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DentedLamp posted:Is the "area-pulse"/AoE weapon line useful at all? Like, say, against fighters and such? If you are fighting Gizureans then the answer is holy gently caress yes.
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Jun 11, 2014 19:52
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DentedLamp posted:Is the "area-pulse"/AoE weapon line useful at all? Like, say, against fighters and such? I got the devastator pulse superweapon and it's a complete piece of poo poo. Friendly fire and no way to specify a formation makes it worthless.
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Jun 11, 2014 20:28
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Suicide divebomber.
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Jun 11, 2014 20:46
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Or a heavy resupply ship(Which I always end up using not as a refuelling point but as a mobile starbase for killing things).
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Jun 11, 2014 20:55
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Never ran into this before, pirates took over my starting starport. Any way to take it back other than holding on and teching to colonization and coming back for it later?
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Jun 11, 2014 21:03
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So I just bought this game, and it's pretty awesome, but I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing with my economy. Playing from the Age of Shadows, I've just researched my first hyper drive, and have discovered a world nearby that I could colonize after one more tech, but I think I should figure out my finances first. Some questions:
I'll post proper screenshots of my finances later, but it'd be really nice to see some sort of guide as to how much stuff I should be building in the beginning.
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Jun 11, 2014 21:07
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Zombie #246 posted:Never ran into this before, pirates took over my starting starport. Any way to take it back other than holding on and teching to colonization and coming back for it later? I know you can buy bases from empire players, but I don't know if you can do that with pirate factions... maybe check the diplomacy screen and see if they will sell it? Otherwise you'll just have to tech up to boarding pods and send in the marines.
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Jun 11, 2014 21:18
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Zombie #246 posted:Never ran into this before, pirates took over my starting starport. Any way to take it back other than holding on and teching to colonization and coming back for it later? Sign a protection agreement with them and then build a defensive base with superior firepower and shields compared to the starport, then drop the agreement once its fully built and charged up?
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Jun 11, 2014 21:49
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PittTheElder posted:So I just bought this game, and it's pretty awesome, but I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing with my economy. Playing from the Age of Shadows, I've just researched my first hyper drive, and have discovered a world nearby that I could colonize after one more tech, but I think I should figure out my finances first. Some questions: I'll answer what I can: Firepower in most contexts just refers to the dps of a single ship / total dps of a fleet. Not sure how maps onto military strength, but I doubt it's 1:1. Did they just buy/retrofit a bunch of new ships? They pay you for building the ships, so if they just finished a ship buying cycle, their cash onhand may be low while your income from them just got cut off. I've read there's some kind of formula based on how many bases / planets / etc. you have determining how many and what kind of ships the private sector wants. I've never not been able to order a ship / base when I had the money. Construction may be slowed if you're out of key resources, though.
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Jun 11, 2014 22:27
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I believe the private sector did just finish buying up lots of new ships; they were all upgrading to hyper drive capable models I believe. But I'm just very surprised that their Cash on Hand is so strongly negative, it's down at like -200K, and still falling. Since my bonus income has dropped to almost nothing, I don't think they're continuing to place order with me.
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Jun 11, 2014 23:05
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Mining stations use private finances, so if they've got no money, you won't be able to build any. I've never actually seen my private sector go into the red on new ships before - they always seem to wait until they have a fair amount of cash on hand before doing so. If their cashflow is positive, though, it should balance on fairly quickly, especially now that you have hyperdrives. Also, if your own finances are sound, you may want to make things easier on them for a bit by reducing taxes.
