End-game Discussion

[Immanis]

So, I'm at the slug with the alien to reach victory status, and I wanted to share few bits and discuss few things about the game.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3004512063

Essentially, I control Earth, and I control space, I started to erase Xeno-stations from planets orbit, and each time one of their fleet land in one of my controlled orbit, they're turned into space dust.

Here's my two cent :

1°) Councilor Automation

- The "automate councilor" option is an awesome addition. However, it would be even better if they went into hiding when they are discovered. It seems sometimes they do, but sometimes I have one or two councilor that stay discovered by 2 or 3 factions forever, hopefully I can still take over ask him to hide and re-automate, good stuff.


2°) The game flow is broken too often

- The game is stopped too many times per turns.

- It would be nice to allow automation or pre-defined choices for more things than just councilors. When you reach the late game, you have : councilors, fleet encounters, various events, researches that pop-up and ask for a user choice

- While during the early and mid game you want to do many of these things yourself and handle all the nitty gritty, because that's all you have to do really, is to choose the best path possible for earth as a whole and your countries in preparation for the late-game, you reach a point where you've researched all the techs you needed, give me a button to automate the process and research all techs one after the others without any interaction anymore.

- The repeatable researches should have an option for always repeat like councilors.

- Repeatable global researches could use more bonuses, right of now only military and life one are worth doing past 2050-2060 depending how you've grown earth's and space science capacity.

- Fleet encounters could use a "stance" button, for exemple, always engage, always accept, always evade, always propose, also, allow a check box for "always automate fight"

- Sometimes, you want your fleets to "notify" the encounter, because you've sent a fleet of equal power versus another fleet of equal power when big fleet battles, and you want to manually do, for that case the current system work just fine, and 90% of the time you send overwhelming force to clean up orbits and just want to fire and forget and be notified only when the work is done.

- As of right now, you stop the game to give the fleet a target, time passes, encounter happen, you choose what to do, then you have battle report, and if it was an intercept trajectory, you have another forced pause to choose a new trajectory or stay on the target's trajectory. This is 3 to 4 breaks in the game flow just to handle one fleet.

- At end game state, you handle more than one fleet, you have multiples intercept trajectories, and each fleets will ask you new trajectories, will notify for refuel repairs, you can end up interrupted a lot, and every time you have that very slight lag / stutter / freeze which end adding up to the waiting time.


3°) Faction interaction after global control

- Everything that lead up to the climax and moment where humanity finally can fight back feel awesome.

The control you have over a country economy is good enough and work decently, it's very similar to Europa Universalis, and it works.

What I regret is that you cannot eradicate other factions, and you cannot peace out with them, even if you grind their relation to go from hatred up to tolerance or even liked again, they'll still keep harassing your countries (well, you do control the globe.., so they can't do anything else I guess ?) and ruin their relationship with you, because past a point in the game when everyone reveal their objectives, the option to make a non agression pact disappear, or I do not understand how it works.

When the globe is under your control, there should be an option to integrate the executives of the other faction or mount a project to eradicate them.

For exemple, as the Initiative, I should be able to absorb Humanity's First and Project Exodus's executives, and eradicate the Academy, Resistance, and Servants, but I guess it's going to happen at victory state ?

I'm in open war with the alien and pushing them back on the Kuiper belt, but humanity keep harrassing me and there's nothing I can do they keep recruiting new councilor even with 600k credits in debt....

4°) Base edition

- The time spent into the base and station editor is insane and add up to all the forced pauses. I have to say, the template thingies is a godsend. But what would be even more awesome is a check box that auto-upgrade the bases/station that has it checked with the latest researched part if you have the ressources in stock.

- If you really want to take on the alien, the real difficulty is to produce enough ressources to throw enough ships at their stations in a reasonable timeframe. You end up with a crapton of mining bases. You're constantly coming back to them until they're totally upgraded or reached a good enough state.

- Now that we have the wonderful template system, it would be nice if I could automate this process, I press the button to put down a base/station, check a box, and it will build and upgrade itself per give template.

