Plasma, Coils, or both?

[Democratic utopia of Pakistan]

What are your prefered fleet compositions? I went full Heavy Plasma with Phaser PD. Howerver it took me forever to bring down an alien war fleet. I took 80% of their force in the first few minutes, with barely any casulties of my own, but the rest spreaded out in all directions. When I got back from shopping, and the battle has been going for real 30 minutes at full speed, I had no choice, but to accept ending the battle, wasting like 100 Exotics.
Now I've bulit 6 Coil Battleships with 4 Light Coilguns, Medium Coil Canon, and 2 PD each.
I'm hoping it won't be yet another wasted effort. I really hate the fact that, you can't design your own ships in skirmish mode, and test them immidietly outside of the Sandbox mode. Would've saved me a lot of game resources, and real time.

[Crucades]

Coils are the best weapons in the game. Plasma is trash and I dont really have too much fun with lasers of any variety.

[Tomoko]

i find coils projectiles going slower than plasma. Thus making plasma having a better hit rate on top of using 0 ammunition. BUT ! alien armors mitigate energy damage ( so plasma/laser) which is... a flaw, maybe, but a fleet with both lasers and plasma can do the trick if the fleet is engaged in CQC. plus plasma balls can't be shot down, while shells and missiles can. so another win for plasmas.

[Patrus]

Originally posted by czarek723:

I'm hoping it won't be yet another wasted effort. I really hate the fact that, you can't design your own ships in skirmish mode, and test them immidietly outside of the Sandbox mode. Would've saved me a lot of game resources, and real time.

You can import ship designs from your save and test them in the skirmish mode (select "import" when selecting a ship class).

[Zuul]

Think of Plasma as a hybrid between lasers and kinetics.

Lasers ALWAYS hit, and can not be killed by PD, but NEVER chip armor. As such, if they can't damage a target, they will NEVER damage that target without something else to blow holes in the armor.

Kinetics can be dodged, are vulnerable to PD, but are relatively hard hitting. Even the ones that don't get through the armor chip it so future shots have a chance at completely bypassing the armor.

Plasma has significantly higher velocity than kinetics, so are much harder to evade. They are also immune to PD. They also have much lower damage than kinetics (in general) and so can't defeat heavy armor. They do, however, still chip armor like kinetics, and as such will cause holes in the armor that will eventually kill the target.

So that's your choice.

Laser: Guaranteed hit, immune to PD, can never wear down armor if the armor is enough to protect against it. Armor effectiveness decreases as you get closer.

Plasma: Highly likely to hit, immune to PD, but will chip out armor making future shots deal damage even if the armor is sufficient to completely protect against it.

Kinetic: Low-middling hit chances, vulnerable to PD, will chip armor and is fairly hard hitting in its own right.

[Soul]

Plasma is Fantastic, im moments away from crushing the last vestiges of the aliens from the solar system and I run Plasma for my nosegun and 2 green phasers on my battlecruiser fleet. It gets the job done, the ships are cheap, and the plasma is never shot by alien Point defense so you can easily eviscerate their fleet no matter how well protected they are (Coilguns are fantastic but vulerable to heavy PD pockets and their muzzle velocity is a fraction of plasma's, if you don't have plasma definitely run Coilguns). Meanwhile having 2 Green phaser on guardian mode and keeping your fleet packed close will give you an amazing point defense bubble. This is my Design for the BattleCruiser MkIV https://postimg.cc/0MSv0HG8 Im done with the techtree and this is what i've settled on for my ship of the line to win the game.

[Crucades]

Originally posted by Soul:

Plasma is Fantastic,

If this game had MP I would absolutely wreck you with a MK1 setup

What's the armour chip on plasmas anyway? Sure the projectile is fast but that's about it for the sorry ass weapon.

[Badger BrownCoat]

I'm getting

"flatChipping": 0.2,

for all the plasma's I'm looking at.

Originally posted by Soul:

Plasma is Fantastic.

I'm looking at the Shiva/ Marauder project and sighing wistfully like an anime girl

[VoiD]

That depends.

Against my fleets plasmas are probably the only kind of weapon capable of doing any damage of any kind whatsoever, bar close range lasers which are impossible to defend against, but nothing can survive long enough to get that close.

If you have enough PD, and a few laser battleships with nothing but 1 slot lasers and laser engines rest assured no missile or kinetic will ever reach any of your ships, and lasers can't do anything about even low armor values, but plasmas can.

Also, I'm about to try them against alien stations too because much like my fleet composition, alien stations are full of lasers, to the point they've stopped a big 30 ships fleet all armed with MK3 coils as if they were nothing, so plasma might be the way to go there.

PS: Since plasmas are really bad against armor, you should probably consider any low damage plasmas to be useless, only use the heavy hitting 4 slots nose versions, and MAYBE the 4 slots heavy hull plasmas.

