can't win battles :(

[somekindofpast]

Every time they wreck me (normal AI btw), even though the result screen shows I do decent damage to them, my ships get destroyed much faster than theirs. Does it come down to the weapons or maneuvering? People say that the battles in this game are pretty straightforward but I don't think I performed this bad in any strategy game before. I lose every single battle, barring the ones where my force is overwhelming.

The Ai eventually outpace me in ship production and have ridiculous amounts of ships at their homeworld. (50+ destroyers, 8+ cruisers easily) Even a full cruiser squadron with plating to deflect their weapons can't punch through. I can't keep throwing numbers at them, I need to win battles somehow. I'm considering putting it down to easy difficulty now. It's been like the 10th attempt.

I'm playing the Morrigi btw. Started out with lasers, teched up, they performed horribly. Switched to gauss, which does better but still not enough. I remember having success years ago with heavy lasers. Are they the only weapons worth investing in? How crucial is point defense? I chose to forgo it this time for more offence, didn't seem to make a lick of difference.

I read strategy guides, watched let's plays, and the empire building part works fine, but the battles are still a mistery to me somehow. Any ideas on the combat or weapon loadouts?

[Fulano]

On normal difficulty the AI gets a pretty huge resource boost, like 50% more money and research or something. It takes a lot of learning the game to be able to beat that. I'd recommend playing on easy until you can beat the game.

Point Defense is only really important if the enemy is using missiles. When attacking enemy planets I have all the small weapon slots on my cruisers equipped with PD weapons to hold off the planet missiles.

Shields go a long way with Morrigi, since they don't get much for armor.

As for medium weapons, usually Phasors are the best early game. The Morrigi also do well with the heavy beam line (starting with the particle beam). The heavy lasers are also useful, especially for a race with agile ships that can keep the lasers aimed properly. I don't use them heavily though, though I probably should use them more. I'll usually switch to fusion and antimatter cannons later on.

In combat I usually focus on the C&C ships. If you kill it first the AI will have the 2nd wave of ships wait until you destroy the first wave, so you don't have to deal with near as many ships at a time. Using that tactic I'm usually able to kill 2x as many enemy ships as I loose if they have better tech than me.

When attacking enemy planets I usually hang back and kill the enemy ships first, then move forward and hit the planet directly and deal with the orbitals.

A final note, if you find easy difficulty too easy, and normal difficulty too hard there's a trick to make the jump in difficulty a little easier. You can set the game on easy, but when you're choosing your race, set yourself to normal. That will get rid of the econ bonuses the player gets on easy. Or setting the game to normal then changing yourself back to easy is another "in between" difficulty level.

[somekindofpast]

thank you, I'll also try to beef up scouting. Previously I just used tankers to sweep every planet, looking for habitable worlds, but that led to getting pushed back by stronger enemy scouts and loosing visibility by the mid game. I haven't even considered trading yet if you can believe it :D

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

I would say that the crows, while not *the hardest* race to learn, aren't the most beginner friendly either. Their regular income is reduced in exchange for a substantial bonus to trade income. This combined with their flock drive system, overly expensive destroyers, and their very good late game tech makes them late bloomers. I would suggest you try a couple of games as Tarka to get a grip on things. They are good all around generalists. With a straight forward FTL drive, decent (but not great) research capabilities, and solid combat ships of all classes. Their standout strength is that they have the best cruisers in the game. Their stand out weakness is that they do suffer a bit on the availability of various high end techs in the late game. Once you get a handle on Tarka, revist the crows.

In manual combat, green lasers are flatly better than regular mass drivers. Beyond that, it depends on which faction you're playing. For the crows and the dolphins, the laser tree is pretty good because they have very high odds of getting x-ray lasers and phasers which are solid techs. For the rest of the races, you are far better off moving away from lasers sooner rather than later.

Point defense is pretty important making small mount weapons generally pretty unimportant outside the early game.


I'll tell you what though - There was a thread a few years back where I was helping out another new player. You will probably find a lot of useful information in there.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/42890/discussions/0/357286663688016478/

[somekindofpast]

thank you, I'll have a go with Tarka

[Vuyek]

this is a surprisingly deep game that looks simple on the surface

economy is king - build mega merchant ships ASAP and spam them where possible (read guides on how).

get all economy upgrades you can.

each planet gets a propaganda ship and police cutter ASAP

[somekindofpast]

okay, so I'm doing a Tarka run and I think I'm f*cked again. The first 30 turns were a breeze, sending explorers everywhere, expanding to 4 colonies, winning scout engagements against my two opponents, Morrigi and Human (normal AI). I find the Morrigi homeworld with 20-30 destroyers, looking good so far.

