Variety of drives

[Zlorfik [CH/BY]]

What is the purpose of the first ~3 generation of drives? Unless you want to spend 500 water / aluminum on fuel for a crappy gunship, there's no way they are capable enough to let them be useful for a patrol ship in orbit of earth/moon/mars.

[Captiva]

First drive tech Baking soda and vinegar

Upgraded drive tech Tin Foil and The Works

[acpfirebird]

Just finished my first game here is what I learned. Early game go for advanced rockets. it gives good rocket drives for defending LEO stations AND several techs for upping boost which you will need early game to get a lead in your space economy by sending out habs to Mars like Tic Tacs. Then I also followed Perun with advanced pulsar. Then the mid game: I rushed for Zeta Boron next but that's alot of research and took a while (gotta admit was sweet when those POS's coundn't out run me anymore) but I also started antimatter and found out later def GO ANTIMATTER. Its cheaper on research and gives very good mid to late game drives. I used antimatter advanced plasma for like 18 years. had 2 stations at Mercury with 5 Super colliders and ended with 78 antimatter while keeping something like 70 titans fueled by the end. Daedalus was great ONLY after you get maxed reactor tech that needs exotics.

[Zlorfik [CH/BY]]

Originally posted by Mistfox:

Originally posted by Zlorfik CH/BY:

There's a drive with 1.5 kps and 1.0 delta-V rating. What would you use that for? We cant build sattelites. We cam build ships. Also, even a 2.5kps ship will take some 20-30 fuel tanks with a basuc drive. Why would one even do that? That's waaay too expensive for such an early ship

Floating defence missile platform for hub protection. Some drives will also allow transfer between hubs in similar orbits.

Does this really work then?

[Zlorfik [CH/BY]]

Originally posted by Vacknishkara:

Originally posted by Zlorfik CH/BY:

What is the purpose of the first ~3 generation of drives?

Their purpose is to puzzle the playerbase, as far as i can see it's working pretty well.

That's also my understanding

[Zlorfik [CH/BY]]

Originally posted by VoiD:

Originally posted by CA53-Scourge:

Ya, the drives are one of the things I expect we will see streamlining and balance improvements on. Realistic tech isnt exactly the best for gameplay.

That said, the best gaming requires you to make choices, do I want speed or range? If I want speed from my fleets, I'm going to have to build an extensive web of refueling locations or limit that type of ship/fleet to a localized area I'm defending.

If I want range, well I cant fight very well if I go too far because I wont have combat acceleration available, so I'll have to build a much larger fleet.

Any option in the middle should be horrendously expensive.

that said, the community is still figuring out how to play, so there may be real uses in drive/power combos that we havent found the best situation for. Like something could have just high cruise accel and be cheap, so you can build a disposable doomstack that can intercept larger alien fleets BEFORE they get to earth and drop off their invasion forces

Not just that, there is no reason to have every reallistic tech ever made in the game.

That's like adding 20 new research options just to give us new ways to create pencils or something, it's reallistic, but it's useless. Having something exist, or to be possible isn't enough of a reason to include it in a game.

I've said it before, but IMO there is no reason to have any of the generators and fusion techs, nobody cares about Something+Something fusion, just make a single fission tech, a single fusion drive and unlock some improvements to it when the requirements are met. I swear almost half the research screen is about some sort of new nuclear fusion which ends up being useless as you need all/nearly all of the fusion techs to unlock the good stuff anyway.

The game only really needs a fuel "generator", fission, fusion, MAYBE antimatter and that's it, as for drives, cut off 95% of them, you only really need a single chemical rocket, a single ion-like long range drive, an early semi-useless drive like pegasus or adv pulsar, and then a couple of good ones for long and medium ranges in fusion, that's it, no need to bloat the research screen with junk, it's not like people need to use any of anyway.

I mean, you can still have multiple ion drives and whatnot, but one upgrade line for each method. We don't need 5 almost identical electrostatic engines. One line per type with several better versions within that line will be enough.

[Zlorfik [CH/BY]]

Originally posted by Mausklickmoerder:

Originally posted by Zlorfik CH/BY:

there's no way they are capable enough

Nova, Heavy Dumbo, Cemet Nerva, Grid, Ponderomotive VASIMIR, Advanced Pulse, Pegasus, I've used them all very successfully against the aliens, and they get extra points for baiting them with low nominal strength and often high fuel efficiency.