- Auto-repair.

5°) Base defense

- I'm not sure how this work, but those alien bases with 60K power are unkillable within reasonable timeframe given the ressources needed to be wasted on them, you just forget about it and nuke orbital rings out of existence with 8 serious titan with 4slot nose plasma, 4slot turret uv phaser, 1slot uv phaser, 1 phaser PD, 40 hybrid frontal, 10 adamantine side and rear, and crap tons of cheap torpedo boat with as much frontal adamantine armor as possible to act as buffer and eat fire in stead of your titans that provide constant fire.

- When you have something like 5k power on your bases, aliens simply forget that you exist, but there's a sweetspot before that where aliens will keep throwing ships at your bases despite having no chance when you reach advanced plasma canons and havn't upgraded to battlestations yet. Because of how the game calculate if the alien fleet choose to engage or not, you can exploit this behavior to create a station that litterally act as a fly trap.

- UV Phasers Batteries, and Advanced Plasma Cannons & Batteries are must have and must be beelined. Anything else (except torpedo/missile overwhelming spam) is simply useless. More on that later.
Before you can field these two weapons on your stations, try to not trigger total war.

6°) Drives & Generators

- heeeeeeeeelp there's too much and 90% of it is utterly useless or only serve as stepstone for the better drives. The number of drives and generators could be cut down by 50% and still have enough flavor and variety.

- It would be nice to have less but more meaningful drives/generator choice, as of right now balance makes it so there's only a handful of them really useful.

- It would also be nice to have more filter options in the ship fleet creation. When you have 20 or 30 different generator / drives, it's a mess.

- You don't really give a ♥♥♥♥ about combat thrust really, 90% of the time, you put your ship on a sideway drift, make them turn their front toward the enemy, and watch. If you play with missiles you fire, turn away and run, but when you play with missiles, you're at a tech level that doesn't allow you to outrun the aliens so you don't care really, all you want is your ship to have enough D/V to go where you want it to go.

- Mid game you don't do interplanetary injections, you build a station on each planet you can, and you build ships where you need it. This is even more important because stations with spaceworks/spaceyards can also send probes which reduce the time it takes to explore the system, it would be nice to have more tech to speed up probes for the late game.

- It would be nice to cancel a probe order to send a new one. In my current game, I can outrun my probes 1000x over, they won't reach pluto before 2080, when I can reach there in a matter of weeks with my ships and already have an orbital ring with spaceworks over there. Or is there a ship component that allow you to probe a planet I've missed ?

- The only real time when you want efficient drives that can send ships across the system is with ships with colony modules. But in reality, if they don't have enough cruise thrust, the following happen : They get intercepted and turned into spacedust by aliens.

- What you want for the end game are fleets with enough cruise thrust (around 200miligees) to catch up the aliens ships, and move around the system in meaningful timeframe to intercept and be useful. Until you can do that, don't overproduce spacecrafts, they're useless past getting your first alien spacecraft kill, and trying to get enough exotic to get your first real capitol ship going.

7°) Mid game weapons

- Anything that isn't missiles, are a waste of your research point. Check the massive detailed tech tree, and only research what you need for plasma and uv phasers. Anything else is superfluous.

- It would be nice to see the advanced coilgun see a buff in projectile velocity so they can actually hit stuff.

- Lasers before UV Phaser + advanced laser engine stack is only good for long range PD. Only missiles and torps will kill ships in the early to mid game.

- I've seen multiples videos and guides that say to have a ship that eat fire and other ship that hide behind and fire back, really, it's a waste of ressources.

Your first design will be a monitor with 2x copperhead and 2x laser PD, and as much frontal armor as you can, you produce 2 or 3 of these, and usually their battlepower should be low enough to allow an encounter with an alien destroyer or corvette.

Just turn around, drift until your missiles fires at the target, start burning to kill your velocity and accelerate away from the alien (reduce relative velocity of any incoming fire as much as possible) and watch what happens.

