and otherwise rely on blowing stuff up before it has a chance to severely damage you or reach you. Thotimx posted:*Thud*. Yeah, I had no clue that was a thing. Is there an easy way to target fighters when they are basically 'on top' of a ship? I had the most annoying time with that, it seemed the cursor had to be precisely in the right location. Unfortunately, there's no easy way. You just have to find the magic pixel.
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Jun 6, 2019 08:03
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Fangz posted:What's even the point of heavy mounts right now? To be better at penetrating shields? If your ships are tankier and the vast majority of the enemy's damage output is missiles, you should I think just go pure AF and close to spitting distance to maximise hit rate. Against anything with Class III shields, the heavy mass drivers do twice as much damage. This puts them at parity in terms of pure damage/weight. Heavy mount weapons also suffer half the accuracy penalty for range (point defense weapons double it), and have approximately twice the range to boot (penalties are the same at their maximum ranges). With a defensive strategy, leveraging decent shields, Inertial Stabilizers, and firing from range to reduce the opponents' beam accuracy, Heavy Mount weapons are pretty great! They also suffer damage drop-off at roughly half the rate of normal weapons (which obviously doesn't matter for Mass Drivers). From a pure efficiency standpoint, sure, ditching the heavy mounts makes a certain amount of sense - your standard beams are generally about 33% more efficient in terms of space used compared to heavy mounts before you factor in shields, and for Mass Drivers against Class III shields they're break even. As to why you would want to use heavy mounts in general, well... the damage drop-off is a big factor. Normal guns do 100% of the listed base damage at point blank range (within 3 squares), and lose 10% of their damage every 3 squares down to a minimum of 35% at max range. Heavy mounts do 150% of the listed base damage at point blank range (within 9 squares), and lose 10% of their damage every 6] squares down to a minimum of 85% at max range. (Remember, base damage is the damage for a normal, non-heavy mount version of the weapon.) The range is another; running around with large amounts of heavy mount weapons can effectively give you an extra turn of shooting before the enemy gets into range, as well as a turn or two of shooting where the enemy's weapons are severely reduced in effectiveness (while yours don't take nearly as substantial a hit).
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Jun 6, 2019 12:38
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Thotimx posted:I guess I just don't get the accuracy math (not a great surprise), because it seems to me a 20% accuracy malus ought to take an awful lot of the sting out of that. Remember, it's not really a 20% accuracy malus, it's a -20 to your Beam Attack, If your beam attack is very high, then a -20 really only drops it a few percentage points. If you're beam attack is only pretty high, it might take the accuracy down from 90% to around ~75%. It's a lot easier to understand if you know that there's only three breakpoints you need to really care about in the accuracy math, and it revolves around what I'm going to call the HIT number. HIT is your total modified Beam Attack minus the target's Beam Defense. For the most part, the game will calculate all of this for you except for the distance penalty and the penalties/bonuses from modifications (i.e., Auto Fire, Point Defense, and Continuous). With Auto Fire Mass Drivers, you look at your Beam Attack, subtract the target's Beam Defense, and then subtract 20 to get your HIT before worrying about range. Here are the breakpoints... If your HIT is 50, that's a 90% chance to hit. If your HIT is 0, that's a 50% chance to hit. If your HIT is -50, that's a 10% chance to hit. At point blank range, you don't need to worry about it any further - those numbers will be accurate. The further away the target is, the lower your HIT. The key takeaway here is that if your HIT is over 50, you can still get a 90% chance to hit at a distance. The higher your HIT, the further away you can shoot while still getting that 90% hit rate. Again, laying it out as straightforward as I can. HIT of... -50 = 10% chance 0 = 50% chance +50 = 90% chance I'll give you another example - the Klackon Hornet VI in your last video has a BD of 90. That's 60 from a combat speed of 12 and +30 from Veteran crew. Your Silencers, out the gate, have a BA of 150 before counting any veterancy bonuses. Assuming you have a Space Academy where you're building the ships, they're starting out as Regulars, at least, so that gives them a BA of 165. 165 - 90 gives you a HIT of 75. Factoring in the -20 from auto fire, that means your mass drivers are hitting a bit better than 90% of the time at point blank range. Conversely, your Silencers had a BD of 150 (165 if they start as Regulars). The enemy Star Base had Battle Scanners, giving them a BA of 140, meaning that the enemy star base only had about a base 25-30% chance to hit your Silencers at point blank range. As far as PD weapons go, the damage dropoff calculation due to range means that PD Laser Cannons and PD Fusion Beams are incredibly crap - PD weapons only do 40% of the listed base damage at point blank range, instead of 50% (the ship screen lies to you). This means Lasers and Fusion Beams do only 1 point of damage except at point blank range (where they do 2). Mass Drivers do 3 points of damage at any range, which makes them okay but they're really mostly there to automatically fire at point blank at any incoming missiles to reduce incoming damage. I personally prefer to use regular weapons and to manually shoot missiles and fighters down, because then the space I'm spending is also useful for shooting at other ships and it lets my ships do a better job covering each other. So I don't use PD weapons myself, but I do allocate space as if I were - this means that my ship weaponry tends to be 1/3rd heavy mounts, 2/3rds regular mounts by weight.
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Jun 7, 2019 13:58
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