Question about lazers

[mattig]

Simple question (I hope). I'm the passive aggressive type who likes to render ships in-operable rather then kill them. Are lasers good for this?

The description says they can punch through sheilds, has anyone found them good for that?

[THE_RaBiD_CanuK]

Heavy Lasers are better at getting through shields, but take a lot of energy. So I mix them with light lasers.I find that lasers work best on the Brutus and Sparta, which can manuever into position quickly to target specific systems. The heavier ships don't target as well. Also, it's pretty hard to hit systems other than the engines while the shields up. But taking out engines will greatly indure enemy ships, since they can't manuever for offense/defense. This is especially true for light ships. Once the combat engines are down, other systems become easier to hit. Lasers are really effective against any ship once the shields are down.

[mattig]

ok...so...they are good for getting through sheilds. but only on the light ships, do I have that right? On the heavy ships (like the angel wing), those...um...energy bombs (I can't remember their names) are still the weapon of choice for getting through sheilds?

[THE_RaBiD_CanuK]

The light ships work best because they can manuever into a good position quickly to hit a specific target, whereas the Angel has a harder time because she's slower, though targets like Engines are easy for her to hit. The Angel can hit slow ships just fine. Heavy lasers are designed for pierceing shields, but they won't actually do any damage to the shields themselves, nor the hull for that matter. They ignore shields. But if you target an enemies shield generator with the lasers and disable them, the enemies shields will drop. Light lasers are most effective against unshielded ships, but heavy will get the job done, too. Eventhough you can't damage the hull with lasers, you can effectively render an enemy ship disabled by taking out the engines and weapons generator. Also, to increase the effectiveness of your lasers, equip your ships with power batteries, and set the weapons to 150 or 200%. They'll shoot much faster.
Another way to take down enemy subsystems quickly are gunboats, which are extremely effective in numbers.

The Anti-Shield weapons work well on the Angel, but they work best when you have at least 2 equiped on the ship, though you can compliment them with heavy gatling guns which damage both shields and hulls.
Energy bombs are anti-shield missiles (artillery) which explode in a huge radius hitting multiple ships. I find these work best on heavy support ships like the Guardian battlecrusier rather than the Angel.

Anyway, if you're going to use lasers, it's best to have the Sparta and Brutus focus fire on one ship, taking out the Engines first, then you can aim for the weapons generator or the shield generator. Most subsystems are very hard to hit when the ship still has its engines. Once the shield generator is out, the lasers will devestate any subsystem, but on some ships I find the shields hard to hit. What you target might depend on situation and what's most urgent. Also, keep in mind that when you target a specific subsystem or change to a different subsystem, it will probably take 10 seconds give or take for the ships to manuever into position, so you won't notice results right away. Try to only target one system at a time.

Also, your ship won't automatically use all the lasers on your ship when you target with F6. It'll use heavy lasers against shielded enemies, and light lasers against unshielded enemies by default. If you want to use all your lasers at once, bring up the manual menu by hitting "m" and activate and target them all. If you have 4 lasers on the ship this will require weapons at 200% to be effective.

[mattig]

wow...really? I put batteries on my ship by default, and upgraded the weapon gen the second I got the chance. I'm trying to beat that escort mission you have when you get to the other side of the wormhole w/out loosing any ships.

[THE_RaBiD_CanuK]

Cool. You should be able to beat that mission with any of the strategies/setups I mentioned. You'll get the Sparta and Brutus a mission or two after that one.

[mattig]

I tell you what, I'm having a hard time of it. perhaps I should just try to wreck them with those...um...gatling guns and energy shells...cause I'm not even managing to live through the mission, much less beat it w/out loosing any ships.

[THE_RaBiD_CanuK]

Worth a try.

[mattig]

I know I'm resurecting an old thread here, but since i'm the starter I think i'm in the clear.

