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361

General Discussion / Re: So let's try to find the worst weapon on vanilla

« on: February 25, 2020, 01:50:49 PM »

For large ballistics I have to give it to the devastator, honestly.  The huge variance in detonation range makes it hideously unreliable for point defense (you know, its apparently intended purpose?) and the damage to shields and armor is underwhelming.  For the OP cost, I'd take literally anything else.  A storm needler, a hellbore--anything.

For medium ballistics, you guessed it: flak cannons.  See Devastator for precisely the same reason.  Dual flaks are only slightly better due to the better coverage.  Those things REALLY need a narrower detonation range by a little bit.  Low damage on an AOE weapon is fine but it needs to TRY to pop somewhere in the same GALAXY as the targets.

Small ballistics?  Hmm.  I usually try to get away from small ships as fast as possible so I honestly don't monitor small weapons as closely.  Have to pass on this one.

Most missiles are really not my bag; the limited ammo turns a lot of ships into VERY limited use vessels and I prefer my boys to be able to duke it out.  I tend to avoid reapers more than anything though; the critically limited shots combined with the likelihood of my lemming AI ships blowing themselves up is just too much to bear.  Fantastic damage yeah, but if you miss...let's just say I don't need that kind of negativity in my life and leave it at that.

362

General Discussion / Re: What is everybody's favorite weapon

« on: February 21, 2020, 07:01:47 PM »

Every weapon was designed for something and is probably good for at least ONE thing it wasn't designed for.  The fun is discovering what each weapon does and how you can take it out of its intended role and succeed with it.

I'm a big fan of the Hephaestus assault gun, for example.  It's a cannon with good fire rate, good range and modest flux buildup that hammers through armor.  It's penalized against shields but given the aforementioned stats it can still put reasonable pressure on them anyway, making it a fairly dependable weapon against most targets and devastating if it gets past shields.  It's a destroyer killer.  Anything smaller than a cruiser likely doesn't have the shield capacity to endure it for long and when their shields finally go down they EVAPORATE beneath the Hephaestus.

The thing you DON'T hear often is how you can use a turreted version and manually sweep through fighter swarms, absolutely demolishing any fighters that don't sport shields and knocking out a few missiles to boot.

One purpose and at least one good trick.  Start with that line of thinking and play around.  You'll find your favorites soon enough.

363

General Discussion / Re: Anti-Remnant Fleet Advice

« on: February 13, 2020, 02:21:06 AM »

The remnants usually have some pretty hardcore shields; heavy kinetic or energy damage is advisable.  They bring a little bit of everything to the damage table, but tend to have particularly nasty plasma volleys, so ships that are just nimble enough to dodge them might be helpful.  Make sure your fleet has enough range that multiple ships can turn and focus on one enemy craft; the sooner your bring one down the harder it is to flank you.  If you go the red planet make sure you have ships that are naturally difficult to flank since one of them WILL be warping around to your sides to assassinate your escorts.

Once you overload a remnant ship it folds like paper so pick off the smaller ships as fast as possible to stop their guns.

364

Suggestions / Re: Inventory / Icon updates: Shortage and Surplus border colors

« on: February 12, 2020, 12:19:19 AM »

Agreed; this would be a simple, welcome quality of life change.

365

Blog Posts / Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit

« on: February 12, 2020, 12:12:06 AM »

Now that I think of it, I really don't like the idea of command point being necessary to give your ships orders at all.  Took me some time to really put my finger on what I didn't like about CP; I think that's it.  Might be more intuitive if they were just used for some sort of fleetwide buff for a short time instead or something.  This way we get rid of the whole "great, my left flank is about to suicide and I can't stop them because I have no command points" thing AND makes a flagship (yours or even the enemy's) a MUCH more important target.

366

General Discussion / Re: Fitting High-Tech Ships

« on: February 11, 2020, 01:01:15 AM »

Load up your Sunders with gravitons and high intensity lasers.    Max out your flux dissipation at all costs.  No enemy will DARE flicker their shields.  Then just spread out further than their shields can cover and ENJOY THE LASER CIRCUS.

367

General Discussion / Re: Good AI ships

« on: February 07, 2020, 07:43:22 PM »

Any charge-limited ship system is wasted on the AI.  It WILL burn them whenever they are up, no questions asked, leaving them out of options when real battle is joined.  Any missiles with highly limited ammo are arguably not great because the AI will TRY to use them at an opportune time but it has a very broad definition of "opportune" and will probably end up wasting them anyway simply because it can't read your mind and anticipate when YOU want it to fire.

Be careful giving the AI ships with shields and poor flux stats because it WILL max out its flux blocking everything and be left never firing.  You can turn this to your advantage by giving the AI "tank" ships loaded with survivability mods, hardened shields, maximum flux stats and mostly point defense weapons; this makes said ship a fantastic decoy that can split massive fleets into much more digestible chunks, especially if it has good peak performance time.

I prefer to give the AI ships with long range, unlimited ammo weapons that allow it to stay safe and apply pressure, like the Sunder.  Load it up with three beams and range upgrades and it can melt armor from outside most effective torpedo ranges.  It's high focus system also recharges so the AI is never left completely without it.  I believe the Eagle's maneuvering jets also recharge and it has enough weaponry to put a ton of pressure on enemies from all angles.

