Agreed about the huge size issue, those Pythons look streamlined and all but they attract fire like nobody’s business.
Then again, Order hulls are pretty giant too apart from the Crusader. And if you use that you have to deal with the armour penalty. But you’re not getting any arguments for me: I’ve seen (and made) a few pretty solid Alliance missile & tank fleets, but the better Order ones out there are tougher to beat.
(Oh, and nice spot with the Shark tank - I can’t believe I never noticed how much better they are)
I’m intrigued. Long range or short? I’ve been tinkering with a short range 50% tank 50% glass cannon fleet that does surprisingly well against a lot of challenges.
It’s a long range fleet. The point is to have every ship with plasmas, 55.78 defense and repair. I also have a few of them with beam laser getting into 770 range to crush other enemy armors, and pulse lasers to deal with fighters.
So far it crushed SAC 5-19 (THC’s stack Tribe MWM), SAC 5-29 (ZGeneral’s Pure Plasma), and SAC 5-35 (THC’s Pure Nomad Missile). So in terms of winning long range war I say it’s pretty good.
If you have a fighter lure in front, then it stands the risk of being decimated by opposing cruisers. Unless of course, your fighter lure is also a tank/cruiser lure, but tribe can’t do this. Also, what happens when the laser fighters have protector/retaliate commands? It seems like lures would be ineffectual, though I’m not sure about that.
As long as your lure have 1 gun on the anti fighter tank, it will work.
I mentioned how you can lure fighters (but not cruisers) by setting 2 lure fighters to it with 600 escort. Fighters will any priority to fighters will automatically find the closest target (your lure fighter) and chase after it (to your fighter tank). While cruisers, with priority to fighter removed, tends to ignore them and drive toward your cruisers.
Man this guide is Amazing, you just need someone working on the cover and tah dah, a book!
Seriously, with this, and other guides and tips in this forum, you can make a real GSB Game Guide
GW, i find your work really usefull, im trying some new things with it
So if all your tanks have ECM guns, and your hammers are on retaliate, then eventually the front row enemy tanks won’t be firing, which means your hammers will be hitting the next rank ships.
But that is only a fairly short window to smash the next rank of ships. When a ship switches target because of retaliate, how long does it stay with its new target? Will it go back to its original target when the ECM effect wears off?
You don’t need to be that complicated. Retaliate triggers quite often so it will work with or without those ECM.
The 1 weapon on tank is really just to draw initial aggro from fleet that isn’t using the retaliate command, as ship without a single gun gets ignored by the firing AI.
Of course, the retaliate tag comes with the trade off of firing all over the place, which is a disadvantage against fleets without tanks (such as Tribe). The co-op tag is a lot better in those situations.
123stw, while I have some reservations about the triangle, there is one thing I have no reservation about.
This is an absolutely fine piece of work!! Keep up the good work. Really, any new players reading this (and even seasoned players) will appreciate the insight and improve their game by reading and practicing these principles. Great to see the dedication, and work you’re putting into this. This is a touchstone for a strategy guide to GSB! Meaning everthing in the future could be measured against this.
If I wasn’t putting so much effort into the campaign I might do a bit of editing or add some comments about fighters. But really, you’re doing fine without any help!!
Nice update! You may want to look into making it into a more readable format. Take a look at gamefaqs formatting guidelines. Even if you don’t want to post it there, they have some good tips on formatting. Here: gamefaqs.com/features/help/entry.html?cat=28
You may even want to consider posting it on gamefaqs, maybe that will get this game more attention.
I disagree. They’re worth it IF you can position your ships so that they do use all of their supplies. That requires some testing, and you can’t expect to use them on your ships on the frontline. You can use them on your “reinforcements” (e.g., the ships in the back), because after some time, when the DPS on both sides goes down, the recharge rate can keep up. I used this tactic to beat one of JoeCairo’s NEC plasma spams. I estimate that 90% of supplies were used in that particular fight. That’s basically an additional 1000 HP per module.
Also, tribe repairs are definitely worth it on AA cruisers placed in the back of your fleet.
I think “immunity” is kind of misleading, because we all know that it’s not. For example, against laser fighters, an armor of 8 is almost nothing. (Also, I think the more important break point is the laser fighter armor penetration. Rocket fighters can’t even bypass shields, in which case, it means your ship is already being beaten on by things with bigger armor penentration.)
The amount of effective hit points armor provides against laser fighters looks something like this:
The total armor of two heavy armors after penalty is 281, critical damage, I don’t know how to calculate, but the ratio is approximately 1, and critical rate is 3% (or was it 2%?). An average armor of 8.5 gets you ~500 eHP against laser fighters, which is simply not worth it. Whereas an avg armor of 10 gets you 2.3k eHP!
In other words, practically, armor isn’t worth it unless you can get armor significantly higher than the armor penetration.
I made several guides on Gamefaqs before. Yeah this one is still quite messy at the moment and needs to be clean up.
Putting repairs on the safest positioned ships somewhat contradicts itself, because every repair forgoes a gun. So for a drag out long range war you can lose over 1000 damage for that 1000 HP. If to get repair to work requires very fine toned conditions.
I will go test 2 identical plasma fleet, one with repair in the back and one without, and see how they play out.
While my AA tends to come with armor as well, I do agree that repair works for AA so long as lasers can’t overload it.
I thought I mentioned the need to go over. I see if I can make it more obvious.
Though repair typically works better than going way over the breakpoints, so long as repair can keep up with the critical damage. 8.5 with 490 supply to repair it will last longer than 10, as 490 repair translates to 16333 eHP. The purpose of going over is to give a bracket of eHP for repair to work with so it doesn’t get overloaded.
While I will never flat-out contradict another player, I will say that the times I have seen a repair module wiped out before it was at least ~90% used have been few and far between. Maybe I just use some weird combination of orders or something that changes the game dynamic. Couldn’t say.
This is not necessarily true. I have plenty of ship designs that have weapons in all available hardpoints and still have a repair system. In those cases, the only thing that would likely replace the repair system is a single plate of armor that doesn’t provide nearly as much survival utility as the repair system.
