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[FeudalWulf]

I think [REDACTED] is [REDACTED] because they're spoilers? I think putting it in one of these spoiler tabs is good then and won't get my post deleted.

If you don't know what I'm talking about when I say "the big red boy" then don't click the spoiler tab. Go talking to people in bars, or click on that spoiler tab if you just couldn't care. (the spoiler tab is required to understand what I'm saying below at all)

Spoiler

I found the red planet in the early game, thought to myself "Yeah no" and left it till later in the game. It is later in the game now, and I can make myself a grand ol' fleet. My friend told me how he beat the red planet, which is basically just 4 dominators a few frigates and two or three carriers. He even told me exactly what their loadouts were. So I did just that, but I also found a BP for a Paragon next to one of my colonies so I threw in a Paragon ontop of the fleet that was supposed to kill this red planet WITHOUT a Paragon.

[close]

Of course, I can't beat the big red boys. He doesn't even know what to call me besides absolutely brain dead. He destroyed the red boys without taking any domi loses. I lost my whole fleet, including the Paragon. I have the loadouts he told me, but I made the carriers even better with [REDACTED] grade LCPs. My fleet didn't last 20 seconds. The same thing happened with the [REDACTED] cache, I went there, fought the boys, and all but lost, with the same fleet. Am I just clueless as to how to fight? He can even put his fleet into auto pilot and he'd still win the fights, I do even worse on auto pilot.

Am I just brain dead and need to go figure out how to stand up straight before I even begin to play this game? I'm probably about as smart as a newborn missing the frontal lobe, I understand. Just explain to me how to regain my frontal lobe please.

And yes, I made sure to ask him if he's playing on normal. He says yes. I can't believe him of course.

[Wyvern]

So, here's a thing: the [REDACTED] ships have (semi?) random variants.  Sometimes these things are devastatingly powerful - I've seen variants of the ship you're talking about that will take on a Paragon and just kill it.  Sometimes these things are, well, armed with PD lasers.  Lots and lots of PD lasers.

As for [REDACTED] vs. spoilers - yeah, maybe?  At least for me I use that because it amuses me, not because any mod is going to come in and start editing posts because spoilers.  Still, spoiler tags (or perhaps a change to the subject to add "spoilers") isn't an unreasonable precaution; just because I've seen these things before doesn't mean that there isn't someone out there who wants their first encounter to be properly mysterious.

As for suggestions to help... well.  Can you post the loadout of the enemy ship in question?  Should be able to get it from F1 from the fleet encounter screen.  Might help with advice.

[Alex]

Side note on loadouts:

Spoiler

The loadouts of the ships  for the Red Planet mission - either all, or at least the battleship, don't recall this 100% - are *not* randomized, though IIRC there's two possible battleship variants you might get. But either one will have the loadout explicitly specified in that variant.

[close]

[FeudalWulf]

Heavy Burst Laser, Plasma Cannon, 2x Hyper Velocity Driver, 1 Harpoon MRM, and a hanger of interceptor drones. Those interceptor drones are probably the reason why my own remnant drones get nowhere, because there's at least 10 of these ships, and so they have a lot of squads of drones.

The ship above is called the Brilliant-class cruiser. They mostly swarm my boats and take us out one by one in squads of five, so there's two squads they generally clump into. They also like to flank us really well because they have so many cruisers to punch through my line.

They also have a capital ship, 5x Tachyon Lasers and 10x PD lasers. The rest of their ships are just small little boys that I can't kill either because they run away too fast.

Basically I get swarmed. Idk what my wolf frigates are doing, I guess they're just garbage ships. My dominators just get flooded with those cruisers. I can only think to just make more dominators and throw more at them.

BTW I didn't say this before, I only managed to kill one of their ships before all mine died. Like, this battle I have goes immensely poorly for me.

[intrinsic_parity]

I think that might be bugged then? I tried the red fleet 3 times and each time the battle ship had a different loadout. Once it had guardian PD once it had auto pulse and once it had tach lances.

[Alex]

Oh, my bad. I'm misremembering - rather than being non-dynamic, it's set to have everything available, so it shouldn't get really low-end loadouts.

[The2nd]

Something worth noting is that several skills have a profound impact on your fleet performance.

So your friend could have taken several of those while you took other ones. To the point where the same fleet would either win easily or be obliterated like you described.


Command point spending helps as well. If you have trouble with fighters and being flanked try forming a battle line. Like 2 or 3 defend orders a bit spread out work generally quite well. Take your wolfs into a pack with rally orders and have them hunt down lone flanking ships with eliminate orders. Note that escort orders can be quite dangerous.

That's all I can think of. You can also upload your save if you want more detailed advice.

[Wyvern]

Hm.  Ten of those -is- a lot.  More than I remember having to fight, at least.

I don't have good advice for dominator variants, but I have defeated larger remnant fleets using Paragons.

Four of them.  Under AI control.  Set with escort orders to keep them in pairs that can support each other.

The variant I used is definitely not -optimal-, but it is at least functional.
5 capacitors, 60 vents, hardened shields, stabilized shields, accelerated shields, auxiliary thrusters, flux distributor, resistant flux conduits
1: two plasma cannons, in the forward hardpoints
2: two autopulse lasers, in the turrets
3: nine ion cannons, in all the small energy turrets
4: 2x HVD, 2x Graviton Beam, in the forward medium turrets
5: 2x heavy blaster, in the rear medium turrets (so that frigates can't just come up behind them and sit there safely).

If you can pull off this grouping, it is horrible horrible overkill.  Most of the time.  There -are- remnant fleets that can give it trouble - even take out one of the paragons, potentially.  But you'll still win.