If the enemy has PD, you might need a third ship, if they don't, 2 is usually overkill.

late game, you just make the best titan you can that bring constant firepower and a crapton of dirt cheap torpedo boat that only purpose is to be in front of the titan to eat fire and dump their torps against alien station, 6 to 8 titan that are correctly controlled will curbstomp pretty much any fleet the alien can throw at you.



...

Phew.

I guess that's all I have to say.

It's a great game with a lot of depth, and i'll try the other factions when I finally reach victory state with the Initiative. But man, the late game is a bit of a grind, and some more automation in the line of what has been done with the councilor would really go a long way to make it a bit more fluid.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Immanis:

- I'm not sure how this work, but those alien bases with 60K power are unkillable within reasonable timeframe given the ressources needed to be wasted on them

Yes, their ground defense lasers are x1.5 times efficient as best human ones (and have absolutely crazy bombardmentValue compared with human ones - but I'm unsure if it used at all for ground defenses).

Originally posted by Immanis:

UV Phasers Batteries, and Advanced Plasma Cannons & Batteries are must have and must be beelined. Anything else (except torpedo/missile overwhelming spam) is simply useless.

Would disagree. Whole station defenses are mostly useless - you don't need more then 1 module per station if playing early game rush instead of sitting like a turtle. And in ship-to-ship battles both lasers and plasma are meh.

Originally posted by Immanis:

You don't really give a ♥♥♥♥ about combat thrust really, 90% of the time, you put your ship on a sideway drift, make them turn their front toward the enemy, and watch. If you play with missiles you fire, turn away and run

Your both tactics are wrong. Agile dancing and flanking is INSANELY powerful once you have powerful engines (coilguns get extra damage from speed difference between you and target so by rushing on enemy even size-1 coils could deal a lot of damage and size-2 became pretty deadly).

Your usage of missiles is wrong too. You need to accelerate up to 3 km/s at start and only then launching them - without making changing course until they gone. That will pack all your missiles in a single salvo = PD unable to stop it even if all enemy slots will be used for PD :)

Originally posted by Immanis:

Mid game you don't do interplanetary injections

Mmm... No? Advanced Pulsar and Pegasus Drive already allow you to move ships around inner planets. Trick is to have refuel outpost at destination (and ideally a mini-shipyard - installing extra armor is pretty quick).

Originally posted by Immanis:

Or is there a ship component that allow you to probe a planet I've missed ?

Yes, Space Lab allow to probe a planet you're orbiting after spending some days here.

Originally posted by Immanis:

What you want for the end game are fleets with enough cruise thrust (around 200miligees) to catch up the aliens ships, and move around the system in meaningful timeframe to intercept and be useful. Until you can do that, don't overproduce spacecrafts

Wrong. Nuclear engines are enough to win the game (as once you'd cleared Jupiter from aliens - it's technically already won game due to resources advantage).

Originally posted by Immanis:

Anything that isn't missiles, are a waste of your research point.

And coilguns. And Particle beam (T1 is enough - all you need here is a Particle PD).

Originally posted by Immanis:

It would be nice to see the advanced coilgun see a buff in projectile velocity so they can actually hit stuff.

Fast ship (!), charge at enemy - and see how aliens burn :) But ideally you want an agile fast ship and doing bombing runs on aliens. Coils are super deadly here.

Originally posted by Immanis:

Lasers before UV Phaser + advanced laser engine stack is only good for long range PD.

Wrong. Lasers PD aren't worth it at all - Particle Beam PD module is completely superior until you will get 60 cm UV Phaser.

As weapons - yes, I don't like lasers too. They're fine, but require to eat all enemy long-range weapons before you're able to strike back. I don't like that.

Originally posted by Immanis:

Your first design will be a monitor with 2x copperhead and 2x laser PD, and as much frontal armor as you can

Too heavy. Your first design should be an Escort - as fast as you could get (3G acceleration is passable, 4G is great). And you don't need a PD as could simply dodge enemy fire.

