Print

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

[SafariJohn]

Zig isn't that hard.

I crushed it recently with a low-end capital, 6-8 cruisers, and 3-4 destroyers/frigates. Just need some tough things to handle the motes, something fast like fighters to keep the Zig under, and some good missile spam to finish it off.

[Hatter]

I haven't really used fighter all that much against Zig. Burn drive helps to keep the pressure on and stay in range, preventing it from running away. Heavy enough PD (PDAI + officer skills) can shoot down motes and heavy missile use forces the it to use motes as PD, neutralizing its main attack. 

[Gaishu_Isshoku]

You can beat this fight with just a few phase ships. I did it recently with a Doom, Harbinger, and Afflictor - the Afflictor is fast enough to aggro and 'tank' the motes by running away in phase and a Doom with Systems Expertise spams enough mines to catch Zig with a few when it drops out of phase briefly.

[Low Settings]

Piranhas are trash, they'll kill your fleet faster than the enemy.

Nah, you're just using them wrong. Lo and behold!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqu-tTDsMHo
Although i admit that 15 condors is not quite enough. But with 20 and some minor tactical positioning flawless victory is quite possible.

Don't you think this is a little bit bonkers? or maybe too much stonks?

[Jarolegon]

Perfectly balanced in my opinion. Zig is just a single ship after all, it's perfectly normal for it to die to such amount of dakka. And one more use for piranhas is also good, since they are such niche bombers.

[MrTwister]

Zig isn't hard at all - it doesn't like long range weaponry 1000+, especially beams.
Nothing too fancy about it, just put up some organized defenses and keep it beamed up so it overheats and then send a swarm of harpoons in its face to finish it. It can maybe take a couple frigates out with its motes, but isn't the end of the world.

Comparatively, the fight with two

Spoiler

Redacted

[close]

ones at the

Spoiler

Hypershunts

[close]

is a lot more difficult and is a true challenge, however it can also be handled mostly without losses.

I think all of these "difficult fights" stem from the fact that a lot of the time  people don't know how to play defensively and cant control their fleet when the situation requires. Its so easy to put SOs on most ships and expect zerg-rush blitzkrieg to work out every time, that when it doesn't work out people get genuinely frustrated.

[baxt]

Its so easy to put SOs on most ships and expect zerg-rush blitzkrieg to work out every time, that when it doesn't work out people get genuinely frustrated.

It's funny you say that because the only reason this fight was won in the end was a lone SO Hammerhead. Range in this fight just got my fleet chewed up over and over. Perhaps you're playing on easy but 1 mote volley would vaporize a destroyer, 2-3 volleys for an Onslaught and a Frigate stood 0 chance unless it had phase. Also zerg rush blitzkrieg does work every time but I will agree it's not the most entertaining. It's just often the best option save for a few scenarios. The longer the enemy has ships on the field the worse your AI will handle it. Not all my ships have SO, my flagship often does though. I tried many combos in this fight and in the end a brain dead rush was the one that got the job done. The main issue was the AI not following orders very well against this particular ship. Either way this fight is an outlier and none of the typical expected behavior from the AI was happening in this battle so it was making it more difficult than it needed to be.

I think all of these "difficult fights" stem from the fact that a lot of the time  people don't know how to play defensively and cant control their fleet when the situation requires. Its so easy to put SOs on most ships and expect zerg-rush blitzkrieg to work out every time, that when it doesn't work out people get genuinely frustrated.

Playing defensive in this game just makes life more difficult that it needs to be. I find it's much better to kill things quickly and decisively but I do run small fleets so I'm often outnumbered, if you let your AI be defensive in that situation the enemy AI will encircle you and start popping your ships. If I run as a flank deleter and delete 2-3 frigates/destroyers from their flanks at the start of the battle my AI will switch to a more aggressive approach since now there is a hole in their formation allowing more 2v1 scenarios for my side. I guess defensive would be fine if it was an even fight and a proper line could form but this just results in more supply cost that it would otherwise need to. But it's all good there are many ways to play this game I tend to favor a supply efficient approach, minimal ships, low repair cost.

[MrTwister]

Hmm, interesting. I'm actually playing normal difficulty with Nexerelin mod.

I find that longer fights are generally in my favor as my fleet has high CR, strong shields and flux and no SO and I can wear waves of enemies down in 3 to 1 ships scenarios. Also my ships generally soak a lot of damage on the shields and back off to vent many times per battle. I also have a lot of command points and spend it using active pause to orchestrate AI past its shortcomings.

Well everyone has their own playstyle I guess, there is no universal recipe to have fun in this game. I do like to design my fleet and tactics with endgame scenarios in mind however, to be able to win fights where I am outmached.

I have a feeling that battle size actually has a lot of influence on these boss fights vs 1 or 2 special ships.
Mine is 800, which means I can field a fairly heavy force vs a lone ziggurat - that could be part of the reason I didnt find it anything special.

[baxt]

I have a feeling that battle size actually has a lot of influence on these boss fights vs 1 or 2 special ships.
Mine is 800, which means I can field a fairly heavy force vs a lone ziggurat - that could be part of the reason I didnt find it anything special.

That could be a factor, I'm honestly not sure. I've just always played regular vanilla with standard settings.

[Grievous69]

Could? Bruh making the fight twice as easy obviously matters for discussion lmao. Unless the AI also has reserves to deploy, increasing the battle size for a hard fight is basically cheating. I mean to each to their own, but I personally wouldn't find fun in fighting a boss enemy with 7 capitals or how many even you could deploy with those numbers.

[MrTwister]

Yeah true, although I don't think I used capitals at all last time I killed Ziggy, definitely wasn't maxed out - it was cruisers mostly, Aurora, Furies, Herons and Champs I think - was awhile ago. Anyway for me battle size 400 is boring and too small, there are big fights to be had in this game 4x style vs many fleets at once and these 1-2 scripted boss fights  I don't care much about.

I'm on a new playthrough recently in a default sector + Nex mod, battle size 800. When I meet Ziggy I'll try to record it if I can, I think default DP should be around 220-240 for this fight.

Just had a fight vs 2 Pirate Armadas merged plus a corsair, I think they had something like 12 Atlas MkII and about 12 more rows of trash below it.

[sterr]

Ion weapons make it easy if you bring enough, just turn off its guns . The Zig can delete mid-size ships very quickly at close range but has meh CC, either bring a bunch of frigates with ion weapons or capital ships that can tank it (one paragon getting its attention can win the fight reliably, it worked for me with no special prep the first run through though it killed a lot of my other ships). If you bring cruisers or destroyers it will just kill them before you can get your DP worth from them unless they outrange it or are tailored for the fight.

I haven't bothered to try this but I'm sure you could solo it easily if you bring a paragon with 4 tachyon lances and every ion weapon you can fit. "Just buy a paragon" might not be the most useful advice but there you go.

[Ibudoto]

Hyperion master race

[Szasz]

Ziggurat can be taken down by a single Harbinger and I mean no offense but the player version is a disappointment.

[Ibudoto]

Ziggurat can be taken down by a single Harbinger and I mean no offense but the player version is a disappointment.

"disappointment"

This thing deal around 36000 damage per burst every 3 second and has 11000 flux vent which is about 6 time more than a Paragon, the motes doesn't deal damage to ship like original version but it slaughters missiles and fighters, and enough EMP damage to completely shutdown multiple capital ships because EMP damage do penetrate shield. It's singlehandedly most powerful ship in the game.