Challenge Discussion!

Gratuitous Forum Challenges and Tournaments
41

I’ve still yet to see a challenge that can deal effectively with a swarm of uber-speed fighters backed up with a decent fleet. I’ve been using the Rebel fighter chassis with five slots, giving it a laser and as many engines as possible, and coming out with a fighter that has over 3 speed. Since no gunners lead yet in this game, almost nothing can hit them. One of cliffski’s ships had enough armor to survive indefinitely, and one frigate-based fleet managed to eventually kill them, but in both cases the conventional backup wiped the floor with those ships.

Gunners really, really need to be programmed to lead their targets. :wink:

42

Interesting designs Omnitronic. The standard plasma spam destroyed GA, but got destroyed by GB. I like both of them though. Original.

Also, your snail buster did quite well against the plasma cruisers, as I am sure you guessed.

43

Could you send this fleet to me, I wanna try to beat it. :smiley: My name is “liq3”.

44

Done.

Incidentally, fleets with roughly this makeup are what I’ve been using on all of Omnitronic’s challenges. Fighter spam is a particularly good counter to frigate spam, it seems, so the more frigates that I see the more fighters I try to purchase.

45

Can you send me that challenge too? So far I’ve found that fusion+plasma on cruisers only with fighter support works well against all the challenges I’ve tried, which are all the ones that have many downloads I’ve seen. My name is the same as this account.

46

I’d like to see this massed fighter fleet, what size is it?

I hear a lot of swarm tactics being mentioned… but I think I have a pretty unique fleet/set of tactics. Check out “Ultimate Fury of the Swarm”. And ignore anything else made by me, trial runs I wish I could delete. :stuck_out_tongue:

47

GA was a piece of cake… Ultimate Swarm completely decimates GA no contest. GB completely confounded me, however I’ve never seen shields behave the way they have on your cruisers. All of my standard fleet designs got completely annihilated by GB (Well shielded/armored cruisers with long range weaponry).

Eventually I tried using my Ultimate Swarm fleet again… and turns out they did the best against it, and with a slight change in formation (keeping the exact same orders funny enough), was able to beat GB consistently and actually quite easily. EDIT: looking back it seems I removed a cruiser for more frigates… but replaying it with the default Ultimate Swarm ship line (in a new formation) still achieves victory.

youtube.com/watch?v=EesBzOw4DUY

The idea behind GB isn’t too different from ultimate swarm, now that I think about it. Tanks in front true threats behind…

Those shields though… I’m really gonna have to try and replicate that effect. It seems like the ship takes a lot of internal damage before the shields even fall, and when they do fall the ship is so damaged it’s practically dead as well.

48

Isn’t it perhaps a slight weakness in the game that spamming something seems to work the best? Particularly, spamming frigates. I’ve got three different frigate types I use now, and I’ve yet to find anything I cant defeat. Oh, and a speedy fighter squadron to lead the charge.

49

Try my Gaxalon Pirates ‘GB’ challenge! It apparently kills off many types of frig swarm. Not all! But many.

50

Fighter swarm tends to MURDER frigate swarm. Seriously; try it sometime as a counter. Keeping your main ships alive while the fighters kill the enemy is the trick (unless the frigates are built without armor, in which case they’ll probably never even reach you).

Regarding the size of fighter swarms, that depends entirely on battle size and particularly enemy fleet consistency. I always tailor my fleet to what I see coming in a particular challenge, so unless I see a ton of frigates on the other size my “swarm” may be all of 2-3 squadrons. If I see frigate spam on a big map though, with lots of available pilots, I’ll throw down 12-ish fighter squadrons. The real key is their orders, which I’ve only seen a few challenge-creators pick up on: you have to make it very clear to fighter AI that attacking other fighters is NEVER, EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES acceptable. Fighters can’t lead targets, so unless there are tractor beams in support they’ll accomplish nothing except flying around enemy fighters in circles (unless the enemy fighters are built poorly, and are slow). I really doubt that this is intended behavior, so hopefully some variation of gunnery leading will be added soon-ish.

Kerensky - I tried your ultimate swarm last night and won first try, simply because your frigates couldn’t kill quite all of my cruisers before my fighters killed your swarm. Also, Galaxian Beta, which seems to confound a lot of people, can be won by practically nothing but three fighter squadrons - those ships have some nice shields, but neither the armor nor light weapons to handle fighters.

Finally, mechanics question: I’ve noticed that some weapons, sometimes, seem to deal damage through enemy shields. Yet I can’t figure out any consistent time this happens (though I use missiles a lot). Anyone know what’s up with that?

51

Cliffski posted an explanation of the shield piercing thing somewhere… I’m sadly not sure exactly WHERE, but, here’s a quick summary:

If you have multiple shields, the game actually tracks the damages inflicted to each of them separately. Thus, if one of two shields is down to 10 hp, and the other shield still has 60hp left (assuming 100 max) then the shields bar on that ship will report 70hp.

But, if a 50 damage projectile hits the ship, it will apply 25 damage to each shield. (50 / num of shields = 20). The 10hp will block 10 of that and fail (permanantly, even if the other one recharges!), letting 15hp through to damage the armour or structure, and the other shield will be reduced to 35.

So, what you’ll see is a ship with around 1/3rd of a shield bar left get hit, and also take some armour damage, even though it has some shield bar left.

