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I had a real frustrating match where I used the default beam destroyers against an AI default heavy cruiser fleet on a conquest match. I quickly managed to pop one cruiser with a wave of 20 missiles aided by radar jamming. Chaff caught most of the missiles, but enough hit to kill the cruiser. Then my jammer came off cooldown, and the cruiser started savaging my destroyers. The beams and cannons seamed to do nothing as I lost 2 destroyers and my jammer. I had my last ship dump its remaining missiles into the cruiser, which crippled the guns but didn't seem to damage anything internal. Then I just followed the cruiser for the next 15 minutes continuously firing the beam point blank, not being able to kill it, as it captured points.
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Feb 22, 2022 19:15
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| # ? Apr 30, 2024 02:44 |
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That's weird. In my experience cruiser get cored by beam in seconds.
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Feb 22, 2022 19:26
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Yeah, damage is still very swingy at times. One game my light cruiser got hit in the nose with three missiles and was instantly destroyed. A few rounds later I managed to land between four and five missiles up and down the broadside of an enemy light cruiser and it still took like 10 minutes of constant 450mm HE shelling and railguns before it went down for good.
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Feb 22, 2022 21:26
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I feel like part of the issue is that shots often end up targeting and hitting the center of mass? Except that whole area may or may not contain critical systems, so even if you successfully gut the center of the ship you might not be hitting things like their engines or reactors or other systems necessary to keep the ship fighting, so repeated shots into the wrecked center don't really do anything because you've already burned out everything there. It's possible that trying to reposition to ensure that some other area of the ship gets the center of mass treatment could do the trick, but it'd be nice to have an option to tell your ships to try and target this or that specific part of the ship, if it's within visual range. Though that might be a bit TOO overpowered if beam ships can basically cut out the engines of anything that isn't facing them directly head on at will.
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Feb 22, 2022 23:17
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The secret to beam destroyers is battleshorting the beams, IIRC they have some modifier that gives them a much lower chance of burning out. My experience in MP is that beam destroyers played right are utterly horrifying.
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Feb 23, 2022 02:21
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Tomn posted:I feel like part of the issue is that shots often end up targeting and hitting the center of mass? Except that whole area may or may not contain critical systems, so even if you successfully gut the center of the ship you might not be hitting things like their engines or reactors or other systems necessary to keep the ship fighting, so repeated shots into the wrecked center don't really do anything because you've already burned out everything there. Center mass targeting used to be how it worked until rather recently, I think the change was about a week ago. I'm not technical-minded enough to describe the new method accurately but its something like it selects a volume within the hull every few seconds and uses that for the targeting point. It does a pretty good job of spreading the fire across a ship without needlessly missing shots that would otherwise hit. Its most noticeable with a beam, you'll see it slew to one part of the ship, wiggle around there for a bit, then slew to a different part.
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Feb 23, 2022 07:37
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LostCosmonaut posted:The secret to beam destroyers is battleshorting the beams, IIRC they have some modifier that gives them a much lower chance of burning out. My experience in MP is that beam destroyers played right are utterly horrifying. I've only been playing around with ship design so far, and hearing how good lasers are makes me glad, because I'v spend some time to make a small fleet that's just a heavy beam cruiser supported by two beam destroyers, both with faster-then-normal engines and jammers to make targeting them harder. If I can find the time to actually play, I want to see how much I hosed up designing when actually using that strike force (For example, my beam cruiser is constantly at 98% energy used while the destroyers are at a less insane ca. 80-90%, so in theory the destroyers can lose one of their smaller support reactors and still going. Is using all your energy bad? Are the combo of PD and jammers enough to survive missiles? I don't know! I guess I will learn.)
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Feb 23, 2022 11:22
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Running at near-100% energy use raises the chance that a single penetrating hit leads to a cascade of deactivated modules; even if the enemy misses the main reactor they might hit a secondary power plant or a reactor control room or something and then you’re dead in vacuum before you’re even really dead in vacuum.
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Feb 23, 2022 11:26
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Yeah running out of power due to a stray shot is very bad, ship builds that go suddenly combat-ineffective due to a single shot can be viable but need to be played around the idea that nobody will ever shoot them.
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Feb 23, 2022 11:28
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poo poo. Well, if this idea doesn't work out, I'll simply design a pure EW-frigate and put three of them in support, one for each beam ship. Then I can massively reduce energy costs by ripping out the very expensive jammers in the main ships. that should lead to some redundancy.
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Feb 23, 2022 11:32
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The current meta is you either knifefight with beams, or snipe with rails, or pack absolutely ridiculous numbers of missile launchers and try and alpha strike someone off the field. Knifefighting with beams typically means the person who starts shooting first wins.
