Ship ment for broadsides

[Foodoman]

Is there a capital ship more ment for broadsides? I've noticed the Osaka does seem to have a lot of M turrets, and the Sun seems like it would be good at it with it's 8 L turrets, but I haven't looked too hard at the other races yet.

[conrado.lacerda]

Not really: for destroyers and battleships, their main source of damage is the forward-facing weapons, and carriers have almost exclusively M-size turrets, which in general don't do enough damage to take down enemy capital ships (except if you're using dumbfire missile turrets, then it can work).

Edit: another problem is that AI captains commanding destroyers will maneuver their ships to face the enemy head-on, so even if you manage to spec such a ship to fire broad-side, you'll have to micromanage it.

[Sticky Wicket]

Originally posted by conrado.lacerda:

Not really: for destroyers and battleships, their main source of damage is the forward-facing weapons, and carriers have almost exclusively M-size turrets, which in general don't do enough damage to take down enemy capital ships (except if you're using dumbfire missile turrets, then it can work).

Edit: another problem is that AI captains commanding destroyers will maneuver their ships to face the enemy head-on, so even if you manage to spec such a ship to fire broad-side, you'll have to micromanage it.

In my experience destroyer captains default to attacking an enemy broadside. They almost never face the enemy to use their main guns. You just cant rely on destroyers to behave with any sense.

[Foodoman]

Originally posted by Sticky Wicket:

Originally posted by conrado.lacerda:

In my experience destroyer captains default to attacking an enemy broadside. They almost never face the enemy to use their main guns. You just cant rely on destroyers to behave with any sense.

Part of the reason why I was asking TBH.

[Sticky Wicket]

Originally posted by Foodoman:

Part of the reason why I was asking TBH.

That makes sense.

In modern water-naval vessels main gun batteries are on rotational turrets, and on ships before Industrial age naval vessels main cannons were port and starboard of course.

So I think either we need main batteries as something that can attack broadside, or they fix the ai.

[conrado.lacerda]

Originally posted by Sticky Wicket:

In my experience destroyer captains default to attacking an enemy broadside. They almost never face the enemy to use their main guns. You just cant rely on destroyers to behave with any sense.

That's accidental: they try to keep facing forward but fail to keep their distance, and the result is that the opposing forces end up circling each other. What I took "broadside" to mean is a ship with the bulk of its firepower coming from the sides and whose default behavior is to position itself accordingly in battle to make use of this, like the Galactica does in the reboot series or the Hiigaran destroyer in HW2. In X4, there's no such ship. Would love it, though. :)

[Foodoman]

Originally posted by Sticky Wicket:

Originally posted by Foodoman:

Part of the reason why I was asking TBH.

That makes sense.

In modern water-naval vessels main gun batteries are on rotational turrets, and on ships before Industrial age naval vessels main cannons were port and starboard of course.

So I think either we need main batteries as something that can attack broadside, or they fix the ai.

Might be easier to fix the AI then redesign while fleets at this point. It just seems like they hardly use their main guns.

[Wraith]

The AI for capital vs capital have been fixed before

Then it broke

Time to fix it again

[DaBa]

Originally posted by Wraith:

The AI for capital vs capital have been fixed before

Then it broke

Time to fix it again

Hopefully they will, permanently this time.

In the meantime, if you are tired of bad large ship AI and them constantly failing to use their main batteries, something that could make this less of a problem would be to get a mod that makes the ship turrets stronger. Or dive into the game files and edit the existing ones yourself. That way those large ships that refuse to point their front at the enemy ship would still have a lot of firepower available in their turrets. You would actually have ships capable of effective broadside engagements. Of course that would have some side effects, like large ships becoming EVEN MORE powerful when actually doing what they are supposed to do and aiming everything forward, and making stations even scarier.

But hey, maybe that's a good thing considering how easy it is to spam small ships and overwhelm the big ones. I always felt the turrets were way too weak in X4, played a game a while back where I edited the turrets to be roughly twice as effective as they are across the board, and it made for a very different experience. Definitely made large ship engagements more deadly.

[Wraith]

Atleast the Xenon capital ship AI didn’t break

They still go for the optimal position for their Graviton spam of death

Nothing worst then being below a K