seems to me that launchers USELESS

[Benzin]

for a while now i have been noticing that launcher based weapons (missiles, SRM, etc) dont seem to be very effective, even though i have them al lvl 8 and with launcher boosters.
So i did a little experiment:
I refitted my entire fleet to use only missiles, a pelican, a volley and a right (or is it left?) hook (the small one with only a large launcher slot), all equipped with nothing but missiles and launcher boosters, except for the pelican wich had an EBC (the one that drops shields).
So i went to a 50(ish) system (me being lvl 94), picked a fight with the UTA, and ordered every ship to fire on a single enemy ship, IIRC it was a left (or is it right? lol) hook (the one with 3 cannons).
I went up close and fired my shield dropping cannon at it, and its shields dropped to zero, and my 3 ships started saturating it with a "rain" of missiles and torpedos.
A couple of minutes later, 2 of my ships were DEAD, and the enemy ship had sustained only minor damage.

WTF!!!???

I really been enjoying this game, but it seems to me that some of the weapons (actually ALL except cannons and maybe drones) are seriously flawed.

I really wish launchers would actually be usefull, they would be one of my favorite weapons.

Oh, and BTW, bombs are even more useless. Mines and turrets? dont get me started.

[wintermane_2000]

The main launcher ship would be the carrrier with its 8 medium launchers.. and even it isnt very good. Launchers arnt a main weapon they are secondary. The only main weapons are beams or cannons. Everything else is a secondary weapon. The main use I have for them is hunting down small ships I cant turn fast enough to fire on.

[magnetmannen WW3]

i like using the slowing missiles. makes my guns hit better.

[Benzin]

I agree about the gravity missile being usefull. I used it exaclty the same way, to slow down the ship and mow it down with cannon fire.
However, spending 10 upgrade points to put launchers at lvl 4 wich is required to use the gravity missile (or is it lvl 5 ?), seems an excesive ammount of points spent just to use that missile.

I find that its equally effective to just use turrets, those hit the targets most of the time without the need to use gravity missiles first. Plus, if you invest some points into turrets instead of launchers, you get the double mount turret, (and even the triple one) wich increase your ships fire power a lot more that any missile would.

And as for overall damage, after further experimentation, it seems to me that if you equip your ships with cannons and fill every launcher bay with a cannon booster instead of missiles, you destroy enemies --- A LOT --- faster that if you used those same cannons and missiles.

Give it a try:
Load a game, arm a ship with cannons & missiles (or torpedoes, srm, etc) and attack something. See how long it takes for the enemy to die.

Reload the same game, use the same ship as before, but this time replace every launcher bay with cannon boosters, and find a similar enemy ship to attack.

youll notice a dramatic diference.

Even as secondary weapons, launchers dont seem very usefull to me. IMHO is far better to use those bays for cannon boosters, and use the upgrade points in something else.

[Air Bear]

Well, for most of the ships, missile launchers are secondary weapons for a reason. You get that slowing missile on it to slow down an enemy, and use the other missile slots for boosters for the main weapons. You can use missiles for a nice little bonus damage. It is significant damage in the first 20 levels, especially if you can't keep your engines up with the enemies.

For your scenario though, you were using missiles wrong. Missiles main advantage is that they are long range. You can keep out of the range of an enemy and still hit them (I think my late game missiles went somewhere between 2400-3000 units away before they self-destructed). You also don't have to aim very well, since they are self targetting. So a 2nd advantage is that they can make up for weak piloting skills.

I said you did it wrong, well how do I think you should do it right?
First, if you want *serious* damage, use a ship with multiple missile tubes like the volley or the carrier, and mix 1 gravity missile and fill the rest with torpedos. Pilot it yourself for best results. Make sure you lead the enemy ship with your torpedos so they don't overshoot it. They will hit the enemy hard. I can't remember if torpedos were not very effective against shields or not, but they have a big impact on armor and hull. You will see the enemies go down faster then you expect, especially if you've got launchers up as high as you say. Don't put torpedos on the AI controlled ships though because they will overshoot a lot. Torpedo single damage is better than anything cannons can dish out.

If you have never tried the Cruiser as a torpedo boat, you're missing out.