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Feb 23, 2022 11:36
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Did a quick test and it seems armor angling is very effective against cannon. With armor angling, 250mm HE cannot pierce light cruiser armor while heavy cruiser is almost completely immune. Also the idea of "raking shot" is also not very effective. 250mm AP from the front can easily destroy all the thrusters on the front of a heavy cruiser, but all the component in the middle of the ships are basically safe no matter how much AP your pour in.
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Feb 23, 2022 13:59
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Feb 24, 2022 01:11
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it's very hard to pull off ime
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Feb 24, 2022 01:40
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Feb 24, 2022 05:16
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pedro0930 posted:Did a quick test and it seems armor angling is very effective against cannon. With armor angling, 250mm HE cannot pierce light cruiser armor while heavy cruiser is almost completely immune. Also the idea of "raking shot" is also not very effective. 250mm AP from the front can easily destroy all the thrusters on the front of a heavy cruiser, but all the component in the middle of the ships are basically safe no matter how much AP your pour in. Cannon just seem incredibly underpowered vs the other weapons options.
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Feb 24, 2022 10:38
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Alchenar posted:Cannon just seem incredibly underpowered vs the other weapons options. Those too feel immensely swingy. There's certainly been times where I had destroyers annihilated in less than five minutes from concentrated 250mm fire from beyond visual range, but also times where I took salvo after salvo to little effect. The angle of impact affecting effective armor thickness would certainly help explain some of that.
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Feb 24, 2022 10:46
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mace corvette swarms are effective, if a bit fragile (against AI, i don't dare PVP)
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Feb 24, 2022 16:10
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RangerKarl posted:mace corvette swarms are effective, if a bit fragile You should PVP. Ironically I find it easier than fighting the AI
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Feb 24, 2022 16:27
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Dumb question, but I am pretty bad at RTS games. Does this game have a way to pause the game (at least in single player modes)?
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Feb 24, 2022 17:31
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Pasha posted:Dumb question, but I am pretty bad at RTS games. Does this game have a way to pause the game (at least in single player modes)? Yes. There's a slowdown functionality bound to Ctrl+Space by default, called "Active Pause". You can configure the degree of slowdown in the accessibility options, all the way down to 0% speed (paused).
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Feb 24, 2022 20:23
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Doubleumc posted:Yes. There's a slowdown functionality bound to Ctrl+Space by default, called "Active Pause". You can configure the degree of slowdown in the accessibility options, all the way down to 0% speed (paused). Okay, good to know, thanks!
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Feb 24, 2022 20:41
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Alchenar posted:Cannon just seem incredibly underpowered vs the other weapons options. That's the conclusion I'm coming to as well. Beams and missile swarms really seem to be the kings of this game. The projectiles can't match beam damage, and while the 450mm and rails could outrange beams on a fast BB, they still to need to deal with missile swarms and jams and tend to need a spotter to really capitalize on range advantages. One could do worse than take the default beam destroyer fleet, replace the secondary guns with more missiles, and call it a day. The ewar vette in that fleet owns as well.
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Feb 27, 2022 08:12
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What is the difference between the internal radars (Parallax, etc.) and the Bullseye one that requires a mount? I feel like I'm missing something basic here. What is the most effective way to use Gale missiles? I love how cheap they are in terms of points cost, but the markerlight thing seems like a lot of extra micro and since the designator has to be line of sight that seems to limit your options for pathing out strikes around asteroids.
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Feb 28, 2022 03:16
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Correct, you can’t path semi-actives around things. But it’s not that much micro; the same way you want to have fire-control lock when you’re shooting guns at something, you illuminate the enemy with your targeting radar and then fire your salvo. The Bullseye radar is both detection and fire-control radar, better than the internal radars at the cost of taking up a slot and being outside the armor.
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Feb 28, 2022 04:23
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The internal radars (Parallax, Frontline, etc.) operate out of the four panels on the sides of your ship. If those get damaged you'll lose sensor coverage over certain areas. The externally mounted Bullseye is only a fire control radar; it can't search for targets, but it can lock on to them and is really good at that. (It also uses a lot less power than the internally mounted radars.) For using gales, I've had the best luck with launching a good amount at once, staying at range, and battleshorting the illuminator so it doesn't shut off when your missiles are halfway to the target. I get the most use of them on open maps (i.e. Abyssal and some of the modded maps), for the maps in asteroids I usually bring a smaller amount of hurricanes or thunderheads.
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Feb 28, 2022 04:24
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I was almost certain the Bullseye did help locate targets in some way despite the in-game description and stats suggesting it didn’t, but I’d have to fire the game up to check for sure
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Feb 28, 2022 04:55
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My understanding is this: Bullseye:
Parallax:
I like Parallax better for general applications, but the bullseye is good in energy-constrained ships. One neat thing the bullseye can do but the Parallax can't is to take the Bullseye on a sneaky, radarless corvette and have that lock targets from tracks other fleet members packing search radars provide.
