a change in alien tactics

[Vigor]

By running pd/lasers pretty heavily I have rarely lost a ship to alien missiles until now.

Now the aliens are running whole fleets of missile ships.

Meanwhile, exotic salvage has been so stingy for the last 15 years of game time that I haven't built a ship with phasers for a very long time. I simply can't afford it. I'm not using exotics for weapons. I'm not using exotics for armor. I am only using exotics for ecm/targeting computer and phaser pd and I'm even being stingy about that. Right now I have 3.9 exotics. By making garbage ships that will last me another few months.

Now ECM is apparently not doing anything.

In my most recent battle, the aliens started a battle with nothing but missile ships. Meanwhile, I didn't even have my best ships in the battle. My starting fleet was massacred despite having 2 phaser pd on every ship. IThere was an enormous purple cloud and the purple missiles aren't even the dangerous ones. It is the ones that are hard to see that get you.

It was even a base battle but the base is entirely ineffective vs missiles. You spend 240 power for a battlestation and it only has 1 pd... :/

Every ship also had at least one coil battery but when they are set to PD they fire all over the place, not even in the direction of the incoming projectiles. It is actually kindof funny. They definitely don't work in cooperation with the PD. The PD should not target something the coil has already shot at if it is on target. The coils should actually fire at projectiles further away, and destroy them before they are in range of the pd.

edit:
oh and particle is beyond useless now since the particle pd won't fire at non-missile projectiles and particle batteries have a 30 second cooldown. If you made a dreadnought with all particle batteries It would be destroyed in under 30 seconds by missiles. They both have their uses early game though particle PD is not what it used to be.

The irony here is up until this change in tactics, I didn't really fear missiles I feared the alien lasers, xray lasers, and particle with a healthy respect for mag cannons.

[Pawleus]

Why do you even make such posts if you don't bother to listen to advice? Alien missile ships could currently be easily and usually entirely safely dealt with even without having any PD and you were already told about how.

Originally posted by Vigor:

I am only using exotics for ecm/targeting computer and phaser pd and I'm even being stingy about that.

Since when they cost Exotics?

[Vigor]

re: exotics
something is using exotics. I'll take a closer look. RN most of the ships I'm making are cruisers with 2 PD, a UV spinal laser and a coil battery. I'm sure the drive isn't using exotics. I do have a better drive I could be using which requires exotics. I'm sure my radiator, battery and power plant don't use exotics. My strictly coilgun ships don't use exotics. I'm not using any plasma ships RN (built one)

RE: advice
when have I ever recieved advice on how to deal with missiles? I have never had a problem dealing with missiles before... 2 hrs ago. I'm not a forum troll. I don't read every post on the forum. I say my peace or get my answer and often don't come back to a thread ever.

RE: wanna try again? without being an ___ this time?

I'm expecting some really gamey advice like, fake them out with your future waypoints. I do that sometimes early game but I don't like doing it. It feels like cheating. They really shouldn't know my future course and I shouldn't know theirs. I've tried to run from them but I've never gotten away.

I've put ecm and targeting computer on almost every ship I've built since I sent 3 monitors to kill one ship with a KO'd drive that was similarly armed and the first 2 died without firing a shot even to pd and the 3rd just ran away. They were all perfectly healthy and had just reinforced. I figured I'm not gonna lose any more ships because they won't shoot.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by Vigor:

when have I ever recieved advice on how to deal with missiles?

My most recent advice for you that was also relevant to alien missile ships was here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1176470/discussions/0/7027393439964348160/?ctp=6#c4693405245805163520

Originally posted by Vigor:

wanna try again? without being an ___ this time?

If you want someone to devote their time for you I would suggest not being "an ___" yourself.

Originally posted by Vigor:

They really shouldn't know my future course and I shouldn't know theirs.

They don't know your future course and you don't know theirs - you know only their intentions at the moment that can change at any moment (usually at waypoints). This doesn't change the fact that based on their current velocity vectors and parameters of their ships you can predict the range of available options for them and eg. whether or not your missiles have deltaV to reach them in the future no matter what they do (especially as they are very schematic in their behavior).

