Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[intrinsic_parity]

The AI always seems to put burst beams like the tach lance and phase lance on auto fire and then shoot them into shields at low flux which is the worst possible time to fire them. It makes those weapons much less useful on AI ships. Burst beams should definitely not be on auto fire, it would be nice if the AI only fired burst beams into hull/armor where they are actually effective, or at least saved them until the enemy was high on flux.

[goduranus]

I am not with the game computer, would it help to add Strike tag to Tachyon Lances in the weapons.csv?

[Sinigr]

The AI always seems to put burst beams like the tach lance and phase lance on auto fire and then shoot them into shields at low flux which is the worst possible time to fire them. It makes those weapons much less useful on AI ships. Burst beams should definitely not be on auto fire, it would be nice if the AI only fired burst beams into hull/armor where they are actually effective, or at least saved them until the enemy was high on flux.

Agree, no sense to use beams at all in ai ships because of they shoot shield without hardflux, use ai just weapons with hardflux. With new release we will get some module allowing beams do hardflux, lets take a look how it will be.

[Megas]

With Tachyon Lance, I purposefully fire it at shields because if it has some hard flux, some of it is getting through.  Also, if I use two or four on Paragon, the burst damage is enough to flux cap some of the enemies.  I want lances firing, and crossfire is good.  The only time lance is bad is if target has no hard flux and can easily tank a lance strike.

Tachyon Lance is fine as an general-purpose assault weapon.

Phase Lance might be the same way against smaller ships, except for no shield piercing.  Aside from being poor-man's AM Blaster for Harbinger, Phase Lance is more of a PD weapon, anti-frigate instead of anti-missile.

[Plantissue]

Could be worse. The amount of times l've seen Hellbore Cannons shoot at something random instead of that Cruiser or Capital that really needs its armour to depleted. Or it decides to shoot at the edge of the shield of a ship when its turrets swing round (Onslaught in particular seems prone to this), which predictably misses and you have to wait another 3 seconds before it can fire again,by which time the opportunity is lost.

But how it might be useful to forcibly push the flux up at the start of a battle as it will decrease their ability to fire weapons in return.

Tachyon lance is longe range, and a near instant hit, and a massive damage spike and it can do EMP damage through shields. Flux cost wise it could do with being more flux per shot, even if it is soft flux.

[intrinsic_parity]

I think the weapons themselves are reasonable balanced (maybe the phase lance could use a small buff). This is a question of how the AI uses them. Tach lance does penetrate on high flux, but the autofire AI just fires it on cool down so you're basically rolling the dice that the enemy is vulnerable when it comes off cool down. The AI should manually fire it intelligently. If that means firing at high flux shields, that seems reasonable, but currently there is no thought at all on the part of the AI, just auto-fire. I haven't tested the strike tag but that could work theoretically.

[TaLaR]

Best way to use TL depends on your overall soft flux output vs their dissipation*shield.

A TL + 2x Grav Sunder vs Hammerhead needs to just keep firing at cooldown and use HEF with each shot until it finally overwhelms the enemy.

A 4xTL Paragon vs most targets can afford to just fire on cooldown, since it's damage output from other weapons is minor and 4xTL can overwhelm most targets.

A 4xTL Paragon vs a decently built Radiant can't shoot TLs at shields at all. Radiant has enough dissipation*shield to laugh at any such attempts. You have to wait for shield drops due to accumulated hard flux (mostly from Heavy Needlers which are pretty much mandatory in this match-up) or just AI derping and fire at corner of enemy ship to sneak in at least part of blast.

A 4xTL Paragon vs hard flux Paragon is a special case. You have to trick opponent into suicide by fortress shield to win. Which is done by slowly building up their hard flux with HVDs and firing 1 or 2 TLs at a time in alternating mode, just enough to force enemy to use fortress shield, thus converting their soft flux into hard. Burst of 4TLs will just cost you more and not perform any better against fortress shield. Then proceed to exploit shield drops, like in Radiant case. Having mod to switch firing mode in combat helps a lot.

[intrinsic_parity]

Buy waiting until the enemy is high on flux to fire burst beams is almost always a good decision (assuming you have something else or another ship to drive up hard flux) while firing on cool down is only sometime decent. The AI should default to the universally safe/effective behavior not the situational behavior.

[TaLaR]

For ships that can make decent use of TL as primary weapon(only Sunder and Paragon), firing on cooldown if not overfluxed is more often than not the correct approach (the alternative being cases like Radiant/other Paragon or any cruiser for Sunder - targets that can't be defeated at all or require specialized and complicated tactics).
There are of course also situational users like Odyssey.