[goduranus]

Four of them.  Under AI control.  Set with escort orders to keep them in pairs that can support each other.

This won't work unless you set the game to bigger fleet sizes. Each paragon takes 60 supplies, and when I went in with a maxed fleet I only got 110 supplies.

I went in with 10 Harbingers, controlled them myself one at a time and torpedoed everything bigger than a frigate, and mopped up the frigates with destroyers and cruisers

[Linnis]

Four of them.  Under AI control.  Set with escort orders to keep them in pairs that can support each other.

This won't work unless you set the game to bigger fleet sizes. Each paragon takes 60 supplies, and when I went in with a maxed fleet I only got 110 supplies.

I went in with 10 Harbingers, controlled them myself one at a time and torpedoed everything bigger than a frigate, and mopped up the frigates with destroyers and cruisers

you can get the battle size to 500 and 250 each side. that 4 paragons and a condor, or whateves.

[Wyvern]

Ah, right.  Yeah, that does require cranking battle size up.  Against some forces, it -also- requires backing the paragons with a bunch of whatever random ships you've got lying around - if the enemy has 500 deployment points of stuff, and you just have your 240 worth of paragons, you won't get to deploy all four.

[ahrenjb]

I was able to beat it relatively early with a combination of Dominators and Herons. In fact, I've waged a fairly successful crusade against the remnants using that strategy or variants thereof involving Legions and some other vessels. Dominators do a great job of forming a defensive line, while the carrier cluster behind them and provide fire support. I might have brought an Odyssey along as a flagship / fire support vessel, but I can't remember for sure now.

Focus kinetic weapons on your ships where possible. Remnants have crazy good flux stats, so it takes a lot of pressure on their shields to overwhelm them. Let your bombers do the heavy work on armor. Load yourself up with as many Khopesh as you can manage. Remnants tend to have excellent PD - when it comes to taking down smaller numbers of missiles or fighters. Once you start to swarm them however, they can quickly be overwhelmed. In my experience torpedo bombers tend to get smashed, but the Khopesh rocket barrage is guaranteed to get a few rockets through. Put Pilums where you can, and cram a few Locust launchers into your fleet if you can manage, they'll do a lot of good keeping the heat off your bombers. The Dominators will keep pressure on the Remnant fleet while your bombers make run after run until the Remnants aren't able to keep up with the flux demand. I've heard that some folks have good success with the Perdition as well. A wing or two of Claws or Thunders can help immensely as well, taking weapon mounts and engines offline and giving your forces a little relief and your bombers easier targets.

Make sure you remember to issue fighter strike orders on the higher priority targets. I generally start with targeting the enemy carriers, then move on to their front line combatants. Ignore the frigates, let your fleet deal with them. Focus on the larger escorts first, then once you've thinned the herd go for the kill on the battleship with everything you've got.

A big fight against Remnants though is never a sure bet. I've lost a dozen or more capitals and huge numbers of cruisers and smaller vessels during this campaign.

[TheWetFish]

You may find good use of Solar Shielding against large amounts of energy damage 

As noted many smaller missiles are far more effective then fewer larger missiles against energy based PD 

You need to have a plan for how to push a high tech style fleet away, which is generally to use a heavy focus on kinetic damage 

You need to have a plan for how to kill a high tech style ship when an opportunity presents itself, generally involving negating their mobility in some way.  This could involve physically surrounding them, EMP damage to take out their engines or opportunistic spikes of overwhelming damage 

[FeudalWulf]

So I've been toying with strats to try and beat things, currently figuring out that capitals are garbage unless it's the Conquest vs many small boys. I want to figure out the best LCP though.

Currently I'm just spamming Sparks with half as many Korpesh wings doing the actual killing, I see why Korpesh wings are useful and the one Reaper torp LCP I have is garbage, more missiles=more things actually hitting and killing. I can't tell if Sparks are garbage or not, sometimes they don't do me anything sometimes they seem to win the whole thing. Your opinion?

Let me modify this after about 10 minutes: I don't know how to stop my ships from suiciding. Constantly my heron's or dominators will just charge, straight into a horde, and get completely surrounded and die. It happens constantly, I can't have my Heron's escort the Legion, because then the Legion feels like burning straight into combat too. Do I really just need to load up each and every one of my boats with a cautious commander?

Wolfs are also completely useless against [REDACTED], I'm trying Lashers now. Generally I feel that the [REDACTED] can send a lot more boats than I can.

[TaLaR]

Let me modify this after about 10 minutes: I don't know how to stop my ships from suiciding. Constantly my heron's or dominators will just charge, straight into a horde, and get completely surrounded and die. It happens constantly, I can't have my Heron's escort the Legion, because then the Legion feels like burning straight into combat too. Do I really just need to load up each and every one of my boats with a cautious commander?

Wolfs are also completely useless against [REDACTED], I'm trying Lashers now. Generally I feel that the [REDACTED] can send a lot more boats than I can.

You can't. Steady or above AI will find ways to suicide unless your side completely overwhelms the enemy, and sometimes even then.  Anything with Burn Drive/Plasma Burn should be put on even stricter suicide watch.
Ships like Falcon/Eagle that have both range and easy to use mobility systems are generally useful and least likely to suicide, so they comprise the majority of my direct combat AI ships.

Cautious will only engage stuff it outranges unless explicitly ordered, so very few ships can remain useful with cautious AI beside carriers.
Cautious carriers seem quite desirable, but there are almost no cautious officers to hire in current version, so you are unlikely to actually implement such policy.

Any AI frigates are useless at killing REDACTED - they can afford level 20 or so officer for each, you can't (since your 10 officers should be manning larger ships). Omens remain a decent enough distraction/PD screen to be worth deploying officer-less.