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I've just been playing skirmish against the CPU, but the game is fun. Lots of diversity in the ship builder, and while there aren't many maps or a real campaign, it's EA and those will show up eventually. That moment where you hit an enemy with big guns and the shell blows straight through in a cloud of particles is incredible. The game looks like a cross between Homeworld and Children of a Dead Earth, and plays pretty much like a game halfway between those to would. Some tips.
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Feb 16, 2022 21:02
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The OSP really shakes up the game in a good way. There is no thrill like managing a drive-by ambush on a battleship with a couple of rocket shuttles. "Nice 3000 points of dreadnought you got there. Be a shame if a couple of good old boys from the belt in 500 points of shuttles with Katyushas bolted to them took it out."
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Mar 11, 2023 21:58
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That was a great post about how to use a battleship. Let me add an effort-post about the two most significant and confusing mechanics in the game: Radar and armor. If you're playing Nebulous, you're probably familiar with the survivability onion.  The most reliable way to not be seen is to stay at very long range or behind a rock. This is safe, but it also limits your offensive potential, and staying safe doesn't win battles. Radar mechanics are complex, but in practice the two things which matter are max range and the precision of your estimation of where the enemy is. You can see these numbers in the fleet builder in the sensors tab, and in battle with the track quality marker by the enemy icon, which ranges from TQ1 (somewhere that aways) to TQ15 (target locked). Some of this is pretty self explanatory, a ship with a Bridgemaster (8.5 km) going up against a ship with a Spyglass (12 km) can be fired on without being seen and can be maneuvered around, but 250mm and smaller guns have ranges of 8000m, so once the engagement has started it's hard to notice the difference. My rule of thumb is that at TQ10 and above you can expect decent results from gunfire. This corresponds to a positional error of about 20m, which you can get on ANS at long range by stacking 4 track correlators on a Spyglass or on OSP by putting two track correlators on a Bloodhound. Long range radar is really important because jamming only has a 10 km effective range, so you can position your radar ships out of range of the jamming cone and still get decent tracks. The only other options for dealing with jamming are burn through, which provides a single low-value track and OSP can't really use, lots of home-on-jam missiles, getting a lock somehow, getting an off-angle track from outside the jamming cone, or closing the range. The last two are most effective, but can also draw you into a tactically disastrous position. Having radar ships behind your fleet makes things nice and simple. Radar range is also effected by the radar signature of your ships, but what I've found is that stealth is really hard to achieve. Big ships which mount long range weapons have big radar returns. Small ships have to get close enough that prowler drives and turning off radar doesn't help much. Angling matters a fair bit, a light cruiser from the side reflects like a barn door and has much smaller returns head on, but you should be bow tanking already. So now you've seen, acquired, and are hitting the target, but are you penetrating and killing? Armor and hull damage has bunch of math as well, but the thing to note is that even small AP rounds can theoretically penetrate every ship in the game short of the battleship. I've put together a handy chart of ammo types vs ship armor values, which I printed out and taped up next to my monitor. Penetration is effected by impact angle, up to 2.5x the listed value, so bigger guns are still better, but most ships have a flattish area. The other key damage mechanic is hull density. A shell will keep going until it's stopped by a combination of armor and internal density. AP does damage to everything in its path, and HE explodes at a random point and does damage in a sphere. This means that it is effectively impossible to totally kill a Solomon from the front, since the length of the ship means that enough of a CIC + reactor + engine hangs on even after everything is scrape. And big rounds can overpenetrate small ships, doing greatly reduced damage. Understanding the radar and armor mechanics means you can cut the survivability onion to make your opponents cry while staying alive yourself.
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Jun 9, 2023 19:41
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600 mm Bomb Shell looks amazing. Cargo feeders definitely need some love.Bubbacub posted:I've been playing skirmishes versus the AI just to get a grasp on the game. I can do ok with TF Oak or TF Birch, but I have no idea how to use any other starter fleets. I somehow cannot kill anything with missiles, while always getting destroyed by missiles myself. Shift+click will command an entire formation to do something, like switch to AP and fire on a target. Missiles are tricky, but really powerful. The first step is aiming them properly. Missiles fly along their waypoints and then turn on their seekers at the last waypoint, which you can see as a yellow cone on the CIC view. Don't be like the container player I was teamed up with last night who set his last waypoint past the target and then was confused why he missed with every salvo. Like everything else in the game, missiles have physics and don't turn on a dime, so make allowances for turning radius, and it's possible to miss small maneuvering targets like shuttles. On a bigger perspective, some targets are easier than others. A ship capping a point can't leave until it's done. A cruiser taking cover behind behind an asteroid isn't going anywhere. A bunch of light ships zooming around on a flanking maneuver might be someplace else entirely by the time the salvo arrives. Missiles can also be fired by clicking directly on the target, which will apply an appropriate amount of lead and turn on the seeker at a good point, but can also lead to salvos flying into rocks. Assuming missiles are aimed right, the next step is tracking. Every seeker has different strengths and weaknesses. Active radar is cheap, but is vulnerable to chaff and jamming. Command guidance is much harder to fool, but requires that the firing ship maintain a track on the target, and TL1 is "somewhere that-aways". Electro-Optical costs a lot, but gets through almost anything. Third step is getting through point defense. The most reliable way is big salvos. A coordinated strike by multiple ships is a scary thing. For the ANS side, hybrid missiles and terminal maneuvers are reliable against anything except for Auroras carried by Occellos. Otherwise, penetration aids like decoys and jammers can help. There's a dilemma between cost and firing. A 1000 points of S3H EO+decoys is going to hit--if's there's a target, if it's worth 1000 points. And finally, armor. You'll note a battleship has 58 cm of armor, and a standard S2 Thunderhead has 54 cm of armor penetration, which means that a single Thunderhead won't do more than scratch the paint. Effective armor is often higher, since that 58 cm is based on a straight on hit, while effective armor is calculated based on angle and goes up to 2.6x the listed value. Explosions also have a certain radius, and key components are in the center or back of the ship out of reach. I'm not even sure that a BB can be killed by punching it in the nose with S2 missiles, though side hits will strip armor and eventually get to those juicy reactor/CIC components. Torpedoes and containers have enough boom to do real damage from almost any aspect, and lighter ships are a lot easier to kill, being both smaller and having less armor.
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Nov 9, 2023 17:05
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