Weapons/tech meta

[spittle8]

I love this game and keep coming back to it, but boy do I wish there was some sort of guide on the basic meta for early and mid-game fleet builds, tech trees, etc. Experimenting in skirmish mode helps, but beyond that it is so hard to gauge when to escalate things. I was solidly at DEFCON 3/4 with the ayys for a while when I decided it was time to start striking their ships in LEO to stop the onslaught of ayy operatives. Well it seems we are on permanent war-footing now, and the AI is smart enough to send the occasional doomstack to erase my Mars or Earth fleet. I have done a ton of save-scumming. This is brutal. I'm sticking through because I've invested hours into this playthrough, but I have no idea if I can persevere (they haven't really targeted my mines yet) until my tech level allows me to take control of LEO or if the war is essentially already lost.

I do enjoy the mystery, as it means the stakes are real unlike most games. Guess I'm not really griping so much as sharing my thoughts, haven't really been awed by a game like this since I was a kid playing AoE II and CS 1.6.

[dallasm15]

I don't participate in the discord, so these are my opinions rather than the meta. The game is re-balanced quite often so I think any guide gets out of date pretty quickly. When I first played it on normal difficulty I won the game mainly with destroyers with a coil gun and 2 hull lasers. I'm playing on higher difficulties now and this seems really weak now, or maybe the game was re-balanced.

A monitor with 4 Artemis torpedoes, 2 magazines and a targeting computer is really strong, try skirmishing against them as an opponent with a fleet with equal MC. 100% lasers seems like a logical counter, but it's not enough point defence against that number of missiles. It is possible to dodge the missiles if you have fast ships and then return fire with your own missiles when they've run out.

However, the alien missiles are much faster with more delta V, especially the brilliant sky missiles. Dodging those is almost impossible since they home in on you. I'm pretty much resigned to just having to accept some losses if the aliens bring those. Sometimes they have battleships packed with them.

The alien gunships and corvettes are sometimes capable of dodging missiles and if even one survives it can wipe out a missile only fleet. I'm currently experimenting with battleships/dreadnoughts/titans filled with missiles, and some nose lasers as a bit of point defence. The lasers can also be used to finish off any small ships that managed to dodge the missiles.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by spittle8:

Experimenting in skirmish mode helps, but beyond that it is so hard to gauge when to escalate things.

It's not hard to determine at all - it's best to attack aliens as soon as you have your mines on Mars on-line and build ships because in this way they are never able to form doom fleets. If used properly even early low-tech missile ships (Escorts are the best by far) can be devastating to alien ships. On Brutal it's an almost mandatory strategy. You can find many posts on this forum about it.

Originally posted by dallasm15:

It is possible to dodge the missiles if you have fast ships and then return fire with your own missiles when they've run out.

In the maneuverable missile combat against the current validation AI it's much better to launch your missiles (not necessarily all of them) and then make efforts at disengaging while trying to dodge/destroy theirs when needed - if you do it well enough AI doesn't even launch their missiles/torpedoes before their alien ships are destroyed (they are currently too slow in initiating their launch).

Originally posted by dallasm15:

The alien gunships and corvettes are sometimes capable of dodging missiles and if even one survives it can wipe out a missile only fleet.

If you do the maneuverable missile combat well enough even 4G alien small ships have exactly zero chance of dodging your missiles.

[Ericus1]

For those early game fleets pair your missile ships with 2 PD Ion/2 40mm cannon monitors, at like a 4:1 ratio. Those can handle even brilliant skys. 40 mms are the absolute best anti-kinetic PD in the game, and PD ions are the best anti-missile PD. Lasers are actually pretty terrible as PD across the board for anything other than a late-game ship packing several laser engines, which can make PD phasers viable.

PD is usually more effective (and a lot less tedious) than attempting maneuvers to avoid kinetics and missiles, although you can do both. Note that purely PD ships don't need targeting computers as they aren't effected by ECM.

