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Even before the (op) dmod remover skill it was cheap to repair frigs back to full and losing a few is inevitable in a large engagement so replacing losses with new salvage and picking up a few new ones at port is just a part of running your fleet. Frigs are expendable.
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Dec 31, 2021 00:50
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Submarine Sandpaper posted:Any advice on using a timid officer? I got a lvl 7 one so don't want to dismiss but they're worse then cautios you can put them in a dedicated e-war / nav ship i guess. it's not really an efficient use of DP but you're never going to make them effective in combat
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Dec 31, 2021 00:51
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idiotsavant posted:Are there any good ways to think about weapons to be able to suss things out? Like ok, Kinetic good for shields, HE good for armor, Energy balanced, balance it all out so that you can blow up shields then armor. But once I start looking at accuracy and ROF and efficiency I get lost. Like dual light AC vs light AC vs railgun with a few points less cap/vents, no idea what is better. Do you just set stuff up and stick it in the test generator? SPeaking of which, any good standard ships to test against for that kind of thing? Test generator is key, also think about it on a ship scale rather than a weapon scale. I have ships built to tear down shields and another ship style thats just for tearing down armor. People itt have good systems for fragmentary weapons but tbh their use is very situational in my experince and a hefty weapon that can rip through armor quickly is going to tear through hull as well. I prefer railguns, longer range and hefty punch means the AI doesn't need to get stuck in to do some work. Figure out what works for your play style. Imo finding a good ship to test against is hard because on one hand you want to test your ships load out against another ship thats somewhat similar, but on the other hand this is a fleet based game and its rare that your ships will be dueling 1 on 1 unless they are speedy. My rule of thumb is that if my ship can quickly overload or keep very occupied a ship of equal size or class than the load out is deadly enough that in a fleet enviroment its going to be contributing what it needs to.
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Dec 31, 2021 00:56
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You can retrain them and change their behavior for a skill point.
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Dec 31, 2021 00:57
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There's a mod that adds a bunch of training dummies to the simulator
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Dec 31, 2021 01:02
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Arghy posted:You can retrain them and change their behavior for a skill point. ...by one "rank" (so Timid would only go to Cautious) and IIRC only as long as they aren't level 5+ already
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Dec 31, 2021 01:03
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Excelzior posted:...by one "rank" (so Timid would only go to Cautious) and IIRC only as long as they aren't level 5+ already Haha welp never tried it so didn't know that, why does retraining suck so bad?
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Dec 31, 2021 01:03
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I know for sure you can retrain level 5 officers, haven't tried doing it to a level 7.Nothingtoseehere posted:or just don't use frigates. I run with lots of carriers to do basically the harassing job of frigates with even larger range and to not care if they get blown up. What about for catching things that are trying to escape?
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Dec 31, 2021 01:10
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Dabir posted:I know for sure you can retrain level 5 officers, haven't tried doing it to a level 7. Anything actually worth catching is slow enough that another size ship can get it, unless all your ships are super slow. And its fairly easy to recatch up to fleeing fleets since the AI isn't great at running.
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Dec 31, 2021 01:14
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Dowload ArmAA and let your Gundams catch them imo.
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Dec 31, 2021 01:15
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lol i just realized that ballistic rangefinder is basically useless for the VIC ships and i built one into my oriax when i first started because i was dumb and didnt really read the fineprint at the time
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Dec 31, 2021 01:57
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spending a bit of time looking at my fits and mods right now, and i just asked myself the question: is it worth using an ITU into a frigate?
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Dec 31, 2021 02:20
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For lategame / large scale stuff I basically stop running conventional Frigates. For screening and mobility I start use fighters or premium high tech platforms like the Tempest that can survive given adequately standoffish loadouts. I might keep a couple restored Pather Lashers around as dedicated pursuit ships if I have room in the fleet. Alternatively take Hull Restoration and it a frigate blows up sometimes it doesn't matter. Omens are great escorts as well.
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Dec 31, 2021 02:26
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Telsa Cola posted:Anything actually worth catching is slow enough that another size ship can get it, unless all your ships are super slow. And its fairly easy to recatch up to fleeing fleets since the AI isn't great at running. How much of a trade fleet do you have to destroy to have it count as not arriving, then? I've been trying it out and I don't know whether I need to be hunting down every last Hound and Gemini or if I can let a few survivors limp away.
