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Author Topic: Sword of the Stars  (Read 124825 times)

Lightning4

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #360 on: February 13, 2011, 07:54:22 am »

War section, probably. It's like that for pretty much every race. Most war section turrets lend themselves to broadsides.
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Zai

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #361 on: February 13, 2011, 01:55:59 pm »

WW1 sure. dreadnoughts were the king of the sea's. But WW2 dreadnoughts were over with compared to modern Battleships.
...
but maybe SOTS has a WW1 feel to it.
That's pretty much what Kerberos has said the games are equivalent to: SotS1 is supposed to have more of a WW1 thing with its ships, while SotS2 is supposed to have more of a WW2 thing.
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Omegastick

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #362 on: February 13, 2011, 02:25:31 pm »

Hehe, I just tried a new fleet setup.

1 Flagship
25 (or 24, I can't remember) Spinal Mounts (I'm considering changing this to Armour)
However many repair/refuel ships you want.

Yup, twenty-five little destroyers all swarming the enemy. It lags like hell but everything dies because of the swarm of missile fire and lasers.

The only practical downsides are that you have to rebuild after each fight (destroyers tend to just get blown up rather than damaged) and the beams hardly ever fire, they all get a shot in at the beginning, taking out an enemy with ease, and then only one or two fire every minute from then on.
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Sean Mirrsen

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #363 on: February 13, 2011, 02:34:30 pm »

Spinal mounts have a lot of trouble lining up for shots if they aren't standing still. Try stopping them ("S" key), then they'll start turning around to fire.

You should try this with either minelayers (just keep your flagship way away if you're using implosion mines), or lots and lots of drone carriers. If you think the trick with cruisers is bad, you wait and see till your swarm of slightly larger "drones" joins the fun with the normal kind. And since they go down fast anyway, the fresh reinforcements from your flagship will keep adding moths to the flame.
(the last figure of speech is even more fitting if your opponent uses Phaser PD)

For horribly excruciating overkill, use the War section. One hundred missiles per salvo, and that's just with the human DEs.
(for ludicrously egregious overkill, make that one thousand dumbfire missiles)

(aand I just realized how to top that. Do you know how? Use Hivers. AI Command + War + Antimatter gives a Hiver destroyer SEVEN MEDIUM SECTIONS!!! Already good. Wait, there's more. The Hiver Flagship gives 76 CP. With both upgrade techs, 84 CP. 18 CP for the flagship itself, this leaves SIXTY-SIX COMMAND POINTS. THIRTY-THREE DESTROYERS, SEVEN MISSILE LAUNCHERS EACH. TWO HUNDRED THIRTY ONE MISSILE PER SALVO! TAKE THAT, PHASER POINT DEFENSE!!)
« Last Edit: February 13, 2011, 02:46:11 pm by Sean Mirrsen »
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"Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems."
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Omegastick

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #364 on: February 13, 2011, 02:50:38 pm »

Yeah, drone carriers might be even better. The main problem is that I've got to the point in the game where almost everything possible is researched so the enemy tends to swat even my heavy drones out of the air with PD missiles.

I would use the war section but there are no Zuul in my current game.
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Sean Mirrsen

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #365 on: February 13, 2011, 02:56:41 pm »

Don't use heavy drones if he's using PD missiles. Or use them, but in conjunction with a wing of light drones with a pulse phaser/phaser PD loadout. No more interceptor missile problem.
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Omegastick

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #366 on: February 13, 2011, 03:21:23 pm »

Sadly, both phasers and point defence haven't been available to me this time.
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Sean Mirrsen

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #367 on: February 13, 2011, 04:05:54 pm »

Okay then, either a Wild Weasel DE in the mix, a CryBaby COL once in a while, or an Electronic Warfare section for your flagship. Sucks up missiles like nobody's business.
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forsaken1111

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #368 on: February 13, 2011, 04:23:23 pm »

Hivers are the only race I'd suggest to use with a destroyer swarm later in the game. Their ships are just damn TOUGH, and have soo many guns.
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Sean Mirrsen

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #369 on: February 13, 2011, 04:50:22 pm »

Right now I'm trying this tactic small-scale against the Zuul. At antimatter warheads and just 4 missiles per DE, six DEs drop a cruiser. Of course, Zuul are low-armor, but that's still neat. Now to build up to the ultimate combo. Which is a problem - didn't get AI research from Expert Systems. Let's hope I get it later from Holographic Tactics.
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Flare

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #370 on: February 14, 2011, 05:24:48 am »

Btw btw, once I saw a human AI dreadnaught with some sort of Galleon-style broadside-facing heavy beams. WTF was that thing? I don't think I saw it on the wiki... maybe I didn't search well enough.