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Jun 12, 2014 00:02
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PittTheElder posted:My state finances are awful, I've started hitting a -10k cashflow, but that had been propped up by bonus income from the private sector for a long time. That seems to have vanished now though. My maintenance costs are mostly for my Large Spaceport, while a little bit of it is my ~8 military ships. Even those don't seem like enough, because various pirates nearby (but not in system, I don't know where they're based) have much higher Firepower than I do Military Strength (~1200 vs. 700). I clearly can't afford to keep buying stuff though. The first thing you should do here is replace that large spaceport with a stripped-down small. You don't need 30 docking bays, 8 construction yards, etc as a one-planet empire and the money you save there should be more than enough to pay off all the pirates. The spaceport is probably also the main reason why your economy is in the shitter. Building that used most of your initial resource stockpile, and when you run out of a resource, it gets way more expensive which affects the price of new construction, refitting, and maintenance. You might be able to recover by getting rid of the spaceport, lowering taxes (private sector gets most of its income from colony GDP), and placing an order with smugglers for whatever resource you've run out of.
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Jun 12, 2014 00:19
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Yeah, I was wondering what the hell the difference between a small/medium/large spaceport was; I seemed to do OK with large, so I just kept going.Hot Sexy Jupiter posted:Mining stations use private finances... Ah, I did not know that, certainly explains that thing. quote:...so if they've got no money, you won't be able to build any. I've never actually seen my private sector go into the red on new ships before - they always seem to wait until they have a fair amount of cash on hand before doing so. If their cashflow is positive, though, it should balance on fairly quickly, especially now that you have hyperdrives. Also, if your own finances are sound, you may want to make things easier on them for a bit by reducing taxes. Yeah, that's the part I really don't understand. Their cash flow is positive, but their cash on hand is still dropping.
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Jun 12, 2014 00:21
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah, that's the part I really don't understand. Their cash flow is positive, but their cash on hand is still dropping. It's either the increased maintenance from your resource shortage, or they still have a bunch of ships stuck in the spaceport waiting for more overpriced resources to trickle in so they can finish their refits.
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Jun 12, 2014 00:53
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Honestly I have no idea what's going on with the cashflow measurements (for the player), I can easily be in the red or black but still be moving the opposite direction sometimes. Edit: next game I think I'm going fighters first, they're so effective even at range and have little / zero passive power draw. metasynthetic fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 00:56
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PittTheElder posted:So I just bought this game, and it's pretty awesome, but I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing with my economy. Playing from the Age of Shadows, I've just researched my first hyper drive, and have discovered a world nearby that I could colonize after one more tech, but I think I should figure out my finances first. Some questions: The economy seems weird because the game is bad at explaining things. Bonus income like resorts or the private sector buying ships gets added in after cashflow, leading to weird things like constantly being in the red and still making money.
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Jun 12, 2014 01:48
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Fair enough, thanks for all the answers everybody. I've decided to start a new game, maybe play things a little more conservatively. So now I simply return to pirates: is there some way to know when you can confidently cancel protection agreements? Is there any real harm in cancelling, and then re-upping if they show up again later? e: Well, I cancelled an agreement, they showed up thereafter and now I'm paying them some 700/month, double what I was previously paying. I guess I shouldn't do that. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 02:03
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Yeah, the problem is pirates continuously get stronger, and the stronger they are the more they'll ask for. To be honest, as a new player you probably shouldn't be doing the Age of Shadows start anyway. It's designed for veteran players looking for an extra challenge, and gets absolutely brutal very quickly once you begin expanding. I also don't think the AI empires handle it very well: every AoS game I've attempted so far results in most of the competing empires being very stunted. This makes them largely irrelevent in your affairs, and puts the focus almost entirely on you fighting pirates. Eventually you'll be under almost constant pirate attack, which is annoying as gently caress because it only takes one escort to scatter all your civilian traffic, and will likely drive you insane if you're not using the silent alert mod. I quit my last AoS game because almost all my colonies were the scene of 24/7 brawls between me and competing pirate factions. You can slowly make progress as you hunt down and eradicate pirate bases, but the whole thing is just incredibly exhausting. I like the pre-warp start, though, so I usually play a custom game with that enabled but the Age of Shadows storyline off, which makes pirates a lot more manageable.