These are 3rd to 4th tier drives. 1st tier is liquid fuel. Lots of acceleration, no kps. 2nd tier is the first versions of the drives you wrote, pretty much useless all around.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Zlorfik CH/BY:

Does this really work then?

Yes, if you have one station :)

[Zlorfik [CH/BY]]

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by Zlorfik CH/BY:

So far, i have been looking at 6kps as minimum viable ship since that's what Perun recommends on youtube.

It's a bare minimum & you will need at least one refueling station directly on low orbit (or even on both low orbits once you will have stations on low 2).

If it is bare minimum, then it is not achievable without spending hundreds of resources on fuel for the basic drives.

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by Zlorfik CH/BY:

There's a drive with 1.5 kps and 1.0 delta-V rating.

Station defense monitors with 2-3k dV & chem rockets are working fine (if you have a single station to defend).

I mean you ARE gonna have multiple stations to defend in the LEOs, since that's where you boost your science and investment point efficiency for Earth.

[Captiva]

I went Fission Spinner, Pegasus, then straight to Triton Pulse in my current game.

Pegasus is upgraded Fission Spinner and they both are decent drives for planetary system travel but not very good for interplanetary.

Triton Pulse has the delta v and the thrust to be decent enough to work as an interplanetary drive and is a solid choice for mid game. Uses water and a pretty small amount of fissiles for fuel.
It is not stupid hard to get either, it has some beefy techs to go through, but nowhere near as bad as some and it is worth it at least for a decent drive mid game.

My last game I went Mini Mag and Orion direction and I was very disappointed in the engines and the fuel costs associated.

Have not made it to end game yet, but am happy with the Triton Pulse as a solid mid game drive tech in my current game.

Also Triton Reflex uses almost same tech as triton pulse and is a decent long range lower thrust drive if you want like 1k delta v. Both solid mid game engines.

[mergele]

Originally posted by Zlorfik CH/BY:

So far, i have been looking at 6kps as minimum viable ship since that's what Perun recommends on youtube. I didnt try out lower kps ships. I am afraid of creaging a ship i can do nothing with excep scrapping it again because it literally can't move anywhere.

Forget about 6kps. For early earth orbit alien hunting 1kps is plenty. Go 1.5 if you want to be save and have a bit of fuel for maneuvering in battle. You build them in LEO1, all your targets are in LEO1, your transfer costs are between 0.01 and 0.5.

[nephilimnexus]

Someone suggested earlier that researching the useless drives should at least give a bonus when researching the better drives later down the line. I like this idea.

[Zlorfik [CH/BY]]

Originally posted by Captiva:

I went Fission Spinner, Pegasus, then straight to Triton Pulse in my current game.

Pegasus is upgraded Fission Spinner and they both are decent drives for planetary system travel but not very good for interplanetary.

Triton Pulse has the delta v and the thrust to be decent enough to work as an interplanetary drive and is a solid choice for mid game. Uses water and a pretty small amount of fissiles for fuel.
It is not stupid hard to get either, it has some beefy techs to go through, but nowhere near as bad as some and it is worth it at least for a decent drive mid game.

My last game I went Mini Mag and Orion direction and I was very disappointed in the engines and the fuel costs associated.

Have not made it to end game yet, but am happy with the Triton Pulse as a solid mid game drive tech in my current game.

Also Triton Reflex uses almost same tech as triton pulse and is a decent long range lower thrust drive if you want like 1k delta v. Both solid mid game engines.

These are all pretty advanced drives to start out on. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it does point out the variety of drives which will just never ever be used.

[Zlorfik [CH/BY]]

Originally posted by mergele:

Originally posted by Zlorfik CH/BY:

So far, i have been looking at 6kps as minimum viable ship since that's what Perun recommends on youtube. I didnt try out lower kps ships. I am afraid of creaging a ship i can do nothing with excep scrapping it again because it literally can't move anywhere.

Forget about 6kps. For early earth orbit alien hunting 1kps is plenty. Go 1.5 if you want to be save and have a bit of fuel for maneuvering in battle. You build them in LEO1, all your targets are in LEO1, your transfer costs are between 0.01 and 0.5.

Thanks, gotta try it out. Maneuvering in Space is definitely a requirement for me.

[onyhow]

IMO? It's them having fun implementing as many drives on Atomic Rockets as they possibly can lol.