Attacking army Carrier

[tigersclaw11]

So I decided to attack the army carrier fleet after confidently wiping out a number of their combat and bombardment fleets. I had 3:1 Ship Supremacy & a 2:1 Fire power Advantage, but during the whole battle I was unable to land a hit with either coil, rail or missiles, and worse, the alien carriers were firing a high velocity darkish purple projectile I hadn’t seen before ( Alien plasma battery??) which it appeared my point defences refused to engage?


Thoughts anyone?

[Soul]

Yeah those were alien plasma batteries, they suck to deal with and fortunately are generally rather rare in my experience. PD won't help you only strong armor will prolong your ships life a bit. I suggest increasing your numerical superiority instead of trying to go for heavily armored ships overwhelm them with cheap heavily armed ones with just enough armor to survive a couple hits. Armor is honestly very easy to penetrate for the aliens armaments and every ship should be a mass produced cheap and expendable tool to be thrown away the moment it becomes crippled or obsolete. Your best bet as humanity is either overwhelming firepower that moves as a wall of death in a wall formation with some nose armor or a ton of agile ships that can dodge incoming fire. If you have the influence to spare you can also yeet a couple ships into their assault carriers. Its an expensive way to win a fight but it beats fighting them on the ground. Your ships after all are basically giant manned kinetic missiles if you can hit a target with them.

[wei270]

you did the right thing. those Carrier are the correct target objective. And that is why they are so hard to take down.

i had battle ship with full coil, i can kill it with 2 battle ship for one assult carrier.

it is hard when they group up but move your ship to the angle where only 1 is in the optimal pd range of your guns and focurs fire.

their plasma weapons is the first real combat challenge, if your ship don't have enough defence to tough it out before you kill your enemy you will lose.

the assult carrier have one weakness you can exploit. they are slow like your ships and can't move to safe their own life. so what do you do?

you pray to the divine winds.

[corisai]

Originally posted by tigersclaw11:

Thoughts anyone?

Heavy coilguns, a lot of them.
Heavy frontal armor.
???
WIN!

Use something like that:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2881328497

Of course it will be even better with better tech and probably still need more armor but doing it job quite fine even now so instead of upgrading them I'm waiting to complete AM engines to make proper dreadnoughts.

Be warned: without basic PD those ships are rely on 2/3 lines formation so you need to have enough of them!

[corisai]

Originally posted by Soul:

Armor is honestly very easy to penetrate for the aliens armaments

My first iteration of Terra Defense BB survived a direct hit from alien dreadnought main cannon :) Don't underestimate armor it pretty strong against everything but massed kinetics & point-blank lasers (and aliens could do only last).

[wei270]

dude you drop your pegasus drive dv to a mere 10 just so you can pat 40 armor on your battle ship.............. that is pretty funny

[corisai]

Originally posted by wei270:

dude you drop your pegasus drive dv to a mere 10 just so you can pat 40 armor on your battle ship.............. that is pretty funny

Why I need more dV for Terra Defense? I have refueling post on LEO1 and use two fleets to intercept anyone via "pincer" maneuver. Honestly I could even drop it to ~8 dV but too lazy for refiting 24 BBs

Previous version (with slush tanks) had only 30 frontal armor and that wasn't enough :P

[Patrus]

From my (simple) tests, if you want to overwhelm enemy point defences, a lot of small coil guns are the best.

I've checked:

Dreadnought with 3 small coil cannons on the nose, 2 coil batteries, 2 PD lasers, 2 small arc green lasers in the hull, 100 frontal armor - best results, with some luck can take any enemy ship smaller than dreadnought 1 on 1.
Dreadnought with 1 heavy coil cannon on the nose, 2 coil batteries, 2 PD lasers, 2 small arc green lasers in the hull, 100 frontal armor - also works, but slightly worse results, takes longer to destroy an enemy with good PDs.
Dreadnought with 1 coil cannon and 1 light coil cannon on the nose, 2 coil batteries, 2 PD lasers, 2 small arc green lasers in the hull, 100 frontal armor - worst results.
Dreadnought with 3 small arc lasers on the nose, 4 keelback missiles, 2 nemesis nuclear torpedoes, 2 PD lasers, 100 frontal armor, magazines - works better than coilgun variants on ships with weak PDs, but much worse on ships with better PDs.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Patrus:

From my (simple) tests, if you want to overwhelm enemy point defences, a lot of small coil guns are the best.