Originally posted by Immanis:

late game, you just make the best titan

VERY sub-optimal choice. Titans are meh, too heavy without serious gain in firepower. Ideally you should master managing agile Destroyers in combat - they're best ships for it.

[Immanis]

Very insightful.

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by Immanis:

UV Phasers Batteries, and Advanced Plasma Cannons & Batteries are must have and must be beelined. Anything else (except torpedo/missile overwhelming spam) is simply useless.

Would disagree. Whole station defenses are mostly useless - you don't need more then 1 module per station if playing early game rush instead of sitting like a turtle. And in ship-to-ship battles both lasers and plasma are meh.

Indeed, I overfocused on matters on earth with this playthrough, now, honestly, I had serious firepower on my stations all the way through the game and any alien fleet that would show up on my doorstep was promptly reduced to space dust. I didn't have to bother about them until it was total war and had to produce spaceships.

What do you mean by early game rush ? Early jupiter rush or missile boat spam ?

Originally posted by Immanis:

You don't really give a ♥♥♥♥ about combat thrust really, 90% of the time, you put your ship on a sideway drift, make them turn their front toward the enemy, and watch. If you play with missiles you fire, turn away and run

Originally posted by corisai:

Your both tactics are wrong. Agile dancing and flanking is INSANELY powerful once you have powerful engines (coilguns get extra damage from speed difference between you and target so by rushing on enemy even size-1 coils could deal a lot of damage and size-2 became pretty deadly).

No they are not "wrong", they are not adapted to coilgun, that I would admit.
They can't be "wrong" when I essentially curbstomp 2x fleetpower with 0 losses and minimal armor damages, anything that try to flank is shot down before they can hope to, and any projectiles is shot down.

I still believe coilguns could use a slight buff in ammo velocity, it's a late-ish tech and barely feel an improvement over railguns beside damages potential, and feel very lackluster compared to plasma for two good reasons, plasma can't be shot down by PD and Lasers, and travel thrice as fast as coilguns.

Originally posted by corisai:

Your usage of missiles is wrong too. You need to accelerate up to 3 km/s at start and only then launching them - without making changing course until they gone. That will pack all your missiles in a single salvo = PD unable to stop it even if all enemy slots will be used for PD :)

Don't you need to actually accelerate when they start launching to stack them ? with about 3gs of thrust (depending the missiles you use ?)

Originally posted by Immanis:

Mid game you don't do interplanetary injections

Originally posted by corisai:

Mmm... No? Advanced Pulsar and Pegasus Drive already allow you to move ships around inner planets. Trick is to have refuel outpost at destination (and ideally a mini-shipyard - installing extra armor is pretty quick).

On-site armor installing is a good idea i'll borrow.
On regards of refuel outpost, I already had that ready since as soon as I could colonize, that wasn't the issue.

I have no idea how you make early ships capable of interplanetary transfer in any meaningful timeframe without them essentially being flying fuel tanks, or you populate all the lagrange points and around the belt and do flea jumps between stations ?

I don't know how long you've been playing the game, but I can guarantee you that a large majority of players don't play like you do.

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by Immanis:

Or is there a ship component that allow you to probe a planet I've missed ?

Yes, Space Lab allow to probe a planet you're orbiting after spending some days here.

Sweet thanks for that, I didn't notice that module could do that.

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by Immanis:

What you want for the end game are fleets with enough cruise thrust (around 200miligees) to catch up the aliens ships, and move around the system in meaningful timeframe to intercept and be useful. Until you can do that, don't overproduce spacecrafts

Wrong. Nuclear engines are enough to win the game (as once you'd cleared Jupiter from aliens - it's technically already won game due to resources advantage).

I guess it depends on how the game turn out, If you don't have lots of fissiles available in your seed, you're going to be hard pressed to use any of those. In my current game, the highest deposit is a 6.5 on one of the Jovian planet, I don't remember exactly the one, and I was struggling with 1.2 daily fissile generation (while having ownership of all the relevent fissile nodes) before I could reach Jup and kick out the aliens, and as such, was mostly stuck with drives that used volatiles or hydrogen.