For your AI controlled ships, put regular missiles on them or the scatter missiles (The SRMs?) along with at least one gravity missile. If you only have one slot, let it be a gravity missile. The advantage is the AI will shoot from a distance and basically never waste a shot (except for SRMs). The disadvantage is the AI will likely fly in too close and get hit. I never let the AIs control a pure missile boat except for the carrier because all the rest of them are just too fragile. If an AI has a Volley they just seem to go up in smoke. So for my wingmen I basically only use missiles as a support weapon. I only have my primary ship be a missile boat because I know I will keep it out of danger. Since missiles are so long range, I can save a ton of rez on lost ships by keeping it alive and letting my wingmen use beams or cannons and get up close. I still do significant damage and I kill off stragglers while the wingmen do the up close and dirty work.

Caution on the scatter missiles: they can hit friendly targets and count as aggressive acts. They are excellent against stray floating zombies in space and are a nice option for one slot on a carrier in act 4.

If you plan on putting missiles on small or tiny ships, give them cloaks. Not only do they get boosted damage while they are cloaked, they are much more likely to survive because they usually wont be seen.

Do your scenario again either with no wingmen, or with all of your wingmen cloaked, and with yourself uncloaked and trying to stay out of range of your enemy. Try torpedos. You should see much better results.

----
Storytelling time:

One of my runs through the game, I had a carrier with all standard missiles (whatever the blue one was) plus 1 gravity missile, and every other slot on the carrier was a booster. I think I had even managed to get a specialist that boosted range and missile damage. That ship ripped enemies to pieces. Enemies that were offscreen. It was an extremely easy ship to win with. The only time I had a problem with it was when I ran up against a zombie mammoth and some other zombie huge ship. They were going at the same speed and their shields were covering each other as I ran away from them. I would knock out one set of shields and the other would come online. I lost all my wing men and my carrier twice, and then while frantically trying different builds while I had just enough rez left to build one more carrier, I hit upon the torpedo build. I hadn't tried it until then. I think I ended up building a large class ship and loading it out with speed boosters and torpedos so that I could kite the enemies faster. It let me take them out and save the day. I think I had 40 minutes into that fight and it felt super satisfying once I figured it out. Torpedos: The unsung hero of the launcher tree. Don't use them unless you you are good at leading the enemy.


As for the other 'support' weapons:
--I never did try a mass bomb build, although I will say that I got owned by them frequently early on when I was doing insane difficulty. Cloaked mass bomb launching helixes are real bastards when your ships have no hp. I even lost my beacon right off the start a couple of times. I started a mass bomb build runthrough once but got distracted by dropped turrets.
-- Drones are great. Possibly more effective if you play with the aggressive/defensive stances in the tactics overview. Setting the ships to aggressive seems to let the drones fly anywhere on the map.
-- I did a dropped turret build and the battle station, or whichever one launches torpedos, provides some good damage, especially if you pair it with the leech turret. I kindof broke some of the stealth missions in act 4 by using those to distract the enemies (they didn't break my stealth even though they were detected). I was using a mod that gave one of the bounty hunter huge ships 3 bomb/dropped turret slots and 2 battle stations + 1 leach was about equal to a large ship's output damage. The other turrets felt too weak to be useful.
-- I never did a mine build either, mainly because it's way too inconvenient to try and drag enemies to specific locations.

[Air Bear]

I had no idea that reply was that long. I'm so sorry!

[Benzin]

Hi Topper, dont worry about the long reply, i appreciate the detailed explanation you provide :)

The scenario i described earlier (with the pelican) was only a short "test" to see just how destructive launchers can be. I completely agree with you about missiles being a long range weapon, and i intended to do the testing that way, i started pounding at it from far away, but after hitting the enemy ship several times, its shields were nearly intact!. Thats why i took the pelican up close to it, to fire its EBC cannon at it a few times so its shields would drop. And they did, after that, my ships hit it a LOT of times with missile fire, but after a while, the only damage done to the enemy ship was 2 yellow armor plates!
The enemy ship did had advanced armor, but after so many hits, i would expect it to sustain at least some hull damage, and it had sustained none.

In contrast, on a similar test using only particle cannons + cannon boosters, that ship would be VAPORIZED in seconds (even with its advanced armor).

I also agree about the drones being a FINE weapon. On another test i did, i speced them to lvl 8, and armed a sunspot with 3 bomber drone bays, and particle cannons, and a raven with similar weapons (drones + cannons).
That build worked so well, that it actually bored me xD. Every time i poped in into combat, basically i just had set the turrets to auto, to sit there and do *nothing* but watch how the swarm of drones and cannon fire decimated everything that got close hehe.

