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[forsaken1111]

I can finally say I can play the game sorta still confusing as hell, this has got to be the most confusing game I've ever played but it got everything I like. The wiki helps a little but not much


Wait how do you save the game I think I lost my progress

There is no saving. The game is in a database which updates each turn. You can close it mid-turn and open it back up and it will still have your stuff.

[PTTG??]

I rather like that approach, although that is most likely the greatest cause for the poor performance of the game. If you have a solid state drive, it's probably far better.

What missile designs do you guys use? I'm trying to determine what's a good Size 1 swarm missile and if I should upsize to something a bit more roomy.

[Girlinhat]

Generally keep the missile warhead a square number, 1, 4, 9, 16, etc, as these have the best damage spread across armor.  In general I make a 1 or 4, sometimes 9 warhead missile, and give it ~50m km range, more like 75m-100m at later techs.  Then use this formula for determine the best engine-agility ratio to get a good to-hit.  When upgrades are made, I decrease my warhead size to keep the same warhead power (ie, smaller warhead with same punch) and increase my agility or engine.  A mid-late game size 5 missile with 4 warhead strength ends up with a LOT of agility and speed, you can hit fighters with ASM and use speed to evade enemy PD.  The only real defense against these is shields, where the lower warhead has trouble penetrating.

For longer ranged or point-defense missiles, it's mostly freehanding to approximate what I want.

[Flying Dice]

Early on, at least, S1 WH is basically either AMM or saturation, S4 WH is your run of the mill ASM, and S9+ WH is a really damn big cap ship buster/Fighter & FAC missile. With lategame tech, a tiny fraction of a MSP in WH will still be massively damaging, so you'll basically have a Size 1 missile that can wreck a battlecruiser with one hit, can approach lightspeed (if not surpass it; I haven't played that high for a while), and will get something like 500% TH against an enemy moving at 10k km/s, while also carrying an onboard sensor and with a range measured in hundreds of millions of kilometers.

[Girlinhat]

That's a small exageration for a size 1 missile.  But a size 6 or so, yeah you can pack a lot into late game missiles, they get hellishly strong.  You get to the point where you can have .2 of warhead and .1 of active sensors and lightspeed strikes, allowing you to fire a full salvo at an enemy fleet and let the missiles retarget on-site to just wipe away the enemy.  It also helps that you can make a design for a size 2 or so missile to be used as a cluster bomb in a drone (large number of second stage ordinance) and keep packing in more of the same missile by miniaturizing them.

[Repulsion]

I think I have a warhead of 10 for my size 4 missile... which is fine, I think. I'm really interested in creating a super missile with several stages (if you even can get more than a second one), at some point.

[Flying Dice]

I think I have a warhead of 10 for my size 4 missile... which is fine, I think. I'm really interested in creating a super missile with several stages (if you even can get more than a second one), at some point.

Either drop it to 9 WH or raise it to 16 WH, or you aren't getting the most from your MSP.


Efficiency RAWR

[Girlinhat]

There's really no limit to stages, I believe.  Anything may be defined as a secondary stage.  For fun you may design a size 10 missiles with 5 missiles of size 1 secondary.  As in, half the size dedicated to extra payload, and either have the main missile continue or have the main missile deploy the "real" missile.  Either way, the five tiny missiles are to provide flak cover, with a minimal warhead and slightly higher speed, they're mostly armor, designed to run fractionally ahead of the main payload to clutter enemy PD and act as decoys.  If they hit, that's good, or if they're shot down, then the main payload still makes contact.

I've also debated massive cruise missiles.  A size 400 missile would be the size of a heavy fighter (20 HS) and could pack enough warhead to level entire planets.  Imagine a size 400 drone being fired from one star to another binary star and delivering 3,000 nuclear damage!  For those times when ground troops just aren't going to cut it, and you absolutely have to irradiate that one planet~

[Flying Dice]

/obligatory quote



Well, if you were just looking to kill the population, you could do it with a much smaller boosted-raditation warhead.

[Girlinhat]

I'm actually not entirely sure what radiation warheads do.  So, what do they do?   I've heard some say that they don't work.

[Flying Dice]

They do. Basically, what they do is decrease the blast damage (so less damage to installations and GUs) but massively boost fallout. Essentially, they're dirty bombs designed to render a world uninhabitable rather than bombard it into submission. If you use them on someone, you don't just want to win, you want to grind them into the mud with your steel jackboots, as it essentially shows that you don't care that their world will be completely unusable for centuries. So sort of like pumping chlorine into their atmosphere, but not manually repairable.

[Bremen]

There's really no limit to stages, I believe.  Anything may be defined as a secondary stage.  For fun you may design a size 10 missiles with 5 missiles of size 1 secondary.  As in, half the size dedicated to extra payload, and either have the main missile continue or have the main missile deploy the "real" missile.  Either way, the five tiny missiles are to provide flak cover, with a minimal warhead and slightly higher speed, they're mostly armor, designed to run fractionally ahead of the main payload to clutter enemy PD and act as decoys.  If they hit, that's good, or if they're shot down, then the main payload still makes contact.

I've also debated massive cruise missiles.  A size 400 missile would be the size of a heavy fighter (20 HS) and could pack enough warhead to level entire planets.  Imagine a size 400 drone being fired from one star to another binary star and delivering 3,000 nuclear damage!  For those times when ground troops just aren't going to cut it, and you absolutely have to irradiate that one planet~

The problem with that is drones have a set engine size (5 msp), so a size 400 drone would be exceptionally slow. You could do it with a missile but it wouldn't have anything close to the range.

Also at that size you run a serious risk of being shot down by ASMs before the secondary stage detaches

As for warhead strength, while its true squares are more efficient it's not a big change. WH4 will penetrate 1 layer of armor, WH 9 will penetrate 2, WH 16 will penetrate 3. These numbers are fairly low in the grand scheme of things, and unless you're using humongous missiles (WH 100 would penetrate 9 layers) you're going to have to sandpaper through the armor regardless; even my early game lightly armored missile ships have at least 3 armor. There's still an advantage, and a WH 9 missile will probably have to punch through less total armor to destroy a ship, but it's a very small difference once you're not blowing through armor in a single hit.

Beams, on the other hand, can quite possibly melt right through even heavy armor at close range (particularly plasma carronades, unless you build a battleship with 50 armor layers). But with missiles I usually resign myself to the sandpaper approach and use large numbers of WH 4 missiles, and reap the gain on less effective PD fire.

[Girlinhat]

Actually carronades are rather poor at penetrating armor.  What they're good at is melting it away entirely.  Enemy has 6 layers and 13 columns of armor?  That's 78 damage needed!  A single carronade might spew 20 damage at relatively low tech.  It's not going to slice through armor, it's just going to spew damage everywhere and turn it red across the board.  On the other hand, lasers might deal 15 damage at the same range, but they get DEEP penetration, focused essentially on one column.  If your enemy has 6 layers and you've getting 7 damage, then you're getting internal shots every time.  If you hit a patch that's already been damaged, then lasers cause massive internal damage.

Lasers are the spears of the stars.  Carronades are warhammers.

[Repulsion]

Eh, I think that plasma carronades are more like flails, missiles are warhammers/maces, mesons are something like thin daggers, and particle beams are... eh, similar to the laser I guess.

[Girlinhat]

Missiles are most definitely crossbows   And mesons are whips, fuckin' lightsabers man!  Ignore your armor, bruise your lung!  Dunno about particle beams.  Or microwave...  Eh, the comparison doesn't work all the way, I give up.