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by Immanis:

Lasers before UV Phaser + advanced laser engine stack is only good for long range PD.

Wrong. Lasers PD aren't worth it at all - Particle Beam PD module is completely superior until you will get 60 cm UV Phaser.

As weapons - yes, I don't like lasers too. They're fine, but require to eat all enemy long-range weapons before you're able to strike back. I don't like that.

You are right, they are not worth a particle beam or phaser PD slot until 60cm UV phaser.
If you don't want your lasers to act as PD, you can actually set their behavior.

Originally posted by Immanis:

late game, you just make the best titan

Originally posted by corisai:

VERY sub-optimal choice. Titans are meh, too heavy without serious gain in firepower. Ideally you should master managing agile Destroyers in combat - they're best ships for it.

I'm not sure about that. If we're talking about stations takedown, having a wall of dirt cheap missile/torp boats with few hard hitters hidden behind gave off the best result with less involvement.

Even in fleet to fleet battles, agiles ships are only successful because the AI can't figure how to fly their ships, and really, all you need is enough frontal armor to soak the occassional plasma cannon shot, and enough long range artillery to blow to smithereen any alien approaching your wall of 4slot weapons.

How many gunship frigates and destroyers tried to flank my wall of titan only to get torn apart by a bombardment of UV phaser with x3 adv. laser engine, while a wall of plasma shred anything it touches.

I guess "Dancing around" the battlefield is more satisfying, but I'm a lazy person, and I like my path of least resistance.

Before I could afford titan, I was doing that with Battleships, but man, I can't get enough of those 4slot weapons. point shoot boom.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Immanis:

I had serious firepower on my stations all the way through the game and any alien fleet that would show up on my doorstep was promptly reduced to space dust.

Issue that each module that don't boost your economy is a wasted potential (MC is expensive). I'm not going to say you don't need a defense modules - but building several of them on each station isn't seems a viable option. So I tend to build more then single one (a few in case of ground bases as single one is doing absolutely nothing here) only on highly vulnerable stations (like lategame asteroid base once I don't care about resources much) or very important one.

Originally posted by Immanis:

What do you mean by early game rush ? Early jupiter rush or missile boat spam ?

Ideally a Jupiter rush yes. But even not doing it - with advanced nuclear engines you can and should strike aliens on Jupiter (and will be able to defend your planets against them).

Originally posted by Immanis:

They can't be "wrong" when I essentially curbstomp 2x fleetpower with 0 losses

AI designs are... Still bad even if they begin to use at least some armor :) When build properly over their magnetic cannons they're super deadly.

Originally posted by Immanis:

I still believe coilguns could use a slight buff in ammo velocity, it's a late-ish tech and barely feel an improvement over railguns beside damages potential

Heh. Coilguns have second best raw damage output in game that could boost even further by moving fast (a double-side sword so be warned). First place - missile salvo :)

I would agree that human coilguns are nerfed too much (alien lasers have ~equal stats to human phasers, while both human coils&plasma a nerfed a lot out of nowhere). But even they with some combat maneuvers they're awesome + help to defend your ships (alien lasers will be busy so don't able to try rolling TAC caused by holes in armor from plasma).

P.S. Even railguns are too nerfed - T1 one have velocity of modern tank APDS shot & much heavier.

Originally posted by Immanis:

and feel very lackluster compared to plasma for two good reasons, plasma can't be shot down by PD and Lasers, and travel thrice as fast as coilguns

Plasma have too low damage output - it countered by armor quite hard and rely on TAC or alien inferior designs (but devs slowly add more and more armor to their ships as they should use - initial alien designs with 12-20 frontal armor were ridiculous for lategame).

As example - 15 armor is enough to stop hit from human T3 4-slot hull plasma battery (and 22+ will usually tank a several hits without TAC), for human T3 3-slot nose plasma cannon it will be 22/33+ armor and for T3 4-slot nose plasma cannon it will be 30/45+ armor.