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Dec 31, 2021 02:33
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Telsa Cola posted:Anything actually worth catching is slow enough that another size ship can get it, unless all your ships are super slow. And its fairly easy to recatch up to fleeing fleets since the AI isn't great at running. I use frigate for chasing down ships in the battle map. Generally they're not needed (I have carriers for actual support) but they get thrown out when I need to wipe out some ludds
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Dec 31, 2021 02:39
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Voyager I posted:For lategame / large scale stuff I basically stop running conventional Frigates. For screening and mobility I start use fighters or premium high tech platforms like the Tempest that can survive given adequately standoffish loadouts. I might keep a couple restored Pather Lashers around as dedicated pursuit ships if I have room in the fleet. Yeah once you start facing multiple cruisers you should be running at least light destroyers, frigates get destroyed far too easy when there's a ton of ships on the field. Loving my new start already, grabbed all 3 first tier yellow skills with the first blue tier skill so now my civvy ships all have 3+ burn level and 50% more space is helping my trading snowball like crazy haha. Buying a ton of combat freighters and putting 2 missiles on their rear hard points which is nuts with extended magazines. I'm definitely gonna lean heavy into the yellow line this run and put myself on a carrier sitting in the back while my officers earn their pay haha. I turned 18k into 400k in under an hour but that's just gonna snowball. Gonna aim for a stealthy exploration fleet to find myself the perfect colony this time.
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Dec 31, 2021 03:17
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Thanks all. I can work with cautious on a beam or carrier with an aggressive escort. loving timid was just going on corner map tours. And I did not realize I could change to cautious
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Dec 31, 2021 03:23
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At this point, I'm of the opinion that ITU on frigates isn't worth the OP. If you want your frigates to kill, Safety Overrides and rushing the poo poo out of everything before your CR depletes deffo feels a lot better because of all the extra flux you get, as opposed to chipping away with only slightly longer ranged weapons.
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Dec 31, 2021 03:25
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lollontee posted:you have a starsector mod https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=22246.0 Phase kites and shepherds. The shepherd has a Wasp wing and better turret arcs, and energy instead of ballistic. The kite (s) has active flare launcher instead of jets, the regular kite has the disruptor thing that overloads the target for like 1 second and a Terminator wing. It's supposed to be a bomber like the Mayasuran Mako. Basically these exist entirely so I can start with a solo ship that I like to fly without being particularly good or needing a million support ships right away. Larry Parrish fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Dec 31, 2021 |
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Dec 31, 2021 03:38
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if you want frigates to scale into the lategame, use the fleet size based on DP mod instead of being stuck with a limited number of ships where eventually the best option is to fill up each spot with a capital, you can have the DP equivalent of that capital spread out across a bunch of frigates with no worries i should mention the base setting for that mod caps your fleet size at 600 DP, which is fine for vanilla but in a heavily modded game like mine i prefer to bump it up to 1000 to have a bit more fun with a wider variety of ships (and to account for the DP used on logistics)
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Dec 31, 2021 03:56
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Anyone like collecting pre-collapse Kites? I just think they're kinda neat.
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Dec 31, 2021 04:06
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Dabir posted:Anyone like collecting pre-collapse Kites? I just think they're kinda neat. I do this. Occasionally in lategame I'll also take a crewman and tool around my home system with one.
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Dec 31, 2021 04:06
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In very broad terms you can split ballistic kinetic/HE into two types each. They aren't hard or fast rules but they tend to hold true when looking at vanilla and mod weapons. For kinetics: 1) faster rate of fire kinetics (Generally with shorter range, but not always) are for ramping up flux on enemy shields and keeping the pressure on when they're trying to block other stuff like EMP or big HE hits. They will never do a lot of damage to armor so they won't force the enemy to raise their shields in the first place, though once armor is breached they can do a lot of hull damage. The ones of this type that can overwhelm enemy shields also tend to generate large amounts of flux, like needlers, so you need to be careful using them. 2) Low RoF, slow reload are for actually overpowering enemy shields or pushing them into overload when they're nearly maxed. At the start of the fight they won't force the enemy to raise shields (except for things with secondary effects like the EMP on the hypervelocity driver) but as their armor gets breached the heavier hitting kinetic weapons can actually do a lot of hull damage at extreme range. They work very well when paired with HE guns with a similar RoF/travel speed since the enemy will be forced to choose between taking the HE on their armor or running up their flux/overloading, which is a terrible position to be in. For High Explosive: 1) High RoF is, as others have noted, are not actually very good at stripping armor since a lot of it gets mitigated by the armor. They'll do it eventually but you're wasting a lot of time if they're all you have. What they do incredibly well is actually dishing out hull damage once armor is stripped since their (generally) higher sustained damage is now bieng fully used. They basically fill the role fragmentation damage should while still bieng able to strip armor on weaker ships and contribute throughout the whole fight. 2) Slow RoF high explosives are the king for cracking enemy armor open and actually dealing killing blows, but before that they're also incredibly useful for forcing the enemy to keep their shields up even if their flux is high or take ruinous damage. If they can't get out of your range in time they're going to die from this, either because they overloaded and are sitting ducks or just took too many hits to their hull. They aren't too great at it but their high base damage means that they're not terrible at building flux on enemy ships. When choosing what weapons to combine onto an AI ship you need to first consider what range it's going to fight at and then give it weapons with the same range. Not all speedy ships need to have fast firing guns, but generally the faster a ship the better they can exploit fast firing guns and the slower a ship the better it is with the slower, longer ranged guns. Having said that, a very tanky ship with high armor or an excellent shield with some sort of burst movement ability can be truly devastating with short ranged and fast firing weapons as it can leap on an enemy and kill them before they can respond.
