Cannot even pretend I understand this space combat

[StormRangerX]

I'm pretty late in the game at this point and have nothing really left to do other than go to Pluto and blow up the wormhole. Problem is I have no real space presence yet and have tried building some ships now that I actually have drives capable of keeping up with the aliens. There's barely any tutorial for anything going on with spaceships, from building them to fighting with them I have absolutely no idea what's going on or what I should be doing. I try building an array of weapons, they get blown up easily, I try focusing on specific weapon types, they get blown up easily. I try to maneuver my ships in combat? They either don't move at all or go flying past the enemy, and I don't think there's any particular way to keep my ships grouped up in any sort of formation like they can start combat with unless I micromanage every single directional pip on the board. What the actual hell is going on with any of this space stuff, the rest of the game is so good but this is incomprehensible.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by StormRangerX:

and I don't think there's any particular way to keep my ships grouped up in any sort of formation like they can start combat with unless I micromanage every single directional pip on the board.

You can select multiple ships at once and give them all the same flight path orders, which will keep them in formation if they have the same flight characteristics.

[corisai]

Originally posted by StormRangerX:

I try building an array of weapons, they get blown up easily, I try focusing on specific weapon types, they get blown up easily.

Easiest way - show us screenshots with your combat designs and share goals why you're building them (defend? attack asteroid belt? attack alien main base itself?).

Originally posted by StormRangerX:

I try to maneuver my ships in combat? They either don't move at all or go flying past the enemy,

Game is realistic - you can't expect capital ships to make a maneuvers in time. In my experience Destroyer is a biggest ship that (with decent engines!) could be used for actual maneuvers in combat.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by StormRangerX:

I try to maneuver my ships in combat? They either don't move at all or go flying past the enemy

They always move - you probably mean they don't accelerate and that is because they are much too heavy for the amount of thrust their engines provide resulting in negligible combat acceleration. To understand combat you need to understand kinematics (basically: to slow down you need to accelerate in opposite direction to your movement) and compare where are pips of the same color in regard to pips of enemy ships (unfortunately UI is still far from perfect in this regard so it's not always easy). There is nothing wrong in flying past the enemy providing you are prepared for it (your designs and tactics for them) and it can actually be the best option in maneuvering combat - just don't go straight at the enemy ships (unless you want to ram them) and try to keep armored front to the enemy especially when you are close to them.

Last advice: AFAIK, AI can't keep formations, yet, so by your maneuvers divide their forces and defeat them in detail. In this way even when your forces are nominally much weaker you can win without losses because locally they can become much stronger.

Edit: Don't forget about keeping your attention to rotation when you design your ships - with some engines, eg. some of antimatter ones, you can have decent (or even very good) combat acceleration while rotation of your ships can be very bad (ships are too heavy for maneuvering thrusters which don't scale to main engines).

[StormRangerX]

Originally posted by corisai:

Easiest way - show us screenshots with your combat designs and share goals why you're building them (defend? attack asteroid belt? attack alien main base itself?).

At this point in the game I have complete dominance over earth and strong enough defenses on my various mines and stations through the mercury - mars area that the aliens can't really make any forward progress against me. But that's the extent of my space presence for the most part, I've pretty much ignored ships up until now because it didn't seem like anything I could design could do much against the aliens and my station/outpost defenses were good enough on their own. As Resistance I need to start taking down the alien space presence to 25% of the total and I have no idea how to go about doing that. I've tried a few different ship designs focusing around the neutron flux torch engine as its the only one I have that seems to outrun enemy fleets to actually be able to fight them, and I've been trying to designs between the various weapon classes and not really seeing lasers accomplishing much at all outside of point defense. Missiles and Magnetics actually damage ships once they overwhelm the enemy point defense it seems, but a lot of my designs seem to wildly vary in effectiveness. My goal for the most part is just fighting alien ships I guess, what am I supposed to be doing for that? Small ships seem to die too easily but large ships get overwhelmed and I don't really have the resources to build and rebuild a lot of them.

[DaBa]

I'll throw in my 2 cents. When you have trouble manouvering your ships in combat it is usually a sign they are using engines that don't have a lot of thrust. If you use an engine that is efficient and can travel far distances it's usually not going to be effective in combat and be able to provide a lot of immediate thrust. You have to get very far in the tech tree to unlock engines that are good at both.

But don't expect to ever be as manouverable as the alien ships, or at least don't expect that to happen until the very end of the game when you get your hands on the best stuff that will allow even the big ships to do some pretty cool things.

