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The Lone Badger posted:I've heard it's possible for the Gathering to get spooked and withdraw all their remaining strike groups to guard Khiva. This would obviously immensely complicate the 'decapitation strike' strategy the Prince is relying on. E: Decided my reply might be too close to spoilers. Selling the nukes is very profitable and absolutely reasonable to do! I usually do it most of the time because I do not want to use nuclear weapons because they terrify me.
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Sep 7, 2021 03:56
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| # ? May 19, 2024 20:45 |
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I am apparently very good at trying to see what happens when I launch nukes and discovering that have no IFF.
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Sep 7, 2021 04:04
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Well, I would think that a nuclear weapon wouldn't discriminate anyways
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Sep 7, 2021 04:09
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SugarAddict posted:What stops you from just selling the nukes? Night10194 posted:E: Decided my reply might be too close to spoilers. SIGSEGV posted:I am apparently very good at trying to see what happens when I launch nukes and discovering that have no IFF. Slaan posted:Well, I would think that a nuclear weapon wouldn't discriminate anyways As loath as I am to start a nuclear war, I have a plan for our nukes. In the meantime, they are essentially portable cash, we can hold onto them till we need to sell them, rather than removing the tactical option they provide. (Warcrimes). Part 9: Target of Opportunity  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcFxBgdYK50 Something that I hold as integral to succeed with the type of strategy I am employing is flexibility. After realizing that there is an enemy missile carrier group nearby, I can't turn down the opportunity to merk them. Missile Carrier groups aren't particularly threatening to our LIGHTNINGS but they are a threat to big ships like the SEVESTAPOL. They generally carry a small number of strategic cruise missiles (only seen in this episode as IRIST contacts swooping past our ships) and lots and lots and lots of heat seekers. This missile spam can overcome the CIWS and AA fire of our bigger ships and start cracking them open, so I treat them as a serious threat. There are consequences for our actions in this episode, as making this attack reveals us to the enemy and they react!
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Sep 7, 2021 04:45
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drat, if this is what a start of game airstrike looks like then I want to see some real carrier air wing operations.
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Sep 7, 2021 05:16
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This is the episode I've been waiting for because this is the one that's precisely what I mean by 'you can overcomplicate and seriously mess up'. The instant you had the MLRS group in sight of the Lightnings without getting blasted out of the sky by being picked up on thermals, the right thing to do was just rush in and attack the extremely unarmored missile carriers with your Lightnings; the thing you ended up doing eventually anyway. Was it just 'I want to show off trying to guide in A-100s for the LP'? Two lightnings in the hands of a practiced pilot can absolutely mop the floor with them in close combat. My favorite way to deal with missile groups is to smash them with airstrikes when they're on the ground, mind, because I don't trust them not to pick me up on IR and then shotgun me, because that has happened enough times to tell me I don't like risking it and would rather blow them away from a distance. But this is a great way to deal with everything. Strike craft/CVs are just plain insanely good. Note this applies to strike craft and things being used on you; having a few T-7s with AA missiles in your back pocket is incredibly good for avoiding such a fate, though. They can intercept airstrikes, cruise missiles, you name it. Even gun-runs from aircraft can do a good job intercepting cruise missiles safely. Aircraft are your friend and the Wasp is one of the most useful-for-what-it-costs ships in the entire game for my money.