Try skirmish against equal amount of Alien Dreadnoughts - and you will see how poorly plasma perform against armored targets (while they really should use even more).

Originally posted by Immanis:

Don't you need to actually accelerate when they start launching to stack them ? with about 3gs of thrust (depending the missiles you use ?)

Currently - no, missiles conserve their limited dV and activate engines only relatively nearby to target. They launched with speed around 3 km/s so ship moving that fast will stack them in a single salvo. Even if devs rework it - it will make missiles even stronger :) As you no longer will need to wait for 3 km/s speed and with enough acceleration could fire them right at starting your burn.

Originally posted by Immanis:

I have no idea how you make early ships capable of interplanetary transfer in any meaningful timeframe without them essentially being flying fuel tanks, or you populate all the lagrange points and around the belt and do flea jumps between stations ?

It's very important to understand that early engines are weak and Solar System is damned big. So - ships SHOULD be small. Small ships could achieve pretty good stats even with nuclear engines. Without extra armor (and with extra tank or two) they will have enough dV to do most early transfers (ideally you should use launch windows - in that cause you will have enough fuel without need for refuelling stations). Yes, I'm keeping a refuelling post on highest Earth orbit.

It doesn't allow you to use a single fleet to defend inner planets - but allow to save a bit on keeping shipyards outside of Earth orbit small.

Originally posted by Immanis:

I don't know how long you've been playing the game, but I can guarantee you that a large majority of players don't play like you do.

In latest patch - you already unable to spend early game without building defense fleet as aliens WILL do some early attack on your stations&mines. Passive strategy seems to be not intended by devs :)

Originally posted by Immanis:

I guess it depends on how the game turn out, If you don't have lots of fissiles available in your seed, you're going to be hard pressed to use any of those. In my current game, the highest deposit is a 6.5 on one of the Jovian planet, I don't remember exactly the one

Well, Luna having less then ~8 fissiles is instant restart for me :) And I planning to make a tool for checking savefiles on system resource in a few days (unsure if I will able to share it but at least will share a raw data from it). But I'm not speaking about Neutron Flux Torch or late Gas Core engines - for Advanced Pulsars / Pegasus you could use fissiles from Earth.

Originally posted by Immanis:

You are right, they are not worth a particle beam or phaser PD slot until 60cm UV phaser.

Huh? You probably don't get it. In PD job - best module is 60 cm UV Phaser (due to having big range so most of ships in fleet will be capable to fire on incoming projectiles), second best is Particle Beam PD module. As it also have very small mass - it's a perfect pick for early ships and once your scientists will have a free time you could upgrade it to UV Phaser.

About lasers used as main weapons - as I'd said I don't like them and so lack experience here but it's only my personal opinion. During beta I saw a few players capable to do well using Green Arc lasers an above.

Originally posted by Immanis:

I'm not sure about that. If we're talking about stations takedown, having a wall of dirt cheap missile/torp boats with few hard hitters hidden behind gave off the best result with less involvement.

Dunno, I used coilguns battleships&dreadnoughts for ages against stations and never saw any issues :) Even recent addition of armor don't change anything for coils due to their raw damage output - if they're capable to break through PD anything will melt in seconds (actually you need to change targets in advance in those battles). And as enemy lasers are busy trying to save themselves - you're not getting so much TAC and don't suffer loses with enough frontal armor.

But yes, swarm of missiles is a nice early game tactic against stations, once you could afford it.

Originally posted by Immanis:

Even in fleet to fleet battles, agiles ships are only successful because the AI can't figure how to fly their ships

No. As aliens mix capital and non-capital ships in same fleet - that mean you can separate them and destroy their fleet in parts. Just alien designs are still bad (even if devs made them better in last patches and 60 cm UV Phasers are no longer a reliable weapon even against alien light ships).

While titans are obvious best bet for "static wall of death" strategy - they're VERY expensive. Usually at cost of titan fleet you could have ~2 battleships fleets that would perform much better.

