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http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=755435538
There is not much we can really do because in the end, it's a "let's get as close together as possible and dance around and shoot each other".
So for ship designing, it's basically missles in the begining of the game, and when your missles keep missing, put in the ECCM on them and once they start missing, start going to energy weapons.
1. Unless you're playing mods that improve upon the AI's ship designs (like
this), take advantage of the fact that AI-designed ships are, well, lacking in terms of specialization. Granted, certain AI races may favor certain techs (such as the Darloks favoring the use of Cloaking Devices), but they don't necessarily design their ships to fulfill strict roles, like frigates or destroyers that launch torpedoes (preferably with the overloaded and semi-guided mods, and maybe also the enveloping mod for better dealing with shields) at capital ships, or use beams or missiles to fight off other frigates or destroyers, or use tons of point-defense to protect other ships from missiles and fighters; or capital ships that focus on using lots of beams to destroy other capital ships, using lots of missiles supported by Dauntless Guidance Systems for dealing with swarms of smaller ships, leveraging their sheer bulkiness to protect smaller, lighter ships, or, occasionally, serving as a flagship with support specials like Wide Area Jammers or Warp Interdictors.
This mod changes what the AI designs for your own ships, in order to better showcase what kinds of effective ship designs that you could use in a mixed group. However, I'd highly recommend that you design your own ship builds yourself.
2. Missiles and torpedoes dominate the early-game, while beams dominate the late-game. (The mid-game could be dominated by either, depending on your race's beam attack values and your opponent's beam defense values.) The reason for this is because, although missiles have their countermeasures (such as point-defense, ECM, and some specials like Lightning Fields), these countermeasures are simply hard to come by in the early game, and only start to become viable by the mid-game. It's not until the late-game when missiles can be countered hard. Meanwhile, beam weapons suffer from a lack of accuracy in the early-game, and are, thus, initially unreliable compared to missiles. However, as you research more advanced computers, and as more countermeasures against missiles are researched, then they will start to dominate, since there aren't any techs that can significantly counter them. (The best counter that I can see is having a racial bonus to beam defense, coupled with Augmented Engines.) Furthermore, beam weapons get all sorts of damage buffs, like High Energy Focus and Hyper-X Capacitors, whereas missiles start to shift towards a more utilitarian role, with specials like Dauntless Guidance Systems making them more effective against swarms of smaller ships.
3. Try to take advantage of your weapons' quirks. Gauss Cannons, despite being statistically weaker, and having a slightly shorter range, than the more advanced Plasma Cannons, ignore any kind of shielding from any kind of ship that isn't equipped with Hard Shields. Even if the enemy ships do have Hard Shields, Gauss Cannons have one other advantage over Plasma Cannons; they do not suffer from range dissipation to damage. Coupled with the fact that Plasma Cannons aren't all that overpowered compared to Gauss Cannons, this, in my opinion, makes Gauss Cannons a viable alternative to Plasma Cannons.
4. Be efficient with your weapon groups. No sense wasting your battleship's or titan's array of capital-ship-busting Gauss Cannons on a measly frigate or destroyer when your own frigates or destroyers, or a capital ship armed with tons of missiles that are supported by a Dauntless Guidance System, can get the job done better. (When it comes to picking targets to fire their weapons on, the AI, sadly, is dumb as bricks, targeting whatever comes into their line of sight 1st and foremost, without regard as to whether or not that target is a good one for their weapons.) If you tell your individual ships to fire at specific enemies, then chances are that, unless the target is much further away than the enemy ship that's closest to your ships, the individual ships will hold fire until their weapons are in range of their targets. Likewise, if your ships have multiple weapon slots, then you can toggle whether or not those individual weapon slots will automatically fire upon enemy ships to better conserve shots to use on other enemy ships. (Weapon slots can be toggled by right-clicking on the weapon icon. A swirly icon overlaying the weapon indicates that auto-cast mode is active, while an absence of said swirly icon indicates that the weapons are currently set to hold fire mode. Note that, currently, there's a bug that disables the ability to toggle weapon slots or select specials if you've previously left-clicked on any enemy ships in your entire game session. Rebooting the game is currently the only known workaround to this bug.)