The earliest beams or kinetics you might win fights with is around green arcs/railguns mk 3 (which are superior to coil mk1s mainly due to coil mk1's slow rate of fire), although you will often need a strong advantage in numbers. Anything less than the largest slot (nose or hull) beams are worthless, and for rails you want as many small projectiles as you can to overwhelm PD. But your engine tech at this point will generally limit you to CC/BC sized-hulls, with BBs at the outer limit. Burners or Helicon can get you to Jupiter or asteroids if you want to bring the fight to them. You want to avoid "pregnant whale fuel hog" syndrome where you have ships far too large for your drives using thousand of water to refuel.

You also want to specialize your ship designs to do one or the other to optimize utility slots, and then make fleets that are a mix of both. The beam ships take out flankers and ships that expose their sides, while the kinetics take out the larger ships that take you head on while forcing smaller ships to expose their sides to the beams if dodging. And you want every ship carrying a PD ion and 40mm cannon, if not specialized PD screens. You can also mix in missiles, especially shaped nukes, but I prefer shifting away from missiles. Up to you.

The next tier up is green phasers or UV arcs and siege coil mk2s. Ideally you have top tier gas fission engines like firestar or flare for more defensive fleets around Jupiter, or some of the other more efficient early fusion drives to get distances. You want to be using the 960cm nose beams and the siege coils, so you're getting to lancers now. At this point your beams paired with multiple laser engines can often one shot little ships, and kinetics have shifted to fewer, massive slugs that overwhelm PD not by numbers but by needing multiple hits to kill. Good designs can easily take on equal-sized alien fleets. These will get you into the outer solar system without taking years to make the trip.

Finally, end-game is advanced fusion or antimatter drives on heavily armored brick wall titans using 960cm UV phases and heavy siege coil mk3s. A mixed fleet of those of about 16 ships will take out even alien doomstacks and have the drives to get around the Kuiper belt.

So judge what approximate tech level you are to how well you'll be able to challenge the aliens and roughly where and how you can fight. But large numbers of missile escorts paired with the PD ships can stay quite effective as defensive fleets for a surprising long time, you just need a large numbers advantage.

[dallasm15]

You're right—the PD ions are surprisingly effective in practice. Stat-wise, they appear slightly faster than PD arc lasers but with a shorter range. However, in actual use, their range seems to be about triple what the stats suggest. I would have expected lasers to be easier to focus, offering significantly better range than particle beams, as indicated by the stats. This might be unintentional, but from a balance perspective, I like that the PD ions are effective.

I think missiles should have hit points, like projectiles do, and particle weapons could have the effect of instantly disabling missile electronics rather than relying on increased range. That would better fit the role of particle weapons without making them overpowered.

The cannon has about four times the range of a point defense laser and a better fire rate, but it struggles to hit missiles, likely because they accelerate and the gun’s targeting doesn’t account for that. However, it excels at targeting unguided projectiles, especially at long range, where multiple ships can provide overlapping defense. The lack of tech upgrades for the cannon makes me think this wasn’t fully intended, though. It seems logical that magnetic technology could be used to improve on a rapid-fire, gunpowder-based system. Master of Orion, for example, had rapid-fire point defense mass drivers, and there’s no scientific reason why such a system couldn’t exist. From a balance perspective, I like that cannons are better against projectiles and weaker against missiles, but I think a magnetic weapon upgrade for the cannon would make it a more obvious choice as tech progresses.

As for the tactic of firing missiles and running away, I don’t think it was intended for human missiles to outrange alien missiles. That feels like an oversight. A simple patch could resolve this by extending the range of alien missiles to make them feel more advanced.

Overall, I like the idea of having three distinct types of point defense weapons, and despite some balance quirks, I’ll start using PD particle weapons and cannons more. Even if they feel a bit exploitative, I like the general direction the game is taking with these mechanics.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by Ericus1:

PD is usually more effective (and a lot less tedious) than attempting maneuvers to avoid kinetics and missiles, although you can do both

I almost never use ships with dedicated PD for the maneuverable missile combat exactly because having such ships would be less effective in these fights (this is obvious: I would need at least 1 additional ship without any benefits as even without it I don't usually loose ships to enemy projectiles/missiles), thus PD is usually less effective even in the maneuverable missile combat, providing you do it right.

As for tediousness, the most tedious part of any missile combat (also static one) is usually assigning targets - maneuvers are a small part of it as usually it's enough to maneuver the whole wall as one by using Group Orders. This small part (or sometimes large) for achieving spectacular results (as in the example from this post: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1176470/discussions/0/4434443557915986426/#c4756451565236495122) and for much more interesting combat I can gladly pay.