[Vigor]

You are correct. It is the coilguns using the exotics. I thought I was building coils before I had exotics. That is actually worse because I can't make any endgame weapons. UV arc lasers are pretty bad unless they're spinal. They make awful pd. If I build bigger ships I won't be able to outmaneuver mag cannons when I need to. If I pack big ships full of PD I won't be able to kill anything. Even these cruisers aren't very nimble.

Not only did my station and initial fleet get wiped out all at once, the missiles launched at the station and initial fleet destroyed my freshly reinforced ships too. Many of them didn't reach their first waypoint.

I've been thining the alien weapons are so OP they should be murdering me if they played smart.

the aliens have 1000 ships and I have absolutely nothing to stop them. I've killed hundreds of them without getting enough salvage to make decent ships.

[Pawleus]

Tip: Don't waste Exotics on building ships that you expect to loose.

[Vigor]

Consider it, please, a commnon courtesy to read other people posts if you want to take part in a disscussion - people that don't do it often fall into traps of ignorancy created by themselves as you could have seen well in this thread. Believe me, you can learn a lot about the game just by reading.

You people make threads with 300 posts. You want me to read them all? Your conversations never end. If I stay long, someone is gonna start talking trash and then I'm gonna get pissed off and probably go find something else to do.

I followed your link and didn't see any advice on missiles only references to advice.

I also tried to google what to do about massive amounts of alien missiles. Not a single thread. I googled because I didn't want to come here and talk you people.

Nevermind. I don't care any more.

[Pawleus]

In the post I linked I enumerated posts in which I explained the maneuvering missile combat and in the examples I provided in them I fought against alien missile ships without having any PD.

[Blaarg]

Go to the discord if you want help & don't want to deal with people here.

In short, 2 pd phasers/ship is not enough in the current patch with static combat. I'm usually using 4 pd/ship these days.

Note that, for anti-missile duty, pd ions are better than pd phasers on ships without a ton of advanced laser engines. This is because pd ions get the full 200km range while pd phasers w/o ales only have about 130km range vs missiles. Yes, I know the in-game description says pd phasers have 200km range, but that is the top cap, not what they functionally get.

[Dr. Electrocutioner]

Don't feel bad, it's not you.

The devs keep responding to the tactics and strategies of people who are either professional gamers or have thousands of hours playing this game, so it gets harder with every release.

Since 0.3 army invasion of countries had been nerfed to the ground, burned to ash, and spread to the 4 winds.

The new country size bonuses make it nearly impossible to take back CPs in China that the aliens effortlessly give to the Servants, exotic salvage is negligable and needed for parity with alien weapons

Assassination has been gutted by the way they go to ground and all of your assassins are inevitably Marked. The Servants have seemingly endless Martyrs that cause you to lose half of your global support when you kill them.

No good engines until the game is practically over.

The people here have figured out some way you can fight by micro managing the waypoints on individual missile ships, which might at this point be the only viable early game fighting strategy but seems incredibly tedious to me.

Oh, and if you ever allow even one Assault Carrier to land troops the Aliens gain the ability to teleport councillors to Earth for the rest of the game and there is no way to stop them.

Also Blaarg gave good advice that you will get better information with less condescension and insults on the Discord server.

Edit:
Research Campuses now cost MC when they didn't before.

Mining MC penalty changed from per body to per mine.

Station LDAs nerfed by taking away the ability to have 2 lasers if you don't research kinetics.

Early chemical rocket drives gutted.

Plasma nerfed to useless.

Edit 2:
Opinion lost by atrocities now scales multiplied by the total cumulative sum of atrocities you have committed and nuking now causes multiple atrocities instead of just one.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Dr. Electrocutioner:

Assassination has been gutted by the way they go to ground and all of your assassins are inevitably Marked. The Servants have seemingly endless Martyrs that cause you to lose half of your global support when you kill them.

So then Turn them. Turn makes Go To Ground worthless, and you can force them to resign in the Councilor menu to avoid the penalties from targeting them with Assassinate.

Oh, and if you ever allow even one Assault Carrier to land troops the Aliens gain the ability to teleport councillors to Earth for the rest of the game and there is no way to stop them.

