Am I just terrible?

Yo dawgs. First post. Recently bought the game and its expansion off of Steam. Really nice graphics and music.

Only thing, though - I am having trouble with, pathetically, the second “Battle” in the single-player mode. I have tried it multiple times, and continually fail. I’ve been trying both the Tribes and the Federation, and both times, I can’t control my ships and they aren’t able to penetrate the enemy’s armor.

Is there something I’m doing wrong? Also, is there anyway to speed up gameplay? While the visuals are beautiful, the battles get a little long.

To speed up gameplay press + on the keyboard, or click on the > triangle on the bottom left of the GUI, near the radar.

It’s normal not to be able to control your ships in this game, don’t worry about that. It’s all about the pre-battle orders and ship designs.

If enemy shields are the problem, make sure you have plenty of weapons with shield penetration of 27 or more (enough to defeat even the best shields.)

If enemy armour is the problem (red deflection marks appear when your shots hit, instead of explosions), then make sure you mount some (you won’t need many) weapons with a nice high armour penetration. The Cruiser Beam Laser is wonderful at this. Plasma and missiles are have respectable armour penetration too, enough for all but the most extremely heavily armoured ships.

It usually doesn’t take much to bring armour down, so one Cruiser Beam Laser per cruiser, and the rest of the weapons all having 27+ shield penetration will make for a pretty versatile fleet - able to knock out both shield tanks and armour tanks quite easily.

There’s a sound option you should disable to make sped-up battles flow smoothly. Something like “pitch sounds.”

In the deployment screen, on the fighters/frigates/cruisers targeting sliders, make sure the ship’s range at which it should attack is somewhat less than the range of the shortest-ranged weapon that you want it to use against that target.

The OP never said anything about speeding up battles. (this is gonna get me accused to trolling)

anyways, here is my 2 pence (yes I’m British)

mount a plasma canon or two on every ship, Don’t use frigates, give fighters vulture orders and cruisers the rescusers. Whiz through the missions, unlock, then get kicked in challenges. that’s what I did, anyways!

chuckles

Well. It’s certainly true that fast close assault ships tend to make for a much shorter battle than a standoff missile or plasma fleet.

So on that note, OP, don’t be afraid to mount up to five engines on a cruiser, if you’re using short ranged weapons like the Cruiser Laser (deadliest anti-cruiser weapon in the game.)

I have short range ships with a top speed of 0.14

hi,

some more information about what weapons you use would help.
that you can’t penetrate the armor at all is hardly believable…

however it might be more possible that you couldn’t penetrate the shields, but then a simple cruiser laser will do the trick.

greetings
driver

The shark cruiser (blue one) in Defending Sirius is pretty much invulnerable to cruiser laser.

I just killed it using a fleet that used only the cruiser laser. But it took a while… So it’s not quite invulnerable to even this low armour penetrating a weapon. That cruiser is actually quite weakly armoured - even pulse lasers can hurt it, and they have armour pen ~31 if I remember right. The real problem is it has repair modules - so you can’t rely on critical hits to bring the armour down swiftly.

Add a single cruiser beam laser into the fleet and it dies very very quickly (since the beam laser very quickly reduces the armour down low enough for the cruiser lasers to start dealing full damage.)

Where you talking to me?

I think he was talking to the original poster :wink:

By the way, speed 0.14 is very slow for a short range ship. In challenge play you could expect to be wiped out before getting into range of a long range fleet (missiles, or maybe even plasma with that low a speed.) When I’m relying on short range weapons like the Cruiser Laser, I generally aim for speed 0.35. Slip much below 0.30 and you’re spending too long under fire from long range fleets. At this speed you not only close faster, but missiles and plasma will have significantly worse hit ratio.

I seem to do fine. It might be because I have 3 shield on each ship xD!