Point defense and Flak battery

[OKOK]

I feel flak battery is junk. Point defense kill more missiles than flak. I dont even see where flak damage goes to. Missile just hit home. Once i add 4 more Point defend. These missiles are killed have way.

[kever]

Eh, I changed 6 point defence arrays for 2 flak and got vastly superior results. Gotta change the flak gun behaviour to "defence only" though so it focuses only on defence and doesn't waste ammo / targeting time shooting at the enemy ship.

[OKOK]

Changing to defence only do improve blockage. Need to observe more on the next battle.

[DC-GS]

The description states it can intercept disruptor charges too. Something i had a hard time to defend in the demo.

[kever]

Originally posted by OKOK:

Changing to defence only do improve blockage. Need to observe more on the next battle.

I play all my battles at half speed and still sometimes have a bit of trouble observing how everything affects everything, especially if I have done major overhauls between battles

[WillieSea]

I use 1/4 speed in battles, and press spacebar to pause the action so I can watch what is going on. It also gives me time to target 'specific' parts on the enemy, such as control rooms or power, for quick kills and more viable loot.

[OKOK]

If it can hit emp missile and nuke than it useful. I kind of give it up and go full armor with with pd. Nuke is horrible!

This game is strange. Most tie 2 defend is junk.
Like large shield equal junk.
Flak equal junk.

[PyroMancer]

Originally posted by OKOK:

If it can hit emp missile and nuke than it useful. I kind of give it up and go full armor with with pd. Nuke is horrible!

This game is strange. Most tie 2 defend is junk.
Like large shield equal junk.
Flak equal junk.

I don't really think it's all junk more that everything has hard counters. And DPS scales a lot faster than defenses so fights against larger ships/fleets makes you feel like you got tissue paper hull.

Tried experimenting in Creative vs some of the end game ships 2-3M cost. I noticed they tend to favor 2 weapons above all others. Ion and Missiles.

The Ion ships tend to be the spinal mount design with massive shields and armor down the middle making it really hard to 1v1 them without the beams slicing you in half as several Large shields still only last seconds. And some of the Ion Boats have so much PD that missiles can't really get through unless you have serious heavy amount of Missiles.

The Missile boats launch a few dozen missiles, including Nukes, and simply overwhelm PD on most ships. You pretty much need heavy dedication to PD/Flak to counter or else your toast. But if you have enough PD they are easy pickings because they often lack much else in terms of weapons.

Basically as the game progresses up in ship size it seems to be better to focus on a primary weapon type. As no enough missiles means against decent PD ships they aren't getting through. And larger ships it's easy to toss on a few PD. Ions are expensive and their ability to combine means you can get some insane focused DPS. The Lasers and Cannons tend to be more on Small and Medium ships though.

[OKOK]

I like heavy top mount cannons maybe due to old war World 2 style.
My main ship is a tank with cannon, armor and small shields. There are 7x2 pd front facing side. But they usually are not able to fully prevent missile hits.
I used to use flak guns but they are truly useless.

With 7xw pd I will say it prevented 40% nuke and emp hits. With flak it about 25% effective.
It all by feel. Cause I tend to need to replace flak more often then pd..
+ the big hole cause by flak gun is horrible. Why the hell falk need so much space. If it only 2 cells it will be more logical

[BoonPflug]

Originally posted by OKOK:

I feel flak battery is junk. Point defense kill more missiles than flak. I dont even see where flak damage goes to. Missile just hit home. Once i add 4 more Point defend. These missiles are killed have way.

My main issue is that flak needs people during combat, point defense does not (if charged) - so I would suggest to either make PD use one person vs. a significantly more efficient flak, or make flak autonomous as well (with more ammo instead of charge)

[PyroMancer]

Originally posted by BoonPflug:

Originally posted by OKOK:

I feel flak battery is junk. Point defense kill more missiles than flak. I dont even see where flak damage goes to. Missile just hit home. Once i add 4 more Point defend. These missiles are killed have way.

My main issue is that flak needs people during combat, point defense does not (if charged) - so I would suggest to either make PD use one person vs. a significantly more efficient flak, or make flak autonomous as well (with more ammo instead of charge)

Yeah the crew is an issue. I only tested Flak a limited amount and don't know why they get so much hate for being useless as I find them to be fairly effective as they can also shoot down projectiles. Thus making Ion Beams about the only thing they can't shoot down.

The PD do have a benefit of rapid fire and not needing crew. So against a large missile swarm I can see PD being more effective. Especially since it requires far less crew to simply recharge them vs the Flak's 2 crew per gun and needed ammo supply.

[gilrad]

A front-facing flak wall is a great offense/defense combo against everything except missiles and beams. In addition to dealing some decent secondary damage, they also stop 80% of enemy projectiles from hitting my front. Most combats, my front takes superficial damage at most due to the wall of flak preventing most projectiles from hitting me.

The real problem is the narrow field of fire preventing side-fired missiles. Side-oriented flak could possibly help there, but I am worried that the narrow field of fire means missiles with enough speed can just zip past the damage zone before taking enough damage to get destroyed.

Maybe the ultimate setup for flak defensively would be from a diagonal build. You lose the ability to frontally defend against shots, but you gain great coverage against missiles, which as mentioned above, is one of the larger threats late-game ships pose.