[intrinsic_parity]

It's also worth noting that even if you are putting our more DPS than your opponent has dissipation, you might still be increasing flux in your own ship even faster and losing the flux war. The phase lance has an efficiency of 1.2 so firing it into shields with better than 1.2 efficiency generates more flux in your own ship than the enemy. The tach lance also has bad efficiency. It usually worse to fire these weapon into shields than to not fire the weapon unless you have a significant capacity advantage.

Paragon  with 4TL is a special case. Firing on cool down-can kill small ships because they have much less capacity, but against capitals, it's not a good decision. The paragon might still win because of fortress shield but it could be doing a lot better.

Sunder with tach lance should have small kinetics and wait until the enemy is high on flux to fire the tach lance. That's a much more effective strategy.

[TaLaR]

Oh I'm not saying that firing at cooldown is best tactics possible. Just that it's much better than waiting for enemy to show an opening that you have no way to force.

Sunder with tach lance should have small kinetics and wait until the enemy is high on flux to fire the tach lance. That's a much more effective strategy.

Depends on what you fight. Against a decently built Hammerhead you'll just lose dps race too badly to create an opening for TL (at least on a Sunder built for TL sniping with Optics, which can't afford Hard Shields at least in skill-less sim). Which is why you have to slowly build up it's soft flux from afar instead.

[intrinsic_parity]

I guess I try to avoid building loadouts that have trouble forcing openings, but I can see it being effective sometimes. I just think the default behavior should be fire into hull/armor or high flux shields and then maybe some situational logic can be added for certain ships and loadouts if that is necessary.

[TaLaR]

It's very easy to counter basic 'wait for opening' behavior. Just fire less than your full dissipation, thus showing no soft flux build-up at all.
Considering which ships can equip a TL and that at least single slot is used for said TL, they aren't likely to have enough hard flux damage output to win hard flux dps race against more committed opponent either.

Basically, if we discount suicidal behavior from opponent (like excessive weapon flux buildup), you need to already have an advantage to build up opponent's flux into opening while keeping TL reserved.

[intrinsic_parity]

I disagree that most ships using burst beams cannot win the flux war without firing them. Any paragon loadout with two hard flux large energy weapons does not need any help from the other two tach lances to win the flux war. Odyssey with 1 plasma and sabots will the flux war just fine, and you can also use the small energy slots for hard flux which works as well (you definitely don't need sabots but they're obviously very helpful). That is 50% of the ships that can use the tach lance. Arguably the sunder can also do tach lance + hard flux pretty well with kinetics (it struggles against ships that outrange it since it is slow but works totally fine otherwise), only the apogee really struggles to deal hard flux damage without the large energy. There are also toooons of ships that can easily equip phase lance + plenty of hard flux.

I can make loadouts for all those ships (paragon, odyssey, sunder) that will win the flux war against a similar OP cost ship when they have 25 OP unspent and an empty large energy slot (they will get the enemy high on flux/venting before they flux out but not have as much killing power because the tach lance is missing). I actually think a paragon with only two hard flux large energy weapons is much better than one with that plus two tach lances as well because it never wastes flux on firing beams into shields (it performs a lot better).

The enemy AI also routinely overfluxes itself, most default AI loadouts go way over dissipation and will fire all until they are somewhat high on flux. That's normal behavior in my experience. The AI is certainly not trying to abuse behavior of waiting for openings.

I would also argue that ships exist in a fleet where openings will be created by other ships as well. Ships with only soft flux (or minimal hard flux) are support ships, they're not going to win 1v1s most of the time and it doesn't make sense to have behavior that sometimes lets them win 1v1s as default when it also causes them to die sometimes. There are just as many (if not more) situations where firing a burst beam into shields is actively worse than not firing it since you build up more flux in your own ship than the enemy. They should default to the behavior that will not kill them and let them contribute damage at good moments in a fleet context. The game is not a 1v1 sim.

[TaLaR]

It's still conditional. I'm not saying reserving until enemy fluxes itself is wrong, just that it can horribly backfire if it's an always on behavior than a dynamic decision.

Take two TL+2xPL Sunders (not my preferred design, just demo of burst soft flux approach) vs an Eagle optimized to counter soft flux. If Sunders try to wait for an opening, Eagle will just kill them. If they keep firing, 2 of them can overwhelm the Eagle without problems.

Paragon has built-in advantage against any other single ship except Radiant. It costs 60DP after all. You can afford to keep TLs reserved to some extent and it works well. But even if less optimal, you could just spam 4xTL and win most duels anyway.

I'm also not to fond of optimizing one facet of AI behavior (using enemy's high soft flux as opening) to exploit other AI flaw (letting soft flux build up in situation where it could be easily exploited).