You're forgetting about range of small coil guns (and different damage of aliens laser & particle PD). Because of that 1-slot coilguns are worse, 2/4 slots are better.

Originally posted by Patrus:

2 PD lasers, 2 small arc green lasers

Wasted tonnage ;) Either go full on fleet wide PD or stay with "everyone for himself" PD lasers.

THAT thing is a killing machine (still not completed AM engines so it's only a project now >_<):
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2880305025

[dimm_ddr]

First: drop the missiles, they are really good only in the early game. Aliens increase amount of their PD quite soon. You still can hit with them but you would need so much it is not reasonable anymore. Not to mention that you would need to restock them constantly after each battle.
Second: you need something else in addition to kinetic weapons to hit light and agile aliens ships. If you have plasma and enough exotics - great, you can even go full plasma as long as you can afford it, it will get you to the end game reliably. Only problem will be motherships but even they will die eventually if you can manage to keep distance from them so their lasers would not hurt you. Otherwise green arc lasers is the thing you need to aim for. Phasers and UV are better but required way more research and exotics to build.
As a fun note - I have decent success with gunboats with green arc laser and 100 armor everywhere. They are small enough to still have at least some dV and acceleration with that much armor even with subpar drives, they are cheap, fast to build and can reliably get close enough to actually kill things. You would need something bigger with PD or tons of lasers to help with initial missiles salvo from aliens, though. Not the best strategy, but it works until you get to the point where you have so many ship that most of them are in reserve.

[ulzgoroth]

Yeah, army carrier plasma batteries are a dirty trick. They don't pack very much damage, so you can easily counter them with armor. But you can't counter them any other way whatsoever, and nothing before them has called for that amount of armor.


And yes, army carriers and some other ships have a lot of PD beams. I favor a lot of Mk 3 railguns to saturate that, though coilguns are somewhat okay too. Like, set up a wall with over a dozen large magnetic cannons. Keep your formation together, you don't want to be spread out when engaging that sort of nonsense.


Lasers would work nicely except that when you get close you'll find they've got lots of small mag-cannon batteries that will sand-blast your ships to death.


I'm hoping big plasma cannons will work too.

[Abrusio]

if you are early game, use a lot of missiles with a few torpedoes (nuclear torpedoes if you don't care about "lost nuke"). It only needs a couple torpedoes to go through the point defenses to cripple an army carrier. With nuclear torpedoes, it only requires a single one... In my experience, even a couple cheap torpedo boats in a fleet of missile battleships is enough to get one torpedo through.
Since I reached mid-game, I only ever use plasma, aliens have no real counters against mass plasma.

[Fiddler6291]

Originally posted by Abrusio:

if you are early game, use a lot of missiles with a few torpedoes (nuclear torpedoes if you don't care about "lost nuke"). It only needs a couple torpedoes to go through the point defenses to cripple an army carrier. With nuclear torpedoes, it only requires a single one... In my experience, even a couple cheap torpedo boats in a fleet of missile battleships is enough to get one torpedo through.
Since I reached mid-game, I only ever use plasma, aliens have no real counters against mass plasma.

Plasma is great, until you start facing their upgraded motherships, against those even the 4 slot heavy plasma cannon won't do much. Having said that, against pretty much everything else plasma is great. It would be awesome if there would be a higher tier kinetic/magnetic weapon tech after coil guns. In the endgame these weapons/their projectiles are simply too slow to do any real damage consistently. For motherships I always bring about 6 to 8 coilgun cruisers though