A few turns later, a squad of SIXTY morrigi destroyers start to advance on my farthest developed colony. At this moment I have a 1.5 sqad about 10 turns away from the action and one squad defending my colony with 10 basic defense platforms.

The Morrigi come in and desecrate my line so quickly I just can't understand it. One on one I was able to beat their ships before but suddenly, they cut through me WITH the planetary defenses shooting at them.

I was churning out ships every single turn and i could only muster 3 full squads on the map at once....they had 60....SIXTY ships. At one location. Who knows how many in total.

I followed the suggestions as closely as i could, but what do you do against 60 ships?

edit: my squad had 7 armors with green lasers and a missle, and 2 point defenses (green laser). I had maybe one or two backup ships, that's it. Most of my ships are scouts, since that was the recommended early strat, but even if I had all armors and all in one place, it would only add up to about 50 ships in total. It doesn't seem to be possible to keep up with the AI.

[Vuyek]

one possible way to win is to ally with a strong faction and win together
now which faction is the most OP....

I dunno, dolphins come to mind..... no reason why

[Kir]

Point defense is an entirely seperate weapon from green lasers. If you had actual green lasers on your PD ships (looks like 1 green dashed line in the ship designer) then you didn't have any actual point defense (looks like 3 diverging dashed red lines).

It can be suprisingly easy to get outproduced/outteched by the AI even on normal. If you look at the event popup for the battle (click on an event in the scrolling bar at the bottom, then page through the windows at the upper right) you can get an idea of which ships were present and what weapons they used (click on the i icon when you get to the battle event window).

The AI outnumbers you pretty consistently, but it's pretty dumb in tactical combat and simple in ship design choices.

Getting the right balance of expansion, tech, and ships can be hard.

Do you have Battle Computers for fleet CnC ships, allowing you to field 10 destroyers at a time in tactical combat?

The critical early game techs are Waldo, Cybernetic Interface, Expert Systems, Suspended Animation, Battle Computers. Maybe Pulsed Fission/Recombinant Fissionables. Then you start looking at a weapon type, FTL Econ, Orbital Foundries, Point Defense, missile upgrades/heavy planet missiles (warhead upgrades improve what your planet shoots too), and Poly Alloys/Reflective.

Which weapon type depends a lot on who you fight and what they've already researched. Against somebody without Poly, Gauss/Mass Drivers + Fire Control is deadly if you can catch them. Against somebody without point defense, missiles & drones are deadly if they can't catch you. And so on, but the only way to tell what the enemy has before you have Data Correlation is to start a fight and watch to see if your shots bounce, what type/color their shots are, what color their drive sections are, if they have CnC.

And fighting uphill is hard. Fighting cruisers with destroyers sucks. Fighting fusion ships with fission ships sucks.

The reddit has some useful stuff. JyK7 had a number of posts on weapon choices and other things. Also, never stop at just 1 colonizer. You usually want at least 5, and as many as 20 on 170-220 CR planets. Planets higher than that aren't worth it until you have some decent terraforming tech and probably Biological Transfer unless it is both very big and very rich and you aren't being pressed too hard.

[somekindofpast]

And what do you do against a 60 ship force when you have 50 ships total in the world?
Make more ships? I've been maxing out ship production since about turn 1.

Another question, how do you fight battles exactly? Right now I wait for the enemy to approach and then set my fleet to pursue. (in the editor I set up the ships in a line next to each other with the cnc ship behind them) Is that complete garbage? I guess so because I always get wiped, even now with Tarka.

In the battle with 60 morrigi vs my 14 +planetary defenses I took down about half of the Morrigi, they wiped everything but the planet in 2 truns.

[somekindofpast]

https://imgur.com/KaFTQQF

this is what they did to me. I didn't set the actual point defence weapons on the point defence ships because I'm an idiot, but the rest I don't understand.