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Sep 7, 2021 06:17
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Night10194 posted:This is the episode I've been waiting for because this is the one that's precisely what I mean by 'you can overcomplicate and seriously mess up'. The instant you had the MLRS group in sight of the Lightnings without getting blasted out of the sky by being picked up on thermals, the right thing to do was just rush in and attack the extremely unarmored missile carriers with your Lightnings; the thing you ended up doing eventually anyway. Was it just 'I want to show off trying to guide in A-100s for the LP'? Two lightnings in the hands of a practiced pilot can absolutely mop the floor with them in close combat. A big part of it was wanting to show off A-100 strikes with a teamed Radar carrier, which sadly failed because I landed the radar carrier and it wasn't available to provide tracking for the missiles resulting in a near devastating bit of friendly fire. Thankfully we recovered. Also, I am wanting to project as much power as I can before getting my Lightnings involved as they are starting to get really worn down and the less work they need to do the better. Not losing a single plane in this, and the upcoming strike fleet engagement is a huge bonus. 'Flying too close to the sun' is something I am guilty of and actively enjoy. The highs are higher ever if the lows are lower! Plus it's exciting to go all in sometimes. Acting on imperfect intelligence is a hallmark of this game and you saw it in action there. Part 10: Sky Kings! So last time we wiped out the missile carrier group. The overkill was certainly high but the only casual really was our pride (and our wallet). Now we need to deal with Varyag, who have come to investigate. This is a serious fleet. With 4 huge Cruiser class brawlers. We do not have the ships to fight these guys, so we need to whittle them away as much as possible.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDWNQKwvB74 As you can see, Varyag had some nasty ships with mountains of armor. The 200KG bombs did a lot of work, but looking back I think it would have been more sensible to pair bombs with a rocket strike. Since both planes in a group will aim for the same spot, the rockets should hopefully create a chink in the armour for the bomb to slip through. I will certainly try it with the next group we encounter. Speaking of which, we have a new ELINT contact at the end of this episode, so that might be sooner than you think...
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Sep 8, 2021 03:32
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Awesome fights and great LP!
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Sep 8, 2021 03:44
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My first guess would be it's a missile carrier group. poor overworked Lightnings though, they just can't catch a break. I assume all the parts on the latest full repair are just stuck on with superglue and gaffer tape at this point. Given it was another day before they were finished with being installed.
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Sep 8, 2021 03:48
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This game really does make you feel like a fugitive. Constantly running from percieved threats, making desperate ploys to get money, using guerilla tactics to whittle down your enemy before it's even remotely plausible to fight them, having to hide in hidden compounds just so you can sleep for a few hours. You are constantly punching above your weight and that's really cool. Yet at the same time I hope things slow down for a second so you can get your bearings, your main screen is covered in so much lines and notation it looks like an architect's blueprint.
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Sep 8, 2021 04:12
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It slows down plenty once all the Strike Groups are dead!
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Sep 8, 2021 04:26
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Dear god. Does the fact that these half-destroyed corvettes filled with murderous Romani keep popping up out of nowhere and slaughtering Gathering fleets have any effect on enemy morale? Like at this point I feel there should be stories being passed around about ghost ships full of unkillable berserkers spooking all the nearby garrisons.
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Sep 8, 2021 12:36
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Crazy Achmed posted:Dear god. Does the fact that these half-destroyed corvettes filled with murderous Romani keep popping up out of nowhere and slaughtering Gathering fleets have any effect on enemy morale? Sayadi is a good friend and a fearsome foe, Tarkhan.
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Sep 8, 2021 13:05
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They came to snuff the Rooster! But you know (s)he ain’t gonna die! HELL YES! If you manage to recover the 180mm guns, stick them on the Rooster. You know you wanna. Make it even MORE of a glass cannon! Hell, up the engines if you have to if you need to compensate. I’d imagine she’d be a gas guzzler and a money sink, but damnation if the thought of the Rooster having huge guns and zooming around blasting away tickles me to no end. The ship’s more than earned that honor.
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Sep 8, 2021 22:09
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Does having more crew quarters reduce crew blackout from manuvers?
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Sep 8, 2021 23:02
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HereticMIND posted:The ship’s more than earned that honor.
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Sep 9, 2021 12:11
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Crazy Achmed posted:Oh yeah, how does the "honor" meter that appears during battle work? What's it for? That is ship "exp" it is based off the cost of your ship versus the cost of what it kills more or less.
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Sep 9, 2021 13:04
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I like the idea that honour is so formalised and ritualised in Romani culture that your HUD tracks it as a matter of course. Real-time situational honour updates across the entire combat theatre!