PD is helpful, though, in the maneuverable coil/rail combat as you usually have to do much more dangerous maneuvers to make it work well (meaning: to make it work using comparatively low amounts of ships).

Originally posted by dallasm15:

As for the tactic of firing missiles and running away, I don’t think it was intended for human missiles to outrange alien missiles.

You are mistaken, human missiles don't outrange alien ones - the problem is different: AI was improved as to conservatively use missiles so they don't launch them in situations in which their oponent could run away from them (at certain combinations of ranges and relative velocities). They do it too conservatively, now, so you can exploit it by launching your missiles in ways that allow you to destroy their missile ships before their launch is even triggered.

Edit: however, it's good to remember that even if their launch is triggered you can just leave some missiles for their anti-missile role (eg. Vipers or Pythons which I recommend exclusively for the maneuvering missile combat in the early or later game, respectively) to deal with threatening alien missiles so a dedicated PD isn't needed even then (but some more tediousness comes then, I admit, because UI isn't helpful).

[dallasm15]

I'm not sure what angle and velocity you meet them in order to successfully dodge brilliant sky missiles, but I guess it is possible since you did it in a previous patch when they were not conservative. It sounds like the aliens are in a bit of a pickle, if they fire the missile you have a way of dodging them, if they don't then they have to deal with a barrage of human missiles. I'd prefer they were not conservative, if you found a way to dodge the missiles then that's a valid counter, but they shouldn't just sit there without firing.

Missiles are a fourth type of point defence system that I didn't really try. In a 1 vs 1 duel of viper monitor vs artemis monitor, it did pretty well, stopped all the artemis torpedoes and had missiles left over to finish off the artemis monitor. In a 5 vs 5 duel the viper missiles started firing quite early, but they have a slow flight time and really struggled to intercept missiles aimed at a different ship. Overall they seem pretty balanced considering they can also be effective offensive weapons, you just need to avoid trying to defend other ships with them.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by dallasm15:

I'm not sure what angle and velocity you meet them in order to successfully dodge brilliant sky missiles, but I guess it is possible since you did it in a previous patch when they were not conservative. It sounds like the aliens are in a bit of a pickle, if they fire the missile you have a way of dodging them, if they don't then they have to deal with a barrage of human missiles. I'd prefer they were not conservative, if you found a way to dodge the missiles then that's a valid counter, but they shouldn't just sit there without firing.

Ideally, they should react appropriately to what an opponent does to maximize the effect of their weapons and I see substantial improvements in it, as to compare:

1. when as before they were not conservative at all and immediately started launching all missiles at the closest ship in range even if you were for some reason not able to outmaneuver/destroy their missiles you would probably loose just one ship from the whole wall.

2. now they are able to conserve their missile and launch only some of them toward many ships - if you don't have PD and you don't maneuver you can loose the whole fleet, not just one ship and they will have missiles left for next fights so this is much better universal behavior and probably works well against non-missile fleets without sufficient PD coverage (I am no sure as I haven't tested it) but it's bad against properly done the maneuvering missile combat.

3. they should react better to what a player does (and to his fleet composition) while trying to be conservative in their missile usage but not more than a player does so they should start launching immediately if a player does

4. ideally, with mounting losses they should appear as if developping their own versions of tactics for the maneuvering missile combat (especially if a player already applied them) so they should also try to determine how many missiles they should launch at which target and when, depending on relative velocities and fleet compositions, while trying to be conservative in their usage at the same time (so they should also try to determine how large relative velocity should be built for optimal usage of their weapons and minimal usage of opponent's ones). In this ideal world a player could also use an ideal UI, of course.

[dallasm15]

That explains why alien missiles are so much more dangerous now, they aren't just focusing them all on 1 ship anymore. I noticed there is a slight problem when the player is using viper missiles, they only send a few missiles unless the player switches to defence mode, then they send all of them. That can be abused by a motivated player by using focus fire while you're in range, then switch to defence when you're out of range to get rid of the few missiles they sent. The fix would be to assume the player is on defence mode at all times.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by dallasm15:

I noticed there is a slight problem when the player is using viper missiles, they only send a few missiles unless the player switches to defence mode, then they send all of them.