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Jun 12, 2014 02:49
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Hot Sexy Jupiter posted:Yeah, the problem is pirates continuously get stronger, and the stronger they are the more they'll ask for. The AI handles big research costs pretty badly, but it does beeline for hyperdrives to the point where you don't even need to research it yourself, you can just steal it. The "trick" to staying sane is expanding slowly, because pirates will generally only attack small colonies so once a planet is big enough to hold a decent garrison they'll stop raiding it. There is just basically no way to fight them straight on in the early game though and you have to eat the losses, if they find an abandoned capital ship you can just forget about beating them for 50 years.
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Jun 12, 2014 03:09
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Hot Sexy Jupiter posted:Eventually you'll be under almost constant pirate attack, which is annoying as gently caress because it only takes one escort to scatter all your civilian traffic, and will likely drive you insane if you're not using the silent alert mod. What is the silent alert mod?
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Jun 12, 2014 03:14
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I use this one: http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3339520 It's such a minor change but it improved my playing experience amazingly. It's important to get alerts, but the sound effect is really grating, and was completely killing the game for me. It also makes the very minor visual change of adding green ticks/plus signs for positive events, which I consider an improvement.
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Jun 12, 2014 03:19
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I'm really enjoying my game. A galactic utopian society has become the juggernaut of the galaxy with three times as much territory as anyone else and really close to all its victory conditiosn, being allied with half the galaxy because they are nice, peace-loving and give everyone credits. Me, a bitter, war-mongering human monarchy, couldn't stand for the galaxy to be united under this prosperous and peacful ruling. I'm now revving up the engines of war by buying favour with the nasty, hateful bugs and the cruel dog people, and all the pirates I can find. Currently it is going very well, despite them being much more advanced. I think this is because the AI sucks at war but I'm still too new to the game to determine How do I get my ships to use refueling ships? They need to be deployed? MOVIE MAJICK fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 04:18
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Hot Sexy Jupiter posted:I like the pre-warp start, though, so I usually play a custom game with that enabled but the Age of Shadows storyline off, which makes pirates a lot more manageable. Does any custom game work for this, or is there an Age of Shadows thing I have to uncheck somewhere that I don't see?
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Jun 12, 2014 04:25
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PittTheElder posted:Does any custom game work for this, or is there an Age of Shadows thing I have to uncheck somewhere that I don't see? It's on the last page of the custom game settings, you can enable/disable story events independently.
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Jun 12, 2014 04:26
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Alright, thank you so much for recommending that, this makes so much more sense.
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Jun 12, 2014 05:34
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WYA posted:How do I get my ships to use refueling ships? They need to be deployed? A refueling ship is basically a militarized gas miner with a lot of docking ports. You drive it to a source of caslon/hydrogen and use ctrl-click to deploy it on the source. Then you can select your fleet or whatever and order them to refuel at the deployed ship. PittTheElder posted:Alright, thank you so much for recommending that, this makes so much more sense. It really should be in the OP or something that first timers should not play age of shadows. The game is confusing and frustrating enough without the UI tricking you into thinking that you're supposed to start on the absolute hardest and most teeth gnashing hardcore mode. I'm sure plenty of people have been all gently caress this pirate ridden game without ever experiencing the goodness beneath. Pre-warp is interesting but to be honest kind of masochistic. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 05:35
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double post
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Jun 12, 2014 05:36
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Popular Thug Drink posted:A refueling ship is basically a militarized gas miner with a lot of docking ports. You drive it to a source of caslon/hydrogen and use ctrl-click to deploy it on the source. Then you can select your fleet or whatever and order them to refuel at the deployed ship. Yeah, the only reason I know about this at all because of Grey Hunter's Thousand Year AAR; he recently made the switch from Paradox games to Distant Worlds, and it looked too good not to try. His first update involved him getting just massacred by pirates at the very beginning, so I figured I was doing OK since I didn't have my first three stations immediately destroyed.  So another question: what makes a powerful warship? I'm currently just racing ahead in military tech relative to my other branches, since they've all been slowed by hyperdrive and colonization research projects, which I gather are much larger than the average project of that level. But are my ships going to be pretty useless until I can get better reactors and sensors and such?