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Sep 9, 2021 13:37
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Does the game model inverse square law with radar? If you pick up a radar signal at max range, does that mean they are detecting you, or do they have to be closer to get a strong enough return?
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Sep 9, 2021 23:45
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As far as I can tell, it roughly does, between ELINT sensors having far larger than radar range and radar crosssection being a relevant stat and making you visible at longer and longer ranges, and I suppose the max radar range and so on are affected by the world being a super-earth planet, therefore there's longer to the horizon, especially up in the air, and less bounces with the troposphere depending on what wizardry you are using.
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Sep 10, 2021 00:01
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I look forward to you getting your hands on some proper 'ships of the line' that can handle more even/rough fights.
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Sep 10, 2021 07:53
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Gideon020 posted:I look forward to you getting your hands on some proper 'ships of the line' that can handle more even/rough fights. Sevastapol is the pride of the Romani Navy! She can handle it! In seriousness, with a bit of refitting Sevastapol can be a real badass ship of the line. A friend of mine used her enough to get her all the way to max level and by the end of that campaign she'd been refitted into a lean killing machine. Even without refits she can probably handle a 3-4 cruiser Strike Group if they don't have a Nomad, she's just going to get banged up.
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Sep 10, 2021 12:46
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It seems like what the Sevastopol most needs is someone with a red pencil to ruthlessly remove extraneous components.
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Sep 10, 2021 13:18
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The Lone Badger posted:It seems like what the Sevastopol most needs is someone with a red pencil to ruthlessly remove extraneous components. Like the jammer smuggled into the front of the hull that doesn't work because it is for some reason placed vertically.
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Sep 10, 2021 13:26
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The Lone Badger posted:It seems like what the Sevastopol most needs is someone with a red pencil to ruthlessly remove extraneous components. One of the really important things is that if you jigger things just right, you get pieces of hull with 'high elevation', meaning a gun put there can fire over components like fuel tanks. One of the simplest ways to do this is to remove the leftmost fuel tank and move the main battery to where it used to be, then pull off the frontal Sarmat twin 180mms and put them on the slots below it, so that now Sevastapol's 7 inch guns can all fire 360 degrees. Another important refit for Sevastapol is replacing the 57mms with 37mms. The 57mm does better damage to ships as a secondary gun but it's much worse at point defense, and cruisers like Sevastapol desperately need point defense, especially as you can outright shoot down incoming 180mm shells (and others, but it's especially noticeable with enemy 180mm) since you can't dodge. Cruisers generally dodge damage by shooting it down with point defense and tanking the rest. Which is neat.
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Sep 10, 2021 14:32
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Night10194 posted:One of the really important things is that if you jigger things just right, you get pieces of hull with 'high elevation', meaning a gun put there can fire over components like fuel tanks. One of the simplest ways to do this is to remove the leftmost fuel tank and move the main battery to where it used to be, then pull off the frontal Sarmat twin 180mms and put them on the slots below it, so that now Sevastapol's 7 inch guns can all fire 360 degrees. To achieve this (z level stacking) you need to surround the central hull piece with other hull pieces (4 sides). For one level of elevation you can mount fixed engines and missiles behind armor and if you do it twice i.e. all the elevated bits are also surrounded it elevates the central ones again and guns can shoot over anything.
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Sep 10, 2021 14:42
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Another important thing I discovered working on a design yesterday is that if a gun is far enough from the fuel tank it can fire 360 with even Elevation 1. Not sure if it also applies to Elevation 0, but if the fuel tank is far enough away that it doesn't block the gun's fire in the pie chart the gun will fire in all directions. This, too, can be useful in a long design like Sevastapol.
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Sep 10, 2021 14:45
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Do you think Sevastopol is deliberately designed this way to encourage players to dip their toes into the refit process, or does the ship just suffer from "first vessel designed in the editor" syndrome?