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Dec 31, 2021 04:08
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Complications posted:I do this. Occasionally in lategame I'll also take a crewman and tool around my home system with one. I was thinking of doing something like that when I finally sit down and get my head around how colonies work. Keep different configurations of fleets for different purposes in different colonies, then use the Kite to shuttle between them.
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Dec 31, 2021 04:10
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Dabir posted:How much of a trade fleet do you have to destroy to have it count as not arriving, then? I've been trying it out and I don't know whether I need to be hunting down every last Hound and Gemini or if I can let a few survivors limp away. Assuming if it works like raids and invasions, if you break the fleet by basically killing 80% of it it counts as a failed mission. I think. Which makes sense. If colony needs X amount of food to keep going or whatever and they only receive 20% of that, well its better then nothing bit lotta people gonna starve.
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Dec 31, 2021 04:39
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Dabir posted:Anyone like collecting pre-collapse Kites? I just think they're kinda neat. Yep. Top priority if I ever see one in exploration. Re: weapons question, good answers already. My small additional summary: You need to figure out how your ship / fleet will accomplish the following functions, with common solutions in brackets: 1: Get in firing range. (Be faster) (Have longer weapon range) 2: Persuade the enemy to raise shields. (Have a regular stream of hull-threatening damage, hi-ex or big kinetic) (Have EMP weapons) 3: Max out their flux by hitting those shields. (Have kinetic weapons) 4: Strip or pierce their armour. (Have hi-ex or big kinetic) 5: Break their hull. (Any weapon, pure DPS race) Note that for 2 and 3, flux ratio is very important, because at that point the enemy is presumably trying to do the same to you. If a hi-ex weapon has a bad flux:damage ratio, that's no big problem - assuming you're using it appropriately, flux shouldn't be a major problem by the time you're firing it a lot. If a kinetic weapon has a bad flux ratio, it might be useless for a stand-up fight, and possibly instead meant for artillery-style fire support into nearby fights. Soft flux beams are very bad for 3, because their flux can be dissipated, but they're usually very good for 2. Energy in general is between hi-ex and kinetic, making it worse for each specific role but potentially capable of filling more roles. So, don't view weapons in isolation. Think about which of the above roles they can fill, and build your ship/fleet to deal with all of those requirements as a whole.
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Dec 31, 2021 04:39
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Dabir posted:Anyone like collecting pre-collapse Kites? I just think they're kinda neat. I have a soft spot for them from playing Starfarer mode a bunch. When you have to grind those 'emergency delivery' missions to afford a real ship, you learn to love that stupid thing.
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Dec 31, 2021 05:08
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Dabir posted:How do I not let losing frigates bother me? Is the answer just to build my own colony so I can mass produce them? Reinforced bulkheads makes it so they're always recoverable. The +40% (I think) hull points is also a big boost to survivability. It's an automatic pick on frigates for me.
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Dec 31, 2021 06:44
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Arghy posted:How do you even field the zig though it's loving 75 DP's Dabir posted:Anyone like collecting pre-collapse Kites? I just think they're kinda neat. 
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Dec 31, 2021 06:46
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One thing that some of you newer players might not know is that the length of how long a ship is overloaded depends on the severity of the hit that caused the overload. That means that while a Storm Needler can poo poo out a ton of kinetic damage any overload it causes will be rather short compared to an overload caused by a Gauss Cannon or even the Mark IX Autocannons.
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Dec 31, 2021 07:04
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Remember, kill the pirate trade fleet IN HYPERSPACE so you can trade at all those great prices and not get locked out haha. Missed out on easily 500k worth of heavy armament sales because i didn't look closely at the fleet i was killing.
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Dec 31, 2021 07:23
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Note that hyperspace battles don't leave debris.
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Dec 31, 2021 07:47
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Arghy posted:Remember, kill the pirate trade fleet IN HYPERSPACE so you can trade at all those great prices and not get locked out haha. Missed out on easily 500k worth of heavy armament sales because i didn't look closely at the fleet i was killing. There is probably some friendly pathers nearby that need a instant delivery.