I'm trying to beat the chase mission with 3 whitelights, while keeping the data scanner on board.

my fit top to bottom is:

Data scanner
3xWhitelight heavy lasers
2xUranium gatling guns
2xSpacetech flack systems
the sheild
the default engines
a sensor array
3x support generators
2x energy cells
and the combat firecloud generator

Belive it or not, when the whitelights hit, they cut through the sheilds like a hot knife through butter. trouble is its 6 energy cells (on the enemy ships) vs my sheild. That sensor array doesn't find the weapon generator(s), it does find the support generators though. not sure what good that does me, but there you go.

Any ideas on where I could improve? Oh, and I did start these missions with an ecm system. so swapping out the ecm system for the sensor array does cost 2 points, and since I had a whitelight from the last mission already, I needed to use the exploit where you look at your squadrons then back at your fitting to get the second one on there.

That said, I did try it with 3 energy shells. I just kept getting overpowered. but the time I got halfway through one of the enemies sheilds, mine would be down.

[Llamedos]

dont you have a squadron of gunboats on board in that mission? thoes guys can shoot through sheilds and take out the enemy shield generator or other hard points no problem, just dont leave them out there to long.

[FAButzke]

I never could use lasers properly. Either they don't hit or they do but cannot destroy the subsystem before the enemy repairs it. Your best bet is to load all your ships with hard hitting vs shield weapons and/or using gunboats.

[mattig]

yea, my gunboats keep getting popped before they can hit a subsystem.

hey, what do those subsystem generators do? both mine and theres. maybe I could try hitting those. might be easier the eshells or sheilds.

[Mazryonh]

Actually, lasers (and anti-device attacks that aren't from Fighters or Bombers) can get hideously overpowered in this game, especially when spammed. Let me outline how that works below.

If you can get more than a few squadrons of Gunboats attacking a specific device on a targeted ship and there aren't fighters to drive off the gunboats or destroy them, that device is largely history once it's identified and you can target it. This is because Gunboat projectiles penetrate shields very often (even Layer Shields, which are supposed to stop them, don't do so very often). This works even better if you take care to disable a capital ship's flak systems first so it can't shoot back at the Gunboats.

If you can amass enough capital ship lasers or gunboats on a single target ship, you don't even have to identify any of its devices. Check out this video from an ingame mission:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhhnRXdNXCw

You'll notice the Ghost ships firing on Gorg vessels quickly disable them. You can do this too; if enough capital ship lasers or gunboats are firing, eventually a critical device will be disabled (since lasers firing on a capital ship that doesn't have targeted devices will just fire at random ones). This isn't helped by the fact that devices on ingame starships don't make a lot of engineering or military sense. It makes no sense to have only one shield generator or only once weapon power generator that can be quickly disabled with concentrated anti-device fire, leaving the ship entirely without shields or weapon power, but that's how capital ships in Nexus are configured. It would be more balanced if backup engines/backup weapon power generators/shield generators could not be destroyed in mission for all starships, only disabled. The Angelwing's devices all have this ability, but the above would be more balanced for all starships.

Small lasers of the Crystalpin model or stronger have a good chance of piercing through shields. They're short-ranged, but they fire fairly quickly and accurately. This short range also means that ships using them are exposed to more enemy fire, though. If you really like to use lasers, make sure to scan the disabled Ghost ships in the Locust Queen mission. Last I heard that lets you access the best ingame laser models earlier than usual.

By the way, does anyone else here like the sounds that shield-piercing light lasers make in this game? It sounds pretty nice to me. The only better laser sounds I've heard in a game are those used by the Nod Laser Turret in the old game Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. You can hear them in the following video:

http://youtu.be/Ublub1sSLyE?t=1m43s

[mattig]

see now, I genuinely don't know what ghost ships your talking about.

And what do those generators do? Do they just control life support? I wouldn't mind suffocating those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gorg ships at this point. it seems no matter what I throw at them, they kill me before I kill them, very frustrating.

[mattig]

oh, I managed to beat the mission I was on. Had to catch the freighter.

