Beating levels, the wrong way...

This is a topic for people to post how they beat a level in a way they thought shouldn’t work, or in such a way that they just thought was hilarious.

I personally found it sadly hilarious that the first time I beat the first level, I barely won on easy with a huge fleet. Less than an hour later, I came back, made a fleet of frigates with only shields and torpedos, and was able to beat the level on expert with no loses with only 12 frigates. This means I beat a level on expert with 12 ships that could not move, it just seems so wrong.

Lots of folks have already lamented the ability to win battles with ships that can’t move. Perhaps a new order could be “don’t close with ships that can’t move.” Thus resulting in a stalemate. In challenges, this can be done simply by placing 11% of the deployed hitpoints in a ship that also cannot move. Then, at the end of the fight its a lone non-moving cruiser against a line of non-moving frigates, no victory.

With the ability to deploy a fighter-repair cruiser, the non-moving ship even has something to do!

Equipping an entire fleet with just missiles went pretty well untill i got some enemy’s using scramblers and point defenses.

A topic on ways to losing levels the wrong way might be more fun :smiley:

I defeated the last scenario on expert with nothing but frigates and lasers. They had engines, shields, and armor so they weren’t really gimped.

I never can get frigates to work in a well rounded fleet since they get singled out and wasted so quickly, but in a large mass of them they can be really strong.

Nothings more ‘wrong’ than beating an entire enemy fleet with only fighters

I beat one challenge with a single squad of missile fighters. It was that one map that restricts cruisers.

Then there was one challenge where the guy forgot to set a max range on his cruisers so I could outrange him with a lone cruiser. I would used a lone frigate but I couldn’t out damage his shield regen.

Equipping ships with big reflective shields and repair nanobots can be really fun. Works great against ‘low’ damage enemies.

I’ve found that pretty much every mission can be beaten on expert by simply maxing out on fighters with a handful of cruisers to mop up a bit at the end.

The game is challenging until you find a technique that works, but after that you can pretty much just repeat the same strategy using only 50% of the resources available and still mop the floor with the enemy.

Works against most human challenges too and it only really runs into problems if you encounter an enemy who’s using a very similar tactic.

Yes its very effective. The most difficult human challenges that I have encountered do this. If Cliffski would release a self destruct module it could potentially balance this strategy. In fact any AOE effect would help but I don’t think GSB has the tech right now to do anything AOE.

you can win every single battle with ion cannon fregates (one cannon per ship is enough, ship have to be fast, when enemy has a lot of fighter you can add a few anti fighters fregates) with good shields (around 140) and good engines. Buy as much as you can then set ai to vulture / keep moving / cautious 80% and play about 1-2 hours to beat all maps on every difficulty level. No balance at all

sorry there is one map where shields doesnt work On that map you have to buy something else :wink:

Well, ships blowing up is an AoE effect, I think. But not really a weapon, and useless against fighters anyway.

Demo mission 3:
50% penalty to shields. The only Cruiser design I had that was actually eating up the enemies on the hardest difficulty had 5 shield generators. Figures, the enemy seemed to have loaded armor piercing instead of shield penetration since my Heavy Armor ships were dropping like flies.

Hah, I’d never really thought about it, but I had shields on my ships on that level, too- I was getting torn up making shieldless ships, dropped it for a while, came back, tossed in some standard cruisers, and won.