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Dec 31, 2021 12:47
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Atopian posted:Note that hyperspace battles don't leave debris. Yep, the true pro gamer move is to intercept them just before they enter hyperspace in their home system, or hit them right as they exit at their destination system but ahead of the polity. Granted, most of the time you'll run into trade fleets in hyperspace, so no foul if you want to hit them as you find them, but you will likely recover a little extra when you pop them in realspace.
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Dec 31, 2021 13:31
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Larry Parrish posted:https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=22246.0 huh, that is exactly what i was looking for, so im not sure how to express contempt. the shepherd looks really nice, the center especially. i think the kite could use a little more highlighting to give it more corners, it feels kinda flat with just grey and indigo. anyway, we need more mods. it is praxis
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Dec 31, 2021 13:50
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lollontee posted:anyway, we need more mods. it is praxis  One of these days, I'll work up the energy and guts to start putting together the ridiculous "rebuild a mobile-station and learn amazing things in the process" thing I have in mind to put together.
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Dec 31, 2021 15:31
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Taerkar posted:One thing that some of you newer players might not know is that the length of how long a ship is overloaded depends on the severity of the hit that caused the overload. That means that while a Storm Needler can poo poo out a ton of kinetic damage any overload it causes will be rather short compared to an overload caused by a Gauss Cannon or even the Mark IX Autocannons. True, but it also means the AI can't pull its usual bullshit and perfectly drop shields to take gauss cannons on the hull. In some cases that's a good thing, as it can allow you to snipe out destroyers because the sheer weight of a gauss round will still dunk on their armour, but it makes single impact kinetics quite spotty against larger, better armoured ships. Also re: frigates I have been throwing omens at problems for a while and I usually lose some each fight, but I can't remember the last time I even picked up a D mod on them because I have the right skill picks, always been recoverable too, once you get to the point where you're losing frigates regularly you can quite easily get the skills to make it not actually a problem, either that or just get used to treating them like very expensive supplies. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Dec 31, 2021 |
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Dec 31, 2021 16:10
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insane mod idea im hallucinating after being unable to sleep all night from insomnia mini gate ("ship") only found as a rare bp and costs 50mil to produce, because the reasoning is that you have to build two of them. one goes to your fleet equipped with maneuvering jets and a manned bridge, the other is heavily shielded and thrown into a star the pilotable mini gate costs like 400 DP, has no mounts (maybe some jury-rigged smalls on the sides?), and has 3 burn with awful logistical costs. poo poo tons of armor. ship system has no flux cost. movement is slow capital-speed in a linear direction with very poor maneuverability. the mini gate itself is shown top-down in battle (as a wall-like line instead of the full frontal circular shape) with massive thrusters on each end (nothing that would block the gate's aperture) to propel and maneuver the ship this thing is huge too, "mini" is in reference to the absolutely collosal size of an actual domain gate now, the ship system. takes 20 seconds to charge up. movement locked during the charge and activation. activation lasts 5 seconds. cooldown is another 20 seconds. so, the pilotable mini gate is linked to the one thrown into the star. the system activation does exactly what you probably now realize. basically everything in front of the mini gate for the full breadth of the gate's aperture extending the full length of the battlefield is BLASTED with a seemingly solid mass of solar hellfire. complete obliteration. the existence and usage of this ship is possible lore-wise because the player is the only one with a jaanus device and is able to operate gates like this. the weaponization of the gates was an untested secret domain military project lost after the collapse, and even if the plans were stumbled upon they were disregarded because gates were thought to be rendered useless pros of the ship: 1. hell yeah 2. HELL yeah 3. fun 4. goodbye stations 5. technically the most powerful ship ever possibly conceived 6. orb cons: 1. ludicrously expensive in every single way 2. in mortal danger if a single frigate gets behind it 3. spectacular gimmick 4. i will never make this so essentially it would be a ton of work doing art and code and effects n poo poo good luck lol 5. orb also, it makes all bombardments cost 0 fuel why not
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Dec 31, 2021 17:09
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lollontee posted:huh, that is exactly what i was looking for, so im not sure how to express contempt. the shepherd looks really nice, the center especially. i think the kite could use a little more highlighting to give it more corners, it feels kinda flat with just grey and indigo. i like the tengu but the tengu (e) kind of looks bad qq. but yeah it's hard to highlight the edges on a dark colored ship. that's probably why so many modders seem to make white ships.
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Dec 31, 2021 19:25
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Raine posted:insane mod idea im hallucinating after being unable to sleep all night from insomnia not gonna lie i want this also orb is NEVER a con
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Dec 31, 2021 19:28
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