No they don't. Alien Facilities on Earth are what allow them to spawn here instead of landing.

Early chemical rocket drives gutted.

I don't think they have been changed.

Opinion lost by atrocities now scales multiplied by the total cumulative sum of atrocities you have committed and nuking now causes multiple atrocities instead of just one.

I'm pretty sure both of those have always been true.

[Dr. Electrocutioner]

Saying "turn them" is really just an admission that assassination has been nerfed.

In any case all of the changes are towards greater difficulty.

The ground combat thing is totally ridiculous now. Empty territories are more powerful than armies.

[Dr. Electrocutioner]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Originally posted by Dr. Electrocutioner:

Assassination has been gutted by the way they go to ground and all of your assassins are inevitably Marked. The Servants have seemingly endless Martyrs that cause you to lose half of your global support when you kill them.

So then Turn them. Turn makes Go To Ground worthless, and you can force them to resign in the Councilor menu to avoid the penalties from targeting them with Assassinate.

Oh, and if you ever allow even one Assault Carrier to land troops the Aliens gain the ability to teleport councillors to Earth for the rest of the game and there is no way to stop them.

No they don't. Alien Facilities on Earth are what allow them to spawn here instead of landing.

Early chemical rocket drives gutted.

I don't think they have been changed.

Opinion lost by atrocities now scales multiplied by the total cumulative sum of atrocities you have committed and nuking now causes multiple atrocities instead of just one.

I'm pretty sure both of those have always been true.

There is something here you do not quite understand.

What I said about the alien councillors is true and there has been discussion of it on the Discord. There is a flag in your save game file called something like ManyAliensOnEarth that gets set when the first UFO lands and is never cleared no matter what you do. That flag being set allows alien councilirs to spawn directly on Earth as soon as they are generated.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Dr. Electrocutioner:

Saying "turn them" is really just an admission that assassination has been nerfed.

Okay. So what? It was ridiculous how you could essentially end a faction by just going on a murder spree.

The ground combat thing is totally ridiculous now. Empty territories are more powerful than armies.

There's nothing empty about them. There are defense forces there, and they aren't represented as armies because there's a MASSIVE difference in cost between an army meant only for defense and an army that's meant to be able to go on attack.

[Dr. Electrocutioner]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Originally posted by Dr. Electrocutioner:

Saying "turn them" is really just an admission that assassination has been nerfed.

Okay. So what? It was ridiculous how you could essentially end a faction by just going on a murder spree.

The ground combat thing is totally ridiculous now. Empty territories are more powerful than armies.

There's nothing empty about them. There are defense forces there, and they aren't represented as armies because there's a MASSIVE difference in cost between an army meant only for defense and an army that's meant to be able to go on attack.

Personally I liked the fact that you could essentially end a faction.

With the envy mechanic that causes them all to gang up on the player regardless of ideology the fact that you can't effectively end them means you have approximately 36 councillors plus however many aliens taking actions against you every turn.

This grows tiresome to me as the game goes on and I want to play more in space.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by Dr. Electrocutioner:

No good engines until the game is practically over.

There are many good enough early engines both for static and maneuvering combat, for defense and even for very early offensives, also for colonization of any place in the Solar System - you could even win the game by anti-alien factions without researching any fusion or antimatter drives.

Originally posted by Dr. Electrocutioner:

The people here have figured out some way you can fight by micro managing the waypoints on individual missile ships, which might at this point be the only viable early game fighting strategy but seems incredibly tedious to me.

From what I understand people here mostly still use the static combat to fight - it is suboptimal but it is good enough. However, if you bothered to look at my examples of the maneuvering combat you would know that they show combat with maneuvering the whole wall, not ships as individuals.

Originally posted by Dr. Electrocutioner:

Also Blaarg gave good advice that you will get better information with less condescension and insults on the Discord server.

Is it really condescension or insult pointing that you are wrong in something or that something was already said exactly to you or that you didn't bothered to look at provided examples and persisted in being wrong because of it?

Originally posted by Dr. Electrocutioner:

In any case all of the changes are towards greater difficulty.

You are wrong again eg. Artemis torps are much stronger in the static combat than ever before.