Heres how I did it, used my 3 whitelights to disable the freighters engines. when the 3 enemy ships were good and agro'd on me, I used the gunboats to take down their sheilds, and used the gatlings to rubble their hulls fast. I did have the whitelights firing at the 3 ships, but they weren't hitting anything.

[Mazryonh]

mattig89ch の投稿を引用：

see now, I genuinely don't know what ghost ships your talking about.

I see, you haven't got to that point yet. Anyway, the Ghost ships are the cloaked ships firing laser-only weapons in the first video I linked to. They're restricted to laser-only weapons, sadly, but have enough of them per ship to make spamming them (in the manner I outlined above) viable.

mattig89ch の投稿を引用：

And what do those generators do? Do they just control life support? I wouldn't mind suffocating those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gorg ships at this point. it seems no matter what I throw at them, they kill me before I kill them, very frustrating.

Have you watched some video walkthroughs of this game? How are you managing your power? It is very possible to get through this game on Normal difficulty without losing single capital ship. Anyway, if you want to disable devices, you'll have to identify them on a ship first. The quickest way to do this is to use the Scan command, but since it forces your ship to lower its shields this is clearly very risky (and a ship with shields makes scanning its devices take longer). If you make sure your active sensors are turned on while engaged in close combat you should ID the devices on enemy ships sooner.

Each capital ship has a Support Power Generator (what they use to recharge batteries or run support systems like ECM, ECCM, Sensors, and the IP drive). Destroying this doesn't do much to hamper enemy ships.

Each capital ship also has a Weapon Power Generator. This is what allows it to power its weapons. Disabling this will keep it from firing weapons, as little sense as this makes from a military or engineering standpoint to make such an important system so centralized. It seems the developers had some inkling of how silly this was, because in later missions you can mount backup weapon generators, but only on smaller ships.

If you want your lasers/small craft to have an easier time of hitting enemy devices, aim for the Combat/Deflection and Main Engines first. These are fairly quickly identified and hamper a ship's ability to dodge anti-device fire once disabled/destroyed.

mattig89ch の投稿を引用：

oh, I managed to beat the mission I was on. Had to catch the freighter.

Heres how I did it, used my 3 whitelights to disable the freighters engines. when the 3 enemy ships were good and agro'd on me, I used the gunboats to take down their sheilds, and used the gatlings to rubble their hulls fast. I did have the whitelights firing at the 3 ships, but they weren't hitting anything.

You didn't really need to use the Whitelights (which are fairly inaccurate) to disable the Freighter's engines--you could have just sent in the Praetorian Gunboats. The reason why laser weapons are often fitted to smaller ships is, due to their lighter mass and thus better mass-to-thrust ratio, they can more easily get into position to fire at devices despite enemy ships turning them away. In general, anti-device weapons on capital ships are best used on ships that are larger than they are.

The Angelwing is a bit of an exception because it is more maneuverable than most cruisers are, but that still doesn't make it a good choice to use it to disable devices against smaller, more agile ships like the ones the Raptors use.

I always did think of using anti-device fire to disable shield generators as cheating. Anyway, it is perfectly possible to defeat the Raptor contingent in "The Chase" mission by using Energy Shells and Hull-destroying weaponry. You just need a good set of batteries (so you can increase power to your shields to recharge them faster when they are running low), at least 3 Energy shells (focus them on one target at a time to bring down its shields), and two Uranium Gatling Guns (they can be mounted in the mission to Shukenja Beta, in the "Heavy Weapons" slots of the Angelwing).

The Praetorian Gunboats can be used to your benefit. Send them out from time to time to get the Raptors to fire their Phalanx Flak Guns, then order the Praetorians to target and destroy those Flak guns so they have no defense against the Praetorians' attacks. These gunboats have a lot of health so they can withstand a bit of flak damage before you have to order them back into the Angelwing's hangar for repairs. Once the Raptors' flak guns are disabled you can then order the Praetorians to disable the Raptors' main engines to make shooting them down with the Angelwing's weapons easier.

Don't forget you can achieve a bonus objective if you bring along a Datascanner to scan the wormhole the Freighter is heading to.