I checked it in 0.4.41 and it's not true.

I've actually found some time to test missile combat in 0.4.41 in more detail and I have to say I was wrong about Artemis and 4G alien Gunships - the Gunships are currently so bad at evading Artemis that they can't evade even a single torpedo. Thus, a single Artemis Escort can in a static combat destroy at least 3 such Gunships despite their evading attempts so at least against 4G Gunships you need much smaller fleets in the static missile combat than I stipulated. However, I haven't tested it, currently, against other 4G alien ships.

I was also wrong that AI tactics don't change depending on player fleet composition, even depending on the number of ships, eg. when I used 7 Viper Escort fleet against the mentioned above alien fleet of 1 Monitor with screen AI didn't use formation tactics (every time I tried) but when I was using 4 Viper Escorts or less they always used formation tactics. When I was using in this combat 3 Artemis Escorts and 1 Viper Escort (for antimissile coverage and yes, such a fleet can win against this alien fleet without losses) with static tacitcs AI didn't use formation tactics, however.

With the rest of my conclusions I was right and you could see my findings in these new series of screenshots with descriptions showing eg. how effective Viper and Python Escorts can currently be in the maneuvering missile combat having only just about 14km/s deltaV: https://imgur.com/a/iLI7azN

[Ludek]

For very early game I might use misiles but quickly settle for rail/coil with particle beams combo. Particles are mounted on hull with rails/coils on the nose, I might add another design with particle PD (if it's light ship) instead beam. Rails/coils are main kiling weapon with effective death zone of 400-800km (depnding on tech), beams are for reducing nimblenes of those small ships(they work on bigges ships too) and providing additional PD coverage. I minght reverse setup on some ships (beams on the nose and rails/coils one the null) or make pure particle ships (PD on hull and beam on the nose). In any case such additions are 1 in 2 to 4 ships in the fleet and I never use more than 2 diffrent designs in the fleet .. unless it's situation I need all ships I have in the battle :) . In early game destoyers are best hull or destroyer/monitor mix latter it's all Battlships or Deadnoughts depending on what performance you find acceptable in a ship.
Usually If I have 30%50% more ships than enemy I win and AI usually accepts such fights.
For engines I try to use Burners (to upgade them to Firestars latter) and aim for 30-40 kps(first vaves may sill be less than 20kps in order to save water and make their loss less painfull) for strategic mobility (ability to move ships in inner solar system and eventually to Jupiter) but very early any weak long range engine is ok(ish), just accept that maneuver for such ships is only to turn it's nose in direction of ship it wants to kill. I still prefer to get and use Burners ASAP.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by Ludek:

For very early game I might use misiles but quickly settle for rail/coil with particle beams combo.

You are of course entitled to your choices but changing to such a combo in the early game is far, far inferior in comparison to staying with missiles. Did you even look at the example I provided just before your post? Just think how many Destroyers with your combo you would need to be this combat-effective and how many RPs, mined resources and time it would cost you.

[Ludek]

Originally posted by Pawleus:

Originally posted by Ludek:

For very early game I might use misiles but quickly settle for rail/coil with particle beams combo.

You are of course entitled to your choices but changing to such a combo in the early game is far, far inferior in comparison to staying with missiles. Did you even look at the example I provided just before your post? Just think how many Destroyers with your combo you would need to be this combat-effective and how many RPs, mined resources and time it would cost you.

I did and I do use misiles ealrly but as fights get bigger I prefer to use rails/coils(eraly misiles ships stay in my inventory for loong time just use them less and less). For me fighting with misiles is very binary if you do things right you win big but if not, you lose big. Also after fight your fleet is spent (you must rearm to be capable of fight). Also I never claimed that it's better I just find use of it more comfortable (I think it's more forgiving for my mistakes) besides perfection is overated thing.
Usually my Burner rail/coils end up in Jupiter taking it and guarding beachead there. I do not think I would be comfortable with using for this purpose pure misile fleet but perchaps it's me problem not you problem.
As far as battle atritiion is low higer cost of individual ships is not that big prblem since early I'm more MC limited than mineral and I will use those ships for long time (probably upgrading them to get better everything) . RP wise not sure it slow me me down: I need to(at least I feel that) reseach rail/coil and beams.It's lasers, plasma, advanced misiles, nuclear mislies where I skimp or delay reseach.