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Feb 28, 2022 07:21
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Also, a few of the internally mounted radars cannot target lock by themselves (but have better range and/or accuracy in exchange). If you use those, a bullseye can be a good way to make up for that shortcoming.
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Feb 28, 2022 08:59
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BurntCornMuffin posted:My understanding is this: Bullseye also have range limit @9.5km irrc. What bulleyes do is that it can lock on to maximum distance while Parallax can only lock to what it can see, practically that's usually 8.5-8km or so, or 6km or less if you are jammed before you can get a lock on. Once locked on Bullseye and parallax provide the same precision.
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Feb 28, 2022 17:27
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BurntCornMuffin posted:That's the conclusion I'm coming to as well. Beams and missile swarms really seem to be the kings of this game. The projectiles can't match beam damage, and while the 450mm and rails could outrange beams on a fast BB, they still to need to deal with missile swarms and jams and tend to need a spotter to really capitalize on range advantages. I've ended up using that ECM Corvette alot in fleet designs as it's wonderfully built and doesn't cost too much. I suspect the reason that TF doesn't take extra missiles is that the compounding cost of the VLS cells combined with the the missiles to put in it are pricy as hell. I'm glad I've picked up this game, though I am a bit intimidated on the multiplayer front as I am not one for micro, and I tend to like to keep ships in a collective formation instead of microing them all spread out. I can kinda imagine doing it for Spotter/Sniper setups but even then I feel like I am going to lose ships when I'm not looking. Edit: Quick question but what does 'Hook Track' do? SkySteak fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Mar 5, 2022 11:54
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Hook track takes your camera to the track number you type in. It's for coordinating between players. From my experience everyone tends to keep their whole fleet within supporting distance. The map is actually not that big for four players so there isn't much reason for you to split your fleet. Usually people have a scout that ranges ahead from a different angle, otherwise most splitting is only done for immediate tactical needs. pedro0930 fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Mar 5, 2022 14:57
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Modding community is already doing some interesting stuff. (expanse spoilers I guess) 
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Mar 7, 2022 01:41
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Phrospher made a video and it really should be mandatory watching to understand the weapons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz54pEAzjWs
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Mar 7, 2022 15:52
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I love the premise of this game but the balance is absolutely awful. I've been playing for about 30 hours and missile spam is borderline unstoppable. There is no reason to fly anything except the smallest ships packed full of missiles that can render literally any ship useless in 3 seconds. At the standard 3K, PD only increases your lifespan by maybe 5 seconds, even in the biggest ships with varying configurations of EW. I guess I will put this on the backburner for now and follow development.
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Mar 12, 2022 03:12
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hello internet posted:I love the premise of this game but the balance is absolutely awful. I've been playing for about 30 hours and missile spam is borderline unstoppable. There is no reason to fly anything except the smallest ships packed full of missiles that can render literally any ship useless in 3 seconds. At the standard 3K, PD only increases your lifespan by maybe 5 seconds, even in the biggest ships with varying configurations of EW. I guess I will put this on the backburner for now and follow development. Not really my experience. 2 jammers of the correct type will render 90% of the incoming missiles useless, a single chaff can spoof a good percentage of incoming missiles. Combined with flanking speed to the side, most games I never get hit by a single missile. Aurora is also supremely effective at stopping missile even under jamming condition in my test and experience. If all else failed, hugging rock counters almost all long range weapon.
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Mar 12, 2022 03:39
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I've found flares and jammers forgive a lot of sins. I've never noticed someone use the anti-jamming missiles against me, more often my jammer corvettes get rail gunned and then the missiles catch me. I'm really looking forward the the new faction with new models for each of the ship classes, it'll be fun to have more variety in actual ship design.
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Mar 15, 2022 16:59
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Has anyone had success launching missile strikes with the anti radiation missiles mixed in?
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Mar 16, 2022 21:46
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Watching somebody melt down in chat after you turn on the interruptor jammer and several hundred points worth of hurricanes go sailing into the void is a glorious experience. For thunderheads and gales, anything bigger than a destroyer (and probably should include those) needs at least one rack of chaff. Firing chaff manually early (shift+Z) is very helpful.
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Mar 16, 2022 23:08
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God yes, trashing Hurricanes is my drug of choice. Had a dude the other day whose entire fleet was frigates packed to the gills with Hurricanes. He launched an absolutely crushing salvo at my fleet, I turned my my jammer and watched them spiral into rocks. He launched another wave, I jammed again. This happened repeatedly until his magazines were dry and he ragequit the match. I have no idea why he kept launching at the one formation that provably had the hard counter to his missiles instead of the other three allies I had.
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Mar 17, 2022 02:56
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