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Yes! I feel it is well worth the money and will be in the top Steam sales

11 (36.7%)

No, I have not heard enough about it to make a valued judgment

8 (26.7%)

No, I feel it is too expensive.

4 (13.3%)

Yes

7 (23.3%)

Total Members Voted: 30

Voting closed: August 19, 2011, 09:26:16 am

[SalmonGod]

Right now I'm using a hammerhead with two double-turrets... one beam on each that drains power, and another dealing damage.  I target the big ships and keep them disabled while I whittle them down.

I tried missiles early game, but they didn't seem to do much damage... and most of the time wouldn't even hit anything.  They could launch directly at the enemy, and they'll fucking veer off and try to circle back around.  But only when I'm using them.  Those fucking gravity missiles are accurate and annoying as hell when the enemy's firing them.

[Frumple]

They're definitely less impressive early on, save at station busting (where they're basically the safest but most boring way to kill them). Once you get some stuff rolling and the fire rate to something more respectable things... change. They're still not necessarily the best raw damage dealers, but they also start blowing stuff up from significantly further than just about anything but the bombs, and you don't have to aim, either. Do like to miss but when you've got dozens flying around it doesn't really matter all that much :V

[Rolan7]

I seem to remember particle weapons being the strongest, especially some late-game one that was essentially a beam?
I tried to replay SPAZ 1 a couple months ago with beams, to be different, and kinda gave up after reaching the core worlds.  Like people were saying, I had to bring in massive amounts of rez just to survive things.  And sometimes I'd take a loss on normal missions.  I remember it being pretty grindy with particle weapons, but not so difficult.

As for SPAZ 2, it's super laggy on my current laptop.  Win 7, "i7-4600U CPU @2.10GHz 2.70Ghz" (I guess overclock speed?), but my "display adapter" is just generic Intel.  Which I guess means no hardware acceleration, all software.

So I'll play it on my desktop sometime, but I haven't given it a go yet.  I wanted to replay SPAZ 1 first instead and that got burned out on the grind.
So weird, I loved the game when it was new.  I guess particle weapons are just that much better.

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, I'm working towards getting my hands on the higher level beam/cannon weapons.  Going to move on to Chapter 3 as soon as I do.

[Darkmere]

Cannons and missiles were the only weapons worth a damn in SPAZ 1. Beams are so short-ranged that you can't avoid taking a ton of damage, mines are.... mines... and the bombs kinda suck unless you want to do some really janky cloaked bomber stuff that I could never make work. Beams even got nerfed to hell at sweeping zombies off the hull (they dodge lasers, now).

Drones were pretty good if you went strong into them, though.

[SalmonGod]

I tend to use boosters to up my beam range, and then I don't have any issues with it.  My beams currently go slightly farther than the edge of the screen, when I'm zoomed all the way out at 2560x1600 resolution.  I can *almost* hover just outside of the beam range of a lvl 3 core world station, and still hit with my beams.

And then between all my ships focusing like 8 beams at once, single targets get eliminated quicker than anything else I've found.

Only things that really give me issues are weapons that slow me down so I can't keep up with my target, and getting swarmed

But yeah... I also didn't imagine that reload speeds on missiles could get that fast.  My biggest issue with them was that they'd bounce off shields, and enemy shields would be back up before they'd fire again.

[Rolan7]

@Darkmere
Oh yeah!  I remember the particle beam (lategame cannon) was a godssend because it was good for scraping zombies, which was like the one thing beams used to be good for.

[miauw62]

I feel like the fusion beams/particle cannon + power drain beams is generally the best combination to melt down anything.

Cannons and missiles were the only weapons worth a damn in SPAZ 1. Beams are so short-ranged that you can't avoid taking a ton of damage, mines are.... mines... and the bombs kinda suck unless you want to do some really janky cloaked bomber stuff that I could never make work. Beams even got nerfed to hell at sweeping zombies off the hull (they dodge lasers, now).

Drones were pretty good if you went strong into them, though.

Cloaked bombers worked out for me because I could have 8 Helixes because of mods so :v

Bombs will absolutely desintegrate anything earlygame, but lategame they really, really fall off badly, even if you're using the corrosive bombs.

[Frumple]

I seem to remember the slow-down one being pretty decent regardless, though. Like gravity missiles, but AoE. Just slower firing and harder to hit stuff with.

[miauw62]

All the bombs cause huge slowdown, and then have a secondary payload which the affected ship can't fly away from. But the damage is shit, and gravity missiles are much better and bomb slots are only on otherwise pretty garbage ships, whereas missiles are on basically all ships.

[Frumple]

The... utility one. Ion thingy, now that I check.

Though bomb damage is... actually pretty good, iirc. When the secondary explosions all hit. They can bugger a station sideways, or seriously mess up something that actually holds still/is large enough to get hit by most of the... bomblets or whatever you want to call it them. It's just that most of the things you shoot don't fit those criteria, ahaha. And missiles can do the same thing to stations if you just hang back for a bit.

[Aklyon]

All I remember was there was a mod that let you have like, triple mounts in basically any ship big enough. I think one of them even had a quad.

[Frumple]

There was. Probably more than one, heh. Know big fight for beef had em, though.

[Kagus]

Yeah, my first playthrough I actually ended up using bombs quite a bit. Was pretty much the only thing that got me through some missions.

Sometimes I'd get lucky and the enemy wouldn't be able to run away before the secondary explosions went off, but most of the time I just used it as a preventative measure. No other weapon is as good at generating breathing room, thanks to how the AI completely freaks out when a bomb breaks open and starts charging up its secondary blast.


But, yeah... Missiles, man. Beams are terrible until the very last beam, and even that is cripplingly short-range and battery draining. Cannons do a lot of damage when they hit and are considerably more versatile than beams (what with dedicated anti-shield, anti-armor and anti-hull variants, plus the anti-zombie bullet hose), but the friendly AI is remarkably good at missing with them. Sure, the AI is terrible at keeping proper range with missiles, but it beats shooting in completely the wrong direction with cannons.



The real question, I feel, is shields vs. cloak.

[Shadowlord]

I never got very far into SPAZ.