Of course, if this happens to a ship that’s never been hit before, or a ship with only one shield, I have no idea. :slight_smile:

52

Does anyone know how shield reflectivity works with multiple shields? Are they added together? With reduced effectiveness? These are number that should be shown when putting a ship together instead of just total shield power.

53

I think he talked about the shield effectiveness and more details on his blog a while back.

54

Well, i’ve now beaten every uploaded challenge that didn’t bug \o/

Omnitronic, you wanted details on fleets that beat your “I can’t believe it’s not a stack version 1” challenge…couldn’t find how to PM you sorry, i’ll type my fleet here.
2 of these out front:

[config]
name = pallisade
guiname = Pallisade
hull = Rebel Minotaur Cruiser
cost = 2508

[modules]
0 = cruiser_defence laser,
1 = cruiser_defence laser,
2 = cruiser shield II,
3 = cruiser shield II,
4 = cruiser_defence laser,
5 = cruiser_defence laser,
6 = cruiser_pointdefence,
7 = cruiser shield reflective,
8 = cruiser_pointdefence,
9 = cruiser power III,
10 = cruiser crew IV,
11 = cruiser power III,
12 = cruiser_engine III,
13 = cruiser_engine III,
14 = cruiser powered armor,

And the rest of the fleet made of these (which is my normal cruiser that I have beat most challenges without changing):
[config]
name = dagger
guiname = dagger
hull = Rebel Valkyrie Cruiser
cost = 2396

[modules]
0 = cruiser_engine III,
1 = cruiser shield II,
2 = cruiser_engine III,
3 = cruiser_protonbeam,
4 = cruiser_defence laser,
5 = cruiser shield II,
6 = cruiser_laser,
7 = cruiser_laser,
8 = cruiser_laser,
9 = cruiser_laser,
10 = cruiser_laser,
11 = cruiser crew IV,
12 = cruiser powered armor,
13 = cruiser power III,
14 = cruiser power III,

This was actually the first challenge of yours I beat first time…yours are always the toughest. Arc welder just got fightered to death!

55

Thanks very much - I’m trying to gather some data on how you can make a stack that doesn’t overlap, but I’m not entirely certain how people deal with stacks who don’t sit there and fine tune a specific ship to try and destroy the whole stack. (I can take Arc Welder down to 100/28 with three ships!!!)

Also I’m totally flattered. :smiley: ‘I can’t believe it’s not a stack’ is fairly light experimental stuff.

56

Yeah, Arc Welder I actually found incredibly easy. 6 fighter squadrons killed every frigate in seconds, and then a few cruisers strolled in and mopped up. Toughest so far was your challenge with the plasma/point defence Foxes, which took me 2 or 3 tries to beat.

I think ‘I can’t believe it’s not a stack’ suffers from a lack of concentrated firepower that makes normal overlapping stacks nasty. I sent half of my cruiser abover, half below, and your platforms split fire and di very little due to the range differences.

57

Your comment about being able to withstand the fire from arc welder was interesting, so I tried a line of these against your ‘I can’t believe its not stack’.

[config]
name = armored-shocker 
guiname = armored-shocker 
hull = Alliance Python Cruiser hull 
cost = 3524 

[modules]
0 = cruiser_alliance_lightninggun,
1 = cruiser_engine,
2 = cruiser crew II,
3 = cruiser_armour V,
4 = cruiser_nanorepair,
5 = cruiser_armour V,
6 = cruiser_armour V,
7 = cruiser_nanorepair,
8 = cruiser_nanorepair,
9 = cruiser_armour V,
10 = cruiser_armour V,
11 = cruiser_nanorepair,
12 = cruiser_alliance_lightninggun,
13 = cruiser_alliance_lightninggun,
14 = cruiser reinforced power II,
15 = cruiser_armour V,
16 = cruiser_armour V,
17 = cruiser_alliance_lightninggun,

Managed to win well enough without any losses, as there honestly wasn’t enough damage to chew through their armor.

58

Yeah, one of my theories was that stacks are mean because you can build them to take a whole fleet’s firepower. … Which I haven’t done in ‘I can’t believe it’s not a stack’. :confused:

59

Whatever missiles those things are firing can’t even scratch the main shields on my Imperial cruisers…

The fighters sure were distracting though. If my artillery cruisers weren’t spending their time chasing them, I would have won faster :slight_smile:

Edit: Also, imperial fighters seem to suck quite a lot when it comes to carrying anything moderately heavy. Beam fighters were lethally effective as rebels, but none of the imperials have the hardpoints necessary to make it work… I’m seriously considering upgrading the Javelin to 2,2.

60

I’ve put out my new work in progress - it doesn’t crack snails (I’m looking at you, Esgaro!), but it does seem to handle most of the recent builds that people put forth as ‘ZOMG AWESOME CHALLENGE’, including my already dated ‘you don’t need croozrz you just need dis fleet’ challenge.

I think we’re definitely approaching a ‘we should try a mini-league’ point.

Also - What hurts the imperial fighters is their very low inherant energy. You can do megafast rebel builds because rebel fighters all start out at 4 - enough to run an engine in each slot, if you wanted.

Edit: BTW, Harrower - I’m not gonna be able to get back to you on your fleet because of the beam fighters. :frowning: Sorry man - I’m very set on keeping challenges baseline GSB - it’s the only way to ensure an even playing field. Also, if I haven’t gotten back to anyone on challenges they’ve personalled me, I do apologise! I get a bit swamped. I’m most likely to respond to Sirius fleets - that’s the map I concentrate on.