[Overlooter]

I suffered this myself. The guides that exist are terribly outdated. What worked for me was designing a ton of different ships and then testing them out in Skirmish Mode. Tedious but ultimately rewarding. My findings:

1. Bigger guns are always better than smaller guns. If you have 4 Hull Points to fill, it's better to put ONE Heavy Coil Gun than FOUR Light Coil Guns.
2. Always reserve 2 hull points for PD. In the early-mid game that is Ion PD Batteries and in the late game it is PD Phaser Batteries.
3. Specialise your ships i.e. if you put a large Laser Cannon as the nose weapon on a Dreadnought, put laser batteries in the hull. This way the utility modules such as Advanced Laser Engine or Magazines can apply their effect onto all of the guns of the ship rather than just a few.
4. You only really need two types of ships in your fleet:
(1) Laser Ships - big laser cannon at the nose and laser cannons and batteries in the hull
(2) Projectile Ships - more often than not this will be Coil Guns although Rail is viable in the early game.

Laser ships will kill 80% of the enemy fleet and they should make up 80% of your fleets. The AI loves to try and flank around you with lighter faster ships and that's the perfect time when your lasers can hit the sides of their hull which have low armour.

Projectile Ships are useful against the remaining 20% of the Alien ships which consist of Dreadnoughts. These guys don't manoeuvre a lot, they have thick armour which cannot be penetrated effectively by lasers, however they do take a lot of a damage from a coilgun projectile.

Finally Plasma has been nerfed as everyone says but it's good at weakening enemy armor and also you can compliment these ships with Styx Nuclear Torpedoes which make short work of the aforementioned Dreadnoughts.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by Ludek:

RP wise not sure it slow me me down: I need to(at least I feel that) reseach rail/coil and beams.It's lasers, plasma, advanced misiles, nuclear mislies where I skimp or delay reseach.

It obviously slows you down as you need to research not just rail/coil and beams but also PD and larger ships for things that you can do with tier1 missiles and cheaper drives than Burner (I know that you don't really need Burner). Moreover, you are delayed additionally by having to build larger ships, more of them per fleet and to have more MC and mined resources for them (and you probably have to limit yourself to lower amount of fleets) so larger infrastructure to support it that needs time, mined resources and MC to build and upgrade.

Originally posted by Overlooter:

1. Bigger guns are always better than smaller guns. If you have 4 Hull Points to fill, it's better to put ONE Heavy Coil Gun than FOUR Light Coil Guns
2. Always reserve 2 hull points for PD. In the early-mid game that is Ion PD Batteries and in the late game it is PD Phaser Batteries.
3. Specialise your ships i.e. if you put a large Laser Cannon as the nose weapon on a Dreadnought, put laser batteries in the hull. This way the utility modules such as Advanced Laser Engine or Magazines can apply their effect onto all of the guns of the ship rather than just a few.
4. You only really need two types of ships in your fleet:
(1) Laser Ships - big laser cannon at the nose and laser cannons and batteries in the hull
(2) Projectile Ships - more often than not this will be Coil Guns although Rail is viable in the early game.

"Always" is such a strong word - have you ever seen me in my examples of combat to do as you say? You haven't, even in the late game examples, so it's certainly not needed always to do as you say. It's not even the best thing to do - you don't probably think about the maneuvering combat at all when you say all those things.

[POWER WITHIN USER]

One thing I dislike about laser cannons is that you need to micro manage their targets. At least the frigates they're shooting end up drifting after one or two shots.

I have done a ton of save-scumming.

It's a war between economies, treat it as an RTS like Starcraft where you're throwing resources at the enemy and accept that most of your ships will die.
Losing your fleet doesn't matter if it at least dealt permanent damage, it's cheaper than the enemy's and you can rebuild it earlier. You will remove old ships to free up MC points (via scuttling or running them at enemies) and refit old stations, maybe even decolonize planets.

If you're losing a ship - for instance a Lancer/Titan that was made with exotics and had damage increasing officers then yeah that sucks but you'll have more fun with the game if you consider that as part of the 'story'.