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Sep 10, 2021 15:53
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Absolutely deliberate. The game's description of it even says it was planned to be a truly grand flagship but had to be launched before it was fully fitted out because of nuclear war. One of the issues with the ship design system, though, is you never really have a reason to mix utility and combat in a ship. Take sensors; ships gain nothing for having, say, FCR in combat besides an expensive component outside the armor that can get blown off easily. And because all cost is determined by the sum of parts, it's actually no more expensive to have a hull like a Skylark and then a pure combat ship to go with it and use it as a tanker-tender. This is why playing with all custom ships can easily make the game much too easy; the designed ships for the game all have weakpoints (so the player can exploit/cover them), in-universe design concerns (like the Negev being a cruiser-leader with full electronics suite, etc) that are weaker than things you can design yourself, but I find the default ships have a lot more flavor and the game is clearly balanced around them, for obvious reasons. Also, because of how armor and damage work (armor will protect well from 37-57mm guns, and protects some from 100-130mm, but they'll still shatter it with repeated hits and they fire fast enough to do it reliably), you're almost always better off putting on tons of 100mm or 130mm guns (Since they cost 1 ammo, fire faster, use less crew and power per gun, etc) and ignoring 180s, even on cruisers, which is sad because 180s have incredible special effects and feel great. Hopefully that will get addressed in future patches, I've heard they're reworking Armor some. In short it's much more fun to make refits and redesigns of existing hulls rather than building the optimal Brick Of Guns.
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Sep 10, 2021 16:01
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Huh. I ended up messing around with the ship editor yesterday and created an extremely stupid gas guzzling corvette with no armor, 8 engines, 2 37mm chain guns, and a sarmat. It's doing OK but it really needs a skylark for that 400km range. Being able to shoot down missiles is surprisingly helpful when the sky is full of 100mm.
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Sep 10, 2021 16:22
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Brick of guns is pretty fun, and the Sevas 57mm point defense is actually fine, as long as you can aim properly you can knock out most barrages and missiles and yes if you clear the radius around the gun elevation 0 will still fire over large fuel tanks
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Sep 10, 2021 16:26
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Requesting "brick of guns" as the name for a warship later on, or if you are feeling fancy "La brique aux armes"
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Sep 11, 2021 00:27
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I had no idea why the screen was going black during combat until you mentioned it in passing. I had also never heard of this game before this LP.
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Sep 13, 2021 00:46
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Does the danger in cities go down over time, or is it permanent?
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Sep 13, 2021 06:58
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Jalak posted:Does the danger in cities go down over time, or is it permanent? It will eventually go down, but that will take a considerable length of time, hence the need to find Hidden Cities for use as fleet bases.
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Sep 13, 2021 08:02
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I always found Hidden Cities a nice thing to have but not especially necessary; you can keep ahead of the Dangerous tags well enough by just continuing to go to new cities. Also, eventually, much of the enemy's mobile assets will be dead so it doesn't matter anymore if they know where you are.
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Sep 13, 2021 12:51
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Now that I've watched every episode, I've determined that I would be absolute poo poo at this game. There's just no way I can keep that many plates spinning at the same time. You almost make it look easy.
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Sep 14, 2021 08:30
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So the only reliable source of money in this game is murder and pillaging the corpses of your enemies. Does the enemy ever get reinforcements? or do you just need to do the murder and pillaging across the map with lighting and skylark teams to make money?
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Sep 14, 2021 10:01
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SugarAddict posted:So the only reliable source of money in this game is murder and pillaging the corpses of your enemies. Does the enemy ever get reinforcements? no reinforcements, you need to loot the right pieces (guns) and take transports to keep your finances up enough to get fuel.
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Sep 14, 2021 12:52
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| # ? May 19, 2024 20:45 |
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It's a bit easier than you might fear. The enemy never actually getting new 'special units' means once you're past the midgame you can't get ganged up the way the enemy can during the middle.
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Sep 14, 2021 13:01
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