But back on the topic of launchers, i did another little test. I loaded an old chapter 2 save, where my biggest ship was a tug, and did the same test as before...
- Loaded the tug with a cannon (the blue one, dint have particle yet), and 2 torpedoes. I sent my wingmen far away to avoid interferance, and i picked a fight, this time with an UTA tug.
Yes i eventually trashed it, but it took some time, and i sustained some damage.
Loaded again, same thing. Except 2 cannon boosters instead of torpedoes. had too look for an enemy tug of a little while, but when i found it (on the same system as before), and following the same method as before, i killed it a hell of a lot faster using only the single cannon turret on the tug.

Another issue is point defence. if the enemy ship has them, then your launchers are pretty much dead cargo.

I guess launcher weapons have their uses, such as hit & run using cloacks, etc. But it seems to me that if what you are looking for is sheer damage per second, replacing launcher bays with cannon (or i guess beam if you like those) boosters, is FAR more effective

[Air Bear]

Seriously though, try the scenario again but with torpedos :P
I swear I remember them being comparable to cannons

[Blazing Glaceon]

Not sure what you're going on about, heh. I can't live without mah missles. They're good supressing fire and they tear apart anything that doesn't have much armor left. When you're fighting Zombies, missles are the way to go considering they don't HAVE any armor (aside from the infected human ships, which a volley of Particle Cannons is more than enough to obliterate in seconds). One thing you need to remember is Shielding; missles aren't good against shields. Shields act like nice big sponges, soaking up all the damage and leaving the armor perfectly intact. That's where the power-draining Beam I forget the name of comes into play. Drain the shields, burn them to hell with missle and cannon fire. Even Bounty Hunters can't stand up to a relentless missle barrage. Get a Carrier and pack him full of a Missle Boosters and you have a pretty much endless missle machine gun, which is hilarious and quite enjoyable.

[Benzin]

See for yourself!
re-spec your cannons to lvl10 (using those missile points), and pack a mamooth with nothing but triple mount turrents using particle cannons and cannon boosters.
Compare wich is WAY more effective, your missile machine gun carrier, or the particle machine gun mamooth xD
Small / medium enemies blow up so fast, sometimes you literally dont get a chance to see what kind of ship they were hehe.
even ch 4 Bounty hunter bases dont stand a chance!
(no shield droppin beam prerequisite is required)

[NORgrunt]

The game started out very good at release but after a while they changed everything so it became pretty much a waste of time at later levels since the computer would basically counter everything you had in missions like magically changing their ships to suddenly have point defense. Having level 10 in anything at all didnt do squat.

[Nile]

Wow! I just tried the strategy Benzin outlined of just popping up boosters in every slot (or almost) of the cruiser boat you can get MASSIVE damage. Here's my setup:

Beam lvl 10 - 3 fusion emitter (FE) on the turret and 2 Huge FE on the front
1 Huge Beam booster, 5 other beam boosters, 1 reactor b, 1 engine b, 1 grav,
drone bay + tractor beam.
+17% beam dmg from one guy and +32% reactor total from crew.
It kill almost as fast as the manta ray. The only thing I miss is not having 2 leech beams which I have on the manta ray. Otherwise the extra cargo makes up for that plenty of times.

[Morphic]

I think it really comes down to personal preference and ships/layouts. I used to love Cannons and Missiles. Then I tried Beams and Drones, I found Drones a little lackluster but they were fun. Furthermore Mines and Mass Bombs can be loads of fun. Mass Bombs especially, I much prefer Mass Bombs over Missiles. The only problem with Bombs is the "friendly fire" that can happen, most times I blow up my smaller ships on accident or tick off a neutral/ally.

Though when you dump points into subsystem/boosters it becomes ridiculous how much boosters can improve your output. It kinda makes the game to easy on anything lower than Veteran. Another fun thing to try is dumping points into crew and using the Shuttle weapon/missile. Especially if you use cloak, man was I happy to listen to Blorf on that one.

[Burusagi]

Mass Bombs+Cloak= Fun fun!

[Your Majesty Padded Gamer]

I just started the game and missiles seem to be a lot more useful I hate using beams since I suck at aiming and missiles are easy to fire cause there heat seeking I was doing horrible with the basic beam but rocked with the grass hopper