In other words, keep it simple.  Anything that requires any sort of nuanced thinking or anticipatory timing is generally wasted on the AI.

368

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 31, 2020, 05:25:07 PM »

*EDIT*

So which is it? Do you want to shoot down fighters with your PD weapons or shoot down missiles with your PD weapons? You can't say that you can't use PD weapons to shoot down fighters, and then pretend you actually meant to say they can't shoot down missiles, and then say you actually want PD weapons to serve as fighter deterrents. Non-PD weapons are prefectly fine in shooting down both bombers and fighters. It's honestly not a problem to me, so I can't see why it is a problem to you. I can fight the swarms of fighters from Luddic Church/Persean league/Tri-tachyon fleets just fine with normal weapons and PD weapons.  Flak cannons seem to work fine to me anyways. They kill missiles, and they kill swarms of missiles with their Area effect.

Is there a particular reason PD can't, by design, shoot down both? I mean sure I understand not wanting to mess with PD weapon damage too much to avoid rebalancing missiles, but the suggestion seemed more in line with making flak solely better against fighters without touching the effect it would have on missiles.

There's no reason why PD weapons can't shoot down both fighters and missiles. In fact they can and do so, as they operate just like non-PD weapons against fighters. For instance, a sim Dominator deals with fighters reasonably well with their PD weapons.

What I am objecting to is the nonsensical switching of arguments to suit whatever he happens to be writing. First he says that PD weapons don't anti-fighter properly, so I let him know that PD weapons are anti-missile specifically and that many non-PD weapons are good anti-fighter weapons. Then he quotes me and goes on a ramble about all sorts of things as if he is replying to me some of which contradicts his prior post. He has no reason to quote someone and talk as if he is replying to something that I did not write. If he wanted to write all that, he could had done it without quoting me.

There's a difference between contradicting myself and saying you missed the point by a tiny bit less than you thought.  I appreciate that not everyone grasps every subtlety of every point I think of, though I'm puzzled that quoting you to highlight the specific phrasing I was replying to seems to...upset you?  Might want to put that goalpost down before you develop back problems...

369

Suggestions / Re: More ballistic anti fighter options

« on: January 31, 2020, 05:20:37 PM »

There's a similar thread going on somewhere about this.  My two cents are simply that flaks and devastators suck because their detonation ranges are usually WAY off their target and it feels like 90% of their ordnance misses.

370

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 30, 2020, 12:50:34 AM »

Is there a particular reason PD can't, by design, shoot down both? I mean sure I understand not wanting to mess with PD weapon damage too much to avoid rebalancing missiles, but the suggestion seemed more in line with making flak solely better against fighters without touching the effect it would have on missiles.

This.  My point was that Swarms are only a potential problem when AOE weapons aren't up to the task.  The flak, dual flak and devastator all have the same problem of never hitting anything because of the random detonation range.  Even against missiles I find them dodgy on the best of days.  I know flak weapons are supposed to be somewhat chaotic so enemy craft can't reliably dodge them but this game's flak weapons are WAY too broad with that randomness to be a good choice against anything in my experience.  Thus we are left with generally single target weapons which, while far more accurate and reliable, only really process one threat at a time.  We have things like Locust missiles and their smaller cousins but those run out LONG before the carriers' CR does, even with expanded racks--and while you CAN fire them as a deterrent to missile swarms and even take out a few, this is a gamble at best.

371

Modding / Re: [0.9.1a] Ill-Advised Modifications 1.11.6

« on: January 29, 2020, 03:34:30 AM »

Wha--

What.

What the--

But wha--

I mean wh--

OKAY BUT WHY THOUGH ?!

372

Modding / Re: Hullmod Expansion Disappeared/Taken Down

« on: January 29, 2020, 03:31:29 AM »

Aaaaaand my hard drive went bad.  Got a whole new computer though so that's cool.

But that means no more mod...damnit all.

373

Suggestions / Re: [LOG]

« on: January 25, 2020, 01:29:35 PM »

[LOG], [LOG]
It's big, it's heavy, it's wood!
[LOG], [LOG]
It's better than bad, it's good!

Do I detect a man/woman of culture??

374

Suggestions / Re: Tuning levers

« on: January 25, 2020, 01:28:36 PM »

Oh god what I wouldn't give for some semblance of formation orders...

"YOU!  Yes you!  With the twin Gauss Cannons!  Look at me!  Listen to me because I'm going to say this ONCE before I autodestruct your boneheaded ass!  STAY!  BEHIND!  THE!  UNBREAKABLE!  TANKS!  NOT IN FRONT OF THEM YOU LUDD-BASHED EXCUSE FOR A FAULTY AI CORE!!"

"What?  You're aggressive?  I DIDN'T ASK, YOU FUEL-SNIFFING WOMBAT!  STAY!  AT!  RANGE!"

...So...yeah.  I may have had an...outburst or two.

375

General Discussion / Re: Eagle vs Dominator

« on: January 25, 2020, 01:21:18 PM »

Safety overrides make the ship faster; the devastators still suck and now you're sacrificing 2/3 of your peak time to make a terrible weapon a little better.  I'd rather use a weapon that DOESN'T turn to trash outside point defense range, thank you.