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Jun 12, 2014 05:43
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Shields are key. Armour helps, of course. You REALLY want to get the 'standard' hyperdrive, blasters, reactors, and shields as soon as possible before making a real warfleet, if only to keep from having to retrofit multiple times. Maybe some energy collectors, too.
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Jun 12, 2014 06:17
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Energy collectors are wasted on anything that isn't spending most of its time in a system, and on military ships its space that could be used to put on more shields or guns. Stations and construction ships are the only thing I bother giving collectors and a thing to note is that the energy actually collected scales off distance from the sun. So stations on ice planets on the edge of a system actually need more collectors so it's worth putting an extra one or two on all your designs to make up the difference on static usage.
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Jun 12, 2014 06:19
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How many engines/shields/batteries etc do you need? I want to make my own ships, but I don't want to have to redesign them every 5 minutes when I get a new tech.
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Jun 12, 2014 06:31
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Alright, I have most of that researched, just have to get the reactors. By standard hyper drive I'm assuming you mean the one after warp bubbles. Should I be designing my own ships, or is the AI acceptably decent at it? Is there a particular branch of weapons that's good, or should u have a mix of everything? What counts as a real fleet? I'm currently focused on building just such a fleet so I can cancel the 1000 credit protection agreement I have.
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Jun 12, 2014 06:31
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So what's the trick with your research being capped? The help seems to suggest it's based on your strategic value, but is there any way I can directly work to improve my research speed since building more stations seems to have extremely diminished returns? Any non-obvious ways to improve my strategic value?
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Jun 12, 2014 07:57
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:So what's the trick with your research being capped? The help seems to suggest it's based on your strategic value, but is there any way I can directly work to improve my research speed since building more stations seems to have extremely diminished returns? Any non-obvious ways to improve my strategic value? Your research potential is based on your population, the more population you have the more labs you can get full benefit from. In general it's better to stick to research locations because the percentage bonuses work in your favour but in the early game it's worth sticking at least one of each base around your homeworld.
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Jun 12, 2014 08:02
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Popular Thug Drink posted:It really should be in the OP or something that first timers should not play age of shadows. The game is confusing and frustrating enough without the UI tricking you into thinking that you're supposed to start on the absolute hardest and most teeth gnashing hardcore mode. I'm sure plenty of people have been all gently caress this pirate ridden game without ever experiencing the goodness beneath. Good idea. If anyone else has some other newbie tips they have picked up - post them and I will put them in the OP.
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Jun 12, 2014 09:02
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Comstar posted:How many engines/shields/batteries etc do you need? I want to make my own ships, but I don't want to have to redesign them every 5 minutes when I get a new tech. Three main things to bear in mind when designing fighting ships: Max. weapons energy usage per second Shield recharge per second Cruise speed energy per second The sum of these is what your ship will typically use in battle (ships use sprint to move towards targets, but reduce to cruise when engaging them in weapons range) per second, so you will want your reactor power to match this. For example, a ship with weapons energy of 50, shield energy of 1 and cruise energy of 20 will need at least 71 excess energy from the reactor to do all those things with efficiency. It's also really important to think about fuel storage, because fuel doesn't just influence your range: it also represents fighting endurance, or if you like - ammo, as the energy that powers your weapons is converted from your fuel storage. Inadequate design will result in your strike ships reaching their target after a long journey, only to have about 10 seconds' worth of fighting fuel left (note that this is where resupply ships are worth their weight in gold, as they can set up shop near potential targets to give your fleets max fuel supplies before going into battle). PittTheElder posted:Should I be designing my own ships, or is the AI acceptably decent at it? Is there a particular branch of weapons that's good, or should u have a mix of everything? What counts as a real fleet? I'm currently focused on building just such a fleet so I can cancel the 1000 credit protection agreement I have. The AI designs are adequate for the most part, though naturally a human can make much more effective designs when they know what they're doing. Personally I design everything except private ships. There are lots of variables for weapons, and