Also, it might just be that you're making your ships too heavy by sticking a lot of unnecessary armor on them.. really, there are a lot of factors to consider. People asked for screenshots for a reason, a written explanation from you doesn't really help much. Want help, just make some screenshots of ship designs so people can critique them and offer advice, or identify whether it is a design that is a problem or the way you use them in combat.

[corisai]

Originally posted by DaBa:

I'll throw in my 2 cents. When you have trouble manouvering your ships in combat it is usually a sign they are using engines that don't have a lot of thrust.

Or too big ships. Biggest hulls aren't intended to turn a lot - only accelerate or not :)

Originally posted by DaBa:

You have to get very far in the tech tree to unlock engines that are good at both.

Even basic Advanced Pulsar could do some interplanetary transfers if you're using adequate ships (read: small) and especially if don't mind to bother with refitting (like installing extra armor at destination).

Originally posted by DaBa:

But don't expect to ever be as manouverable as the alien ships

Advanced Pulsar Escort with some efforts could hit 4G acceleration :) It lack fuel for prolonged maneuvers indeed, but could dodge a few mag shots.

Originally posted by DaBa:

Want help, just make some screenshots of ship designs so people can critique them and offer advice, or identify whether it is a design that is a problem or the way you use them in combat.

A lot depend on techs available to you and phase of game (some awesome early designs are mostly useless in late game). Fastest way to find out it by screenshots - show us a ship you think your best one.

[StormRangerX]

Okay so right now the fleet I've been trying to use to clear up the space between mercury and mars has consisted of various monitors and a battlecruiser design, I was using some gunships and escorts for a bit but they were constantly dying so easily that it didn't feel like they were worth fielding.

https://steamcommunity.com/id/thatsxcombaby/screenshot/2059883332617336109/

https://steamcommunity.com/id/thatsxcombaby/screenshot/2059883332617342212/

https://steamcommunity.com/id/thatsxcombaby/screenshot/2059883332617342445/

https://steamcommunity.com/id/thatsxcombaby/screenshot/2059883332617342704/

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by StormRangerX:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3002919542

Battlecruisers just are a bad hull imo. Not enough hull weapon slots to protect itself with. Furthermore, that big nose gun isn't going to get through enemy point defense without more shots being fired at it. You either need a LOT of big guns, or you need small guns to help saturate the point defense.
It also doesn't have anywhere near enough armor for something with so little point defense or maneuverability.
The ECM is also nigh worthless for something with so little armor, because it can't survive a single missile hit, so reducing the hits by 60% isn't going to do much for it, because it needs to stop 100%. ECM doesn't help Point Defense at all at protecting the ship, because it only works once the missile has gotten through the PD.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3002920163

60cm lasers just don't kill ships. They're a point defense weapon in all but name, not an anti-ship weapon.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3002920192

Kinetic weapons have no practical ammo limitation, so there's no need for any magazines, let alone 3. Also, small kinetic weapons don't generally kill ships.
In tandem with what I said above, an important problem is that you're putting these on different ships. When battle starts between large fleets, it randomly chooses which ships are put into battle, which means that mixed composition fleets may not work out like they ought to, because it may put too much of one thing and not enough of another into the fight.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3002920209

I can't identify missile weapons by their icon, so I can't really comment except to say that it doesn't have very much armor, and probably can't dump all of those magazines in a short enough time span to be worth using 3 of them.

[StormRangerX]

Well the idea with this lineup was since the ships aren't very maneuverable they just stay in a formation so the point defences of other ships defend each other, which seems to sometimes works and sometimes not. I haven't run into any battles big enough that I haven't been able to field the whole fleet, my fleet size is really only looking like 10-15 because I just don't have the resources to make more than that especially with them dying. The missiles are ares torpedo bays for the monitor and nemesis nuclear torpedo bay for the battlecruiser, they seems to shred other big ships when they get through PD. Yeah I've noticed the lasers haven't been helping in doing damage so I've sundowned that design and stuck to just PD on the other ships.

How much armor SHOULD I be putting on these ships? I have absolutely no frame of reference, I try to use the auto-builder as a sort of reference even though it makes bad ships but I thought it at least put a good amount of armor on.