It's a human mission section right from the beginning of the series. I'm surprised you haven't come up against them by now. But yeah, humans in this game have a love for broad sides it seems. Both the armor destroyers, armor cruiser, and certain dreadnought mission sections are designed to have the most guns pointed at the enemy from their side.
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Sean Mirrsen

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #371 on: February 14, 2011, 11:05:31 am »

Perhaps that specific human wasn't too keen on using them. I really only saw it a few times when his AI rebelled and our combined forces were hammered by AI DNs, a with most attack waves including one or two of those. I didn't think to research data correlation back then, or I could have checked what those were. They struck me as an incredibly odd design - heavy beams only work when you're facing them all in one direction, for a concentrated alphastrike. You don't usually get to fire exactly perpendicular to your facing, which these things were designed to do.

At least Heavy COLs I can (now) understand - they're an area support weapon, you want a ship with them to be able to fire in several directions without having to turn.

Btw, I tried Antimatter Mine crackers, as the Hivers vs the Zuul. Result - the four minelayer DEs in front of the defensive position remained unscratched, even though one of the 30+ attacking cruisers technically made it past the line (its command section did, separated from the rest of the hull). Four COL cruisers laying down suppressive antimatter fire = incoming ships suddenly discovering themselves in the middle of a superheated plasma cloud. Unlike leap crackers, antimatter crackers actually spread the mines out, resulting in PD being completely and utterly swamped. You can achieve a similar effect with a platoon of minelayers (ten minelayers lay down 100 mines in 15 seconds), but the DEs are fragile, and the CRs are a little too slow. With COLs, you can even shield the ship, resulting in the ultimate siege weapon before siege drivers roll around.
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Krelian

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #372 on: February 14, 2011, 12:07:34 pm »

war sections usually have weapons (including heavy lasers) facing to the side
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Sean Mirrsen

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #373 on: February 15, 2011, 07:46:26 am »

Alright, now I'm a SotS modder too!

Well, a crappy/rookie one, but nevertheless. I've had some ideas for new weapons that SotS-verse could use, so I started adding them.

Idea 1 - currently added. HEAP Driver. Nothing to do with piledrivers, though I suppose a Plasmatic Immolation Low-Emission driver could be a good pun. Anyway. These are, basically, a combination of dumbfire missiles and AP Drivers - a High-Explosive Armor-Piercing Mass Driver, like in the modern(ish) military. Scales up with warhead tech, so allows ballistic weapons to remain usable well into the "melt your face off" age of meson beams and antimatter cannons. Usable for all weapon sizes. Small ones combined with antimatter warheads might even out-DPS pulse phasers, I need to look the damage multiplier up.

Idea 2 in progress. Repeating Driver. Once you research Heavy Stormers, your basic ballistic tech is good enough to dramatically raise fire rate on the common Mass driver and Gauss driver, creating the Repeating Driver. Fits into small and medium slots, fires very fast (I'm thinking twice a second for small, once for medium) and tracks very fast. Might probably work good as point defense too.

Idea 3. Heavy Flak. With small PD roles filled up nicely by existing weapons, this weapon can be installed on a Medium slot, firing wide-area exploding charges in quick bursts. Great for taking out large clouds of missiles or drones (locusts?), but capable of firing at normal targets as well, though dealing less damage than a good proper weapon.

Comments?

edit: update on those ideas.

Repeating Drivers need a slight tone-down, but are otherwise nice. They really need to be installed in a medium/large mount though, just like Stormers. Their difference from Stormers is that they have less DPS, but distribute this DPS much better across multiple targets, and are actually halfdecent weapons against the Swarm and their ilk.

Heavy Flak... well, it didn't work too well, and at the same time worked too well. I couldn't get it to explode around the target missiles, but when firing on normal ships it completely tore them apart. So much for that.

Next, I want to bring missiles up to scratch (larger warheads is all they can sport in later stages), for example with Volley Launchers, large turrets sending out a spray of missiles, and Swarm Launchers, short-range MIRV equivalents without a carrier rocket but with a medium turret mount.

Also, I wonder if an "AI Drone" is a tautology? I wanted to make a sort of advanced drone design that'd become available after AI research, that'd have additional small mounts in proper turrets.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2011, 11:42:43 am by Sean Mirrsen »
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Multiworld Madness Archive:
Game One, Discontinued at World 3.
Game Two, Discontinued at World 1.

"Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems."
- Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Minister of External Affairs, India

Shadowgandor

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Re: Sword of the Stars
« Reply #374 on: February 15, 2011, 01:30:19 pm »

Perhaps you could call them Sweeper Drones? Sweeping the battle of enemy ships :D
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