5. Speaking of being efficient with your weapon groups, did I mention before that the AI is dumb as bricks? You can exploit this by sending your weakest ships (including scout ships!) to the front lines, and baiting the opponent AI to fire all their weapons at it, almost certainly causing it to die from overkill, but giving your own ships a free opportunity to return fire. Heck, I've won battles that the game thought were hopeless by using tactics like this. The only time that this tactic won't work very well is when the enemy either has ships with a very high rate-of-fire, or missile ships that are outfitted with Dauntless Guidance Systems.
Finally, I'd like to show to you an example of just what you can do with a nice combination of smart ship design, smart ship composition, and smart tactical battle positioning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frOy-WVGpNc
@Davor: I have read your guide, some very usefull infor in there! somehow i had missed the part on weapons. Thanks!
@shadowwolftjc:
Thanks for the detailed explaination! I prefeer to stick to vanilla as much as possible so i will design my own ships and keep AI designs to stock for now.
I have a game going at arround turn 120, good time to start doing some serious ship designs and im sure war will follow soon. So i will put your advice to practise tonight!
Speaking of early/late game, what is considered early/late game in MOO?
is it like 1-100 / 101 - 200 / 201 - xxx = early / mid / late? how many turns does a typical game last?
Turn that around and put everything on very slow and the game can easily go 700+ turns.
I won't even go into galaxy size and shape, but these factors also play a role.
I would divide a games more in phases
1) Make your fist colonies and know who are your neighbours.
2) Claim your part of the galaxy with outposts and colonize the best planets.
3) Look for your first easy target to conquer.
4) Now it depends what kind of victory you want to achive.
In my guide are chapters about weapons and blueprints.
The current difficulty is that, even once you feel like you know what you're doing in the blueprint editor, or have a great design idea you want to try, the campaign often doesn't provide you with the right battles to test them out.
Also, once you start messing with the default designs there isn't a good way to return to some kind of basic ship template for your hull type or tech level. So a design that worked really well in the early game, say sacrificing defense for increased attack power with a missile focus, might get outmoded in the mid game, when enemy shields or PD start to outclass you. But it can be hard to develop a new design at that point, because the Attack/Defense rating of the enemy doesn't go into further details beyond the basic number totals, and upgrading can be challenging when you don't have details on the enemy, owing to the huge expense of upgrading vs building from scratch.
I've been thinking a lot about how to outline a combat simulator.
I think the simplest method would be one where the AI has preset fleets (for challenge scenarios at varying difficulty levels, and scales of combat) and the player gets a set number of BCs to use in the blueprint editor, to try and overcome the AI at each challenge level.
A couple dozen preset battles like this, in a combat tutorial, should be sufficient for most players to learn the details of ship design and tactical combat, so that when they encounter similar situations in the actual campaign they will know how to approach them.
This would give players a more controlled environment in which to experiment with different weapons compliments or hull type distributions.
The enemy AI could use the default ship blueprints for the various races, at levels that match varying degrees of tech progress, similar to what they would use in an actual campaign. So you could have a match that emulates early game combats, Mid game combats, late game combats etc. All at different desired scales, from a small engagement with a few ships on each side, to huge epic battles with hundreds of ships on each side.
A system like this would give players a lot more flexibility to learn as they go, but with some stuff preset, like the enemy fleet compositions, and the total amount of money that a player can spend to outfit a given fleet of their own for a given challenge.
Of course, once you developed the standard tutorial challenges, you could open it up, allowing for randomization on the part of the enemy AI.
And the ultimate goal, a Multi-player version of the same.
By connecting a blueprint tutorial to a combat tutorial in this way, players could see for themselves what distributions are best for different combat situations, missiles, or beams, or heavy PD, what kind of shields or systems to include for that hull type, and then try them out on the fly.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=805008478