I have the game a week now and I’m having fun with these challenges, I however can never beat them with a fleet that uses less resources than what the opponent seems to use. As such my main question is, if I should try to aim for that, because I can collect honour that way, or is there no honour to collect in Challenges?
I’m wondering this, because I’ve encountered challenges that only had a fleet ok 10 000 or so points, but the scenario allowed me to spend 100 000 or so, making me feel that I was building a steamroller.
I think you may be confusing challenges and battles.
Battles are part of the single player campaign where the goal is to defeat them with the fewest resources possible and thereby gain honor points to use in unlocking other available equipment.
Challenges are online and downloadable fleets that other players have made for you to try you fleets against.
Generally, before you venture out into challenges, it is probably a good idea to beat all of the single player battles so you can polish your skills up, make all of the equipment available, and work out your ship designs.
Challenges are usually a lot different than battles. Many are a whole bunch harder.
Yeah, I’ve played all the missions, gotten enough honour to unlock everything, and have now played some challenges.
What I noticed in the challenges, is that the enemy fleet often uses less resources as I am allowed to use myself. For example I would get 100 pilots and 100 000 credits against one cruiser and to frigates. After steam-rolling such an encounter, it would say “0 honour”. My first impression was that you can’t get honour from challenges, but with challenges like that I started to doubt as I have written in my OP. Can you please confirm that honour doesn’t play a role in challenges?
To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to gain even the tiniest amount of honour from challenges. (I mean, think of it. People would just post a challenge with a huge fleet, that is nothing else than expensive junk, beat it with a cheap fleet and get all the honour needed to unlock everything with three or four challenges like that.)
Many people posting challenges will allow you to use far more resources than their own fleet is worth. Some just want to give you all the options you want and others simply did not care about it when making their challenge.
You don’t get honor from challenges. It wouldn’t make sense, considering how many custom maps you could play on or how easy it would be to game the system.
A possible explanation for the severely underbudget forces you’re seeing, is that on odd occasion players try to make challenges intended for tests 1v1 to find the best duelist cruiser or fighter or something like that. You’ll usually see it mentioned in the challenge description.
I think some of the challenge where the opponent didn’t use all of the resources are based on single-player battles posted as challenges. The only other thing I can think of is giving someone room to beat you by superior numbers, so that a hard battle can be easier for those who need the help.
Just to build a little on the questions here, is there a way to see the cost or hit points for an enemy fleet before I go into a battle in a challenge? I was playing a great challenge yesterday but had to find out by trial and error how many hit points the enemy fleet had so that I could try to beat it with less. There didn’t seem to be a limit in that given challenge and I didn’t want to just steamroller.
Do not go by hit points. While they can give you a general idea of how much is invested into a fleet, they can also be extremely deceiving because not all modules are created equal when it comes to hit points. Namely, armor has no hit points. A fleet that is seriously invested in armor will have a very low hit point total on the battle screen - but that does not at all mean that it was “cheap” on the deployment screen.
Most people use the full allotment when making a challenge, or leave slight overhead. You should try to beat the challenges using the full points - using any less is handicapping yourself (which can be fun - but you don’t have to do that to be fair).