[Darrenb209]

Originally posted by corisai:

No. As aliens mix capital and non-capital ships in same fleet - that mean you can separate them and destroy their fleet in parts. Just alien designs are still bad (even if devs made them better in last patches and 60 cm UV Phasers are no longer a reliable weapon even against alien light ships).

I've got to ask, have you actually been playing since the last update/recently?

4 60 cm UV Phasers on a ship can tear apart any ship that gets close. Oh, not as fast as coilguns or plasma, but they also contribute to the defence of your ship.

They're not the best thing ever or the most optimal path for minmaxers, but they're solid reliable weapons even against larger ships, nevermind small ones.

You can accurately call them worse than other options outside of niche situations, but unreliable? That's just plain wrong.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Darrenb209:

I've got to ask, have you actually been playing since the last update/recently?

Only Skirmish in 0.3.90 era. Don't have time to start campaign yet - need to complete my Solar System Resource Scanner tool first - https://imgur.com/a/S1hn6nJ :)

Originally posted by Darrenb209:

4 60 cm UV Phasers on a ship can tear apart any ship that gets close. Oh, not as fast as coilguns or plasma, but they also contribute to the defence of your ship.

TOO close for my taste. And yes I will repeat my own words that 60 cm UV Phasers are be best form of PD - for such double purpose too. I think it was obvious.

Originally posted by Darrenb209:

You can accurately call them worse than other options outside of niche situations, but unreliable? That's just plain wrong.

They are unreliable to me as no longer unable to protect my bricks from being flanked on their own (like they could before devs fixed combat AI & added armor for aliens).

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by Immanis:

They can't be "wrong" when I essentially curbstomp 2x fleetpower with 0 losses and minimal armor damages, anything that try to flank is shot down before they can hope to, and any projectiles is shot down.

You have to remember that you play an Early Access game - you will soon (I hope) be very surprised when AI is taught how to properly use missiles and show you why you can be wrong in this case.

Originally posted by Immanis:

Even in fleet to fleet battles, agiles ships are only successful because the AI can't figure how to fly their ships, and really, all you need is enough frontal armor to soak the occassional plasma cannon shot, and enough long range artillery to blow to smithereen any alien approaching your wall of 4slot weapons.

You don't understand: aliens don't have to approach your wall enough to be destroyed and if they properly used their missiles they would destroy your static wall with impunity because the best defense against missiles is maneuver. This is why agile ships are better. Yes, attack runs of agile ships will be worse than now when AI is taught how to use ships in formations but the static wall will be suicidal even before that.

Originally posted by corisai:

Even if devs rework it - it will make missiles even stronger :) As you no longer will need to wait for 3 km/s speed and with enough acceleration could fire them right at starting your burn.

This is actually not necessarily true - if they do it right, eg. if missiles always have the same starting phase of acceleration no matter at which speed they are launched, then it will make them weaker because even though they could be faster during their final acceleration phase they won't create such dense swarms after this initial phase as they can do now.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Pawleus:

This is actually not necessarily true - if they do it right, eg. if missiles always have the same starting phase of acceleration no matter at which speed they are launched, then it will make them weaker because even though they could be faster during their final acceleration phase they won't create such dense swarms after this initial phase as they can do now.

This will completely kill missiles as they will spend most of their dV far away from target so will became a railgun equivalent :) Tiny initial boost could be compensated.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by Pawleus:

This is actually not necessarily true - if they do it right, eg. if missiles always have the same starting phase of acceleration no matter at which speed they are launched, then it will make them weaker because even though they could be faster during their final acceleration phase they won't create such dense swarms after this initial phase as they can do now.

This will completely kill missiles as they will spend most of their dV far away from target so will became a railgun equivalent :) Tiny initial boost could be compensated.

This is not true - they already have an initial acceleration phase when launched at low speeds (eg. 0.5 km/s) and all I postulate here is that this initial phase is the same no matter their launching speed.

Edit: it can't be fully compensated because you can't change the value of your acceleration during your combat maneuvers.