[Pawleus]

There are currently 2 main types of winning tactics:

1. Static wall of death, in which you don't maneuver at all (so very easy even for beginners), depending on your PD to destroy incoming projectiles and missiles and having enough weapons to destroy enemy ships fast before they outmaneuver you. For this kind of tactics your ships have much too little PD coverage and especially if facing enemy with combination of lasers and plasma - too little frontal armor (you need something in range 50-80).

2. Highly maneuverable wall of death (which I find much more engaging and it's much more cost-effective), in which you are almost constantly (in the early game sporadically) doing 3-4g maneuvers, avoiding enemy projectiles and missiles (PD is much less needed here and sometimes even not needed at all if you are skillful) while doing attack runs (they look different depending on what attack weapons you use) to defeat the enemy, preferably in detail. For this kind of tactics your ships have much too low maneuverability (too small combat acceleration combined with much too small turn rate) and generally need smaller ships (I prefer Corvettes as my main force in the later stages of the game when my main weapon are coils and I have at least Zeta Helion Drive and Escorts in the early game with missiles as main weapons and preferably Advanced Pulsar Drive if it unlocked).

Designs for maneuverable tactics demand better insight of you because your ships have to be as light as possible while at the same time decently armored, with 3-4g combat acceleration and with enough DV (read: tanks, which are heavy) for their strategic use.

Edit:

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Kinetic weapons have no practical ammo limitation, so there's no need for any magazines, let alone 3.

You are generally right but I sometimes give a magazine to my pure coil Destroyer design - this design is expected to be in large battles when I have comparatively to the enemy a very small but highly maneuverable force and I am afraid of running out of projectiles from its 2-slot cannon and 1-slot cannons of Corvettes before I defeat them in detail.

[StormRangerX]

Well, I've finished researching everything at this point. Any specific advice? Playing resistance so I need to wipe out the aliens down to 25% of the total space power. I've got a decent amount of mines set up in the Kuiper Belt at this point and have some solid income so resources aren't as much of a problem at this point. Antimatter stuff seems really strong but utterly impractical since as far as I can tell the only real sources of antimatter are around Saturn (one moon has 80 but that's about it, everything else has like 1). I need to kill the aliens there anyway so I could set up a collector out there but is antimatter stuff worth it? What is worth it at this point? The titan seems barely different from the dreadnought, what's the point of it? Pawleus mentioned corvettes as a strategy but I definitely do not understand the combat well enough to pull off that much management in battle.

[StormRangerX]

https://steamcommunity.com/id/thatsxcombaby/screenshot/2059883332619733790/
Is this design any good?

[Pawleus]

It's not very good: I prefer less exotics in my designs (you could only have about 40 Corvettes with the amount of Exotics you have and it's only for 2 my standard fleets - you need more to win the game earlier), I would definitely change the coilgun battery for the 60cm UV phaser (sometimes PD is helpful, at least because everybody makes mistakes :) ) and give it at least 50-10-10 armor (it's needed when you face laser-plasma combo in large battles) - otherwise it's similar to my favorite design (it has similar parameters except turn rate - yours is better but not really needed because it has to be similar to Destroyers) but you have to remember that it's great only for highly maneuverable tactics so you will have to learn them (and not everybody likes that amount of engagement). If I remember correctly it can be even better with the Daedalus Drive (I remember it's substantially better for Destroyer).

[StormRangerX]

Uh, that's a lot more than I was expecting to be building. What exactly are my fleet composition and sizes supposed to look like?

[DarthVishis]

Originally posted by StormRangerX:

Well, I've finished researching everything at this point. Any specific advice? Playing resistance so I need to wipe out the aliens down to 25% of the total space power. I've got a decent amount of mines set up in the Kuiper Belt at this point and have some solid income so resources aren't as much of a problem at this point. Antimatter stuff seems really strong but utterly impractical since as far as I can tell the only real sources of antimatter are around Saturn (one moon has 80 but that's about it, everything else has like 1). I need to kill the aliens there anyway so I could set up a collector out there but is antimatter stuff worth it? What is worth it at this point? The titan seems barely different from the dreadnought, what's the point of it? Pawleus mentioned corvettes as a strategy but I definitely do not understand the combat well enough to pull off that much management in battle.

Other than killing large clusters of enemy ships, my strat usually includes building a bunch of cheap nuclear missile armed ships to buff my own fleet strength as well.

As for antimatter .... Mercury supercolliders, though they can quickly consume your Fissiles if you overdo it.

The Titan is not worth it. Nope. Avoid. Also don't bother with torch drives or any of that stuff ... the resource requirements to build and refuel them is insane.