[Badger BrownCoat]

Originally posted by VoiD:

Also, I'm about to try them against alien stations too because much like my fleet composition, alien stations are full of lasers, to the point they've stopped a big 30 ships fleet all armed with MK3 coils as if they were nothing, so plasma might be the way to go there.

Just to be clear- you meant because/ so that their lasers can't PD the plasma shots as opposed to your mag guns?
( or I'm missing another gotcha )

[Demo]

Plasma is king, I used all weapons and plasma kills everything before Coil is even in range. 1/2 my fleet had coils only time they got to shoot was at missiles coming in. Even then they where not needed as PD and laser took them out before the round came anywhere close to the missile.

[VoiD]

Originally posted by Badger BrownCoat:

Originally posted by VoiD:

Also, I'm about to try them against alien stations too because much like my fleet composition, alien stations are full of lasers, to the point they've stopped a big 30 ships fleet all armed with MK3 coils as if they were nothing, so plasma might be the way to go there.

Just to be clear- you meant because/ so that their lasers can't PD the plasma shots as opposed to your mag guns?
( or I'm missing another gotcha )

yep

[Badger BrownCoat]

Originally posted by VoiD:

Originally posted by Badger BrownCoat:

Just to be clear- you meant because/ so that their lasers can't PD the plasma shots as opposed to your mag guns?
( or I'm missing another gotcha )

yep

rgr- ty- and you can def understand why I asked...
rarely do I have to hit an official forum/discord etc until I'm well into modding-
and this time it's happened for some of the basic mechanics.

But yeah, your reasoning makes perfect sense - just wondering if it was related to the chipping question just before or or or ( howling can be heard )...

we ( the LWS fellas and forum ) had some... interesting.. discussions about xcom's plasma weapons in the nexusmod days... I was really curious (when i on-off followed TI up to launch ) how'd they'd handle plasma weapons in TI

TL: DR, ...a project from the 1990's where they build a coaxial plasma railgun, which uses plasma as a KINETIC weapon, accelerating a Torus (a ring) of 0.5-2 milligrams of plasma to relativistic speeds, 1-3% the speed of light, 3000-10,000 km/s. Then FIRING it, Causing the plasma torrid to impact with a yield equivalent to 5 pounds of TNT, causing devastating mechanical and thermal effects, generating X-rays and EM radiation

kinda feel like the second something nasty showed up in orbit, our ol' satellite cracker
would be back online again shockingly fast
"all systems, nom nom nom!"
Eat THAT donut; Cthulhu-faces

[ExavierMacbeth]

I have used everything except pure laser boats so far...

Early game is obviously missiles because they are just too good until the enemy starts fielding multiple ship fleets with 2-3 PD on each ship.

After that I switch to Coils (skipping Railguns) until I have Plasma.

Plasma is my favorite but in all honesty I still use a mixed loadout (I even still carry a 5 shot nuclear torpedo on some ships late game). Unless your using the 4 slot nose mount, plasma does have issues killing Battleship & Larger Aliens. They can do it with enough shots but it can take longer than you would like sometimes. But just having the 2 slot hull turret on multiple ships can help mop the floor with the smaller hull types.

Coils can kill the smaller ships but they seem better at pounding the larger ones once you can get through the overlapping point defence (especially as the little ones in the way get killed by plasma). I have a tendency to still use nose mounted 2 slot Coils so I can put some Phasers in the nose slots to strengthen point defence.

As for the nuclear torpedos I still carry... well besides bombarding enemy bases (without atmospheres) they are something I can quickly turn on & target against crippled enemy ships so I don't have to figure out how to pull flip & burn maneuvers to go chase them down.

I should also point out that I don't let the AI fly my ships... but thats mostly a personal preference & the fact that I don't like how much fuel the AI wastes on pointless manuveres.

[Soul]

Originally posted by Crucades:

Originally posted by Soul:

Plasma is Fantastic,

If this game had MP I would absolutely wreck you with a MK1 setup

What's the armour chip on plasmas anyway? Sure the projectile is fast but that's about it for the sorry ass weapon.

Lol you wouldn't last a second. Plasma is the Queen of battle mate, Coils guns are again, good weapons and have great damage output but they have to actually hit the friggin target to work. Plasma will almost always hit, point defense doesn't even fire at it because the projectiles so fast. Coilguns are good when you have a small number of ships and you need space superiority ships to fight a few large alien vessels but once you are hanging with the big boys and fighting fleet battles with hundreds of ships you need plasma to pierce the enormous point defense bubbles around fleet formations.

[HaonSolo]

I’ve found Collin’s with siege coils ABSURDLY op the aliens arnt great at target managing and siege coils while almost never hitting anything with working engines absorbs a absurd amount of lasers to the point where alien vessels are nearly all laser and they can barley get a shot off at any of my ships, the only problem is small ships which get cooked(literally) by my pd/really big laser ships that are mostly just there to PD