[Kir]

Depends on what they have and what you have. I've wiped 40 destroyers and a planet with 15 destroyers because I had drones & green beamers, we were both fission drives, and the tarka AI didn't have point defense.

I believe the AI only knows where it has actually explored, so if that was the only colony it ever found then you probably should have had your whole fleet there.

Usually you want your CnC ship near the back of your fleet and to deploy it in a box-like formation. That way you can focus fire from the whole fleet on one ship at a time. If the enemy has a CnC ship, you want to kill that (or blow out the mission section, but destroyer usually die shortly after that) first and then mop up the rest. New reinforcements warp out at your CnC ship if you have one, FYI.

This early there aren't that many amazing tactics to be had. Don't advance on the enemy when defending, because the first wave of planet missiles takes while. You usually want your whole fleet on 'face heading' and 'normal', as otherwise your ships tend to do what they want instead. 'Face Target' makes them face the designated weapons target even if you would rather they move somewhere, same with 'Broadside' and turning sideways. Close and Attack, Pursuit, and Stand Off similarly make your ships move according to the AI. Generally you want to keep your ships close together, pick a single target for all of them, blow it away, and repeat. Things get more complicated with later weapons, but for the destroyer era that is basically everything unless you are going to try to focus on drones/missiles and kite the enemy. Don't put missiles in your medium slots unless you are going to try to kite, try to use hammerhead or strafe (strafe ships need Face Target). If the enemy is using gauss try to keep moving, stay in formation, and move 'through' the enemy formation. The AI rarely does anything but charge you relentlessly, so the best way to keep the range open is to move through them and come back around in a kind of jousting motion.

You might watch one of Fusilier's recent Let's Plays.

[Kir]

Originally posted by somekindofpast:

https://imgur.com/KaFTQQF

this is what they did to me. I didn't set the actual point defence weapons on the point defence ships because I'm an idiot, but the rest I don't understand.

It looks like they didn't even use missiles, but maybe some of that Red Laser damage was from you. They also might have had reflective coating, but the only way to tell would be to see if some of your lasers were bouncing off the enemy. 64 vs 17 isn't winnable without kiting, so that battle was lost due to failure to concentrate ships before hand. Also consider turning around at the start and getting closer to the planet so the defense sats can help. 64 vs 30 and positioning closer to your planet might be winnable.

You did say that was a developed colony, right? I forget if planet missiles show in the combat summary.

Defensive fleets aren't all that necessary early in the game. Early destroyers won't stop most random encounters anyway. DE defense sats are kind of mediocre too; they help, but unless you have sniper cannons on them they aren't worth building unless you know which colonies the AI has found. Both are less necessity and more a luxury.

[somekindofpast]

So i guess the takeaway from all of this is to concentrate everything into one fleet and hope for the best? I thought I was doing so well too :S

[Kir]

That happens in SotS. I was playing again after a few years, accidentally set all the AI to difficult on a Sphere map. I was doing great until turn 100, when fleets of Fusion Cruisers started comming in from everywhere because I had expanded really fast and took most of the center of the map. When all the AI caught up, 3 were attacking me.

And I didn't have Cruisers or Fusion. Your choices matter a whole lot, but that means your misjudgements also matter a whole lot.

Honestly, bigger games seem a little easier since it is easier to outthink the AI as the techs rack up. Even if you lose, you usually lose slowly enough to learn some things.

Also, the Light & Medium Emitters are probably the very strongest early/early mid game weapons. An emitter fleet wrecks destroyers, does ok vs many cruiser designs and Hardened Electronics isn't something you see for a while. #2 is probably Gauss/Mass Drivers (not AP) + Predictive Gunnery, but Poly Alloy wrecks that and Poly is kind of fast.

Also, turn on diplomacy (check the Alliance box during game creation) and tech up to lvl 2 of a neighbors' xenotech line. That's how you make a NAP agreement, and level 3 allows Alliances (I think). Making a friend can let you draw out the game.

[somekindofpast]

okay, now for a really basic question because yes, I need to know.. When I click on a ship to focus fire, my fleet starts to maneuver on its own, that coupled with the enemy swarming breaks the formation where certain ships were kept at the back. It kinda turns into a free for all. Is this normal or should I be trying to reset my formation? Or just focusfire no matter what?

Also should I not give orders at all to cnc and point defense and let them sit back?