there's a massive potential for sperging about dps, damage/size ratios etc, but in practice, it generally doesn't matter that much what you choose so long as the other aspects of your design are consistent with the weapons you've decided to go with. For example, if you're using short-ranged weapons like blasters, then you want to make sure your ship is fairly quick, so it can close in quickly with ships that use longer ranged weapons, and keep pace with them if they try to move away. On the other hand, ships with long-ranged standoff weapons which you intend to use against stationary bases obviously don't need to worry about speed and agility so much. It's useful to pay attention to your opponents' designs, and what their shield and firepower ratings are like compared to yours. Obviously you will want to match or exceeed those if possible. If their size 230 frigates have 40 firepower and 180 shields, while yours have 50 firepower and 260 shields, chances are yours are going to win. Obviously it's not quite that simple given the variety of weapons available (some of which are highly specialized like ion cannons and gravity beams), but going through all those variables accounting for speed, armour, shield recharge, number of ships, range, cosmic background radiation levels etc would require an absolute megapost of sperglord proportions, so at your current level, I think firepower/shield values is about what it boils down to, and thus the main thing to keep in mind. Drunk in Space fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 13:53
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PittTheElder posted:Alright, I have most of that researched, just have to get the reactors. By standard hyper drive I'm assuming you mean the one after warp bubbles. You should design your own ships eventually but while you're still getting the hang of the game the AI does a decent job. Ship design is one of those things that is pretty tedious at first until you start doing tricky things like making escorts that are nothing but little mini carriers. You can compromise by playing with special designs that you test out while allowing the AI to keep up with stock designs. For a new player the #1 thing you need to understand is the economy and expansion, then research, then politics and warfare, and once you have a handle on all those things you can start futzing around with ship design. That's when you start breaking the game by spamming massive research stations everywhere, etc. Weapons research is better if you go deep than wide. It's better to have a couple lvl 6 weapons branches and ignore the rest than to have everything at lvl 2-3 in the mid game, etc. I really like fighters because they automatically retrofit when you research newer designs, but it's an expensive research tree. Fleets can be whatever you want them to be, the thing you need to balance is distribution of forces and cost effectiveness. Like there's nothing stopping you from having a 100 ship death fleet if you can find a good use for all those expensive ships. I generally take a WW2 style and either have all fleet carriers/escorts or all capital ships. What's fun about this game is that it's a honeypot for minmaxing munchkin spergs. There's really no wrong way to do things, just better ways given your current situation and capabilities. Trying to totally ace and optimize the game will lead to burnout as you spend hours sweating over the precise dps of your lesser ships.
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Jun 12, 2014 18:34
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Popular Thug Drink posted:It really should be in the OP or something that first timers should not play age of shadows. The game is confusing and frustrating enough without the UI tricking you into thinking that you're supposed to start on the absolute hardest and most teeth gnashing hardcore mode. I'm sure plenty of people have been all gently caress this pirate ridden game without ever experiencing the goodness beneath. And they have Endless Space to play.  I think the pre-warp game does a decent job of introducing the concepts before you're faced with the Securon start with three planets and a mess of lines and blobs everywhere. I dropped playing the base game mainly due to that level of intimidation.
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Jun 12, 2014 20:11
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Pre-warp start is good if you turn pirates to few and very weak or something.
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Jun 12, 2014 20:54
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Demiurge4 posted:Energy collectors are wasted on anything that isn't spending most of its time in a system, and on military ships its space that could be used to put on more shields or guns. Stations and construction ships are the only thing I bother giving collectors and a thing to note is that the energy actually collected scales off distance from the sun. So stations on ice planets on the edge of a system actually need more collectors so it's worth putting an extra one or two on all your designs to make up the difference on static usage. It takes one collector that's what, 8 size? To power the static energy needs of most ship designs you can think of and with that one collector they can idle indefinitely without using fuel. It's a pretty worthwhile addition in my opinion considering my fleets probably spend 10% of the time moving or fighting and the rest idling while guarding something or waiting for the next target. I don't put them on escorts though since I always put them on automated control.
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Jun 12, 2014 21:24
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