[LorDC]

Originally posted by Pawleus:

This is not true - they already have an initial acceleration phase when launched at low speeds (eg. 0.5 km/s) and all I postulate here is that this initial phase is the same no matter their launching speed.

Edit: it can't be fully compensated because you can't change the value of your acceleration during your combat maneuvers.

Just FYI, currently missiles always spend half of their dV on the initial acceleration.

By the way, it always amuses me how you are always super-certain with your "just wait until devs teach AI to use missiles" claims. If anything, devs would do exactly opposite and nerf missiles. Why? Because you don't want to degenerate metagame into a missile spam-fest.

[corisai]

Originally posted by LorDC:

Because you don't want to degenerate metagame into a missile spam-fest.

Excuse me! Aurora 4X is not for degenerates!

But yean, probably devs don't like to be called "Aurora4X with graphics" so missiles already picked a short stick :)

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by LorDC:

Just FYI, currently missiles always spend half of their dV on the initial acceleration.

Have you actually tested it at different launching speeds against a static target? By static I mean moving with the starting constant 0.5 km/s - it's needed to see the behavior without substantial lateral disturbances and how they would fare against your static wall.

Originally posted by LorDC:

By the way, it always amuses me how you are always super-certain with your "just wait until devs teach AI to use missiles" claims. If anything, devs would do exactly opposite and nerf missiles. Why? Because you don't want to degenerate metagame into a missile spam-fest.

Yes, it might be amusing that kinematics dictates for a weapon with such parameters as in-game missiles (and quite frankly generally missiles) to be either irrelevant or overpowered.

I am super-certain Devs don't want it to be irrelevant because I know from their words how hard they've tried to find a middle ground. I am also quite certain finding it verges on impossibility so they can only make them less overpowered than now (BTW, do I have to remind you that I consider them overpowered - if I remember it right you already think of them as irrelevant).

Why am I certain they will soon try to make AI use missiles properly? Because it's easier than making AI maneuver properly in formations and without it the game will stay too easy for their known taste :) They will also show players in this way how powerful might be tactics based on kinematics, especially in space - it's so rare in the game world that most players don't even think about it.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Pawleus:

They will also show players in this way how powerful might be tactics based on kinematics, especially in space - it's so rare in the game world that most players don't even think about it.

Yes it's true even aside from missiles. It's always make me laugh so much when players telling stories about coilguns "being unable to pass a PD" and "being inferior to plasma". As it quite opposite - once your ships are running 4+ km/s they became super deadly, especially if used in salvos instead of fire on will. And that's true even for static wall of ships (but for them you need to find out max speed your PD will able to stop alien shots as speed boosting projectiles for both of us).

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by corisai:

And that's true even for static wall of ships (but for them you need to find out max speed your PD will able to stop alien shots as speed boosting projectiles for both of us).

Yes, but it's not possible to find such a max speed because the enemy ships might fire different projectiles and also missiles. What's more, the ships might maneuver without warning and you won't be able to answer instantly.

Edit: BTW, in my previous post I should actually say that I consider missiles overpowered against the static wall (or targets that don't maneuver enough) - even I already consider them mostly irrelevant against the highly maneuverable wall.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by Pawleus:

Originally posted by LorDC:

Just FYI, currently missiles always spend half of their dV on the initial acceleration.

Have you actually tested it at different launching speeds against a static target?

I don't know what you mean by "currently" but I've just tested it in 0.3.100 loading my bug-reporting save and FYI, LorDC (and perhaps for you, Derrenb209, if you are willing to listen instead of nurturing wrong preconceptions), missiles still work as in last 70 validation versions.

It means: No, missiles currently don't always spend half of their DV on their initial acceleration. What's more, after certain threshold of launching speed they don't have their initial acceleration at all if the enemy is not maneuvering and this is what I call "bug" in this case.

Edit: You can see how it still looks in-game in the pictures presented in this post I've linked to many times before: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1176470/discussions/0/3767858179328362719/?ctp=4#c3757726349612485720