Killing those darn fighters

[Archduke_Astro]

@Bullethead

Thanks for the welcome, your Erzhertzogness ;).

You earned it. Oh, and your word agility of the Austro-Hungarian hoch-Deutsche variety gets you a bonus point.

@Bullethead

I’m really liking GSB so far. Too much, actually. It’s kept me up until 0300 the last couple nights… The whole rock-paper-scissors thing is fascinating, and besides, the ONLY reason I ever suffered through founding and building colonies in space empire games was to FINALLY be able, many hours in, to fight epic space battles. It’s SO much better to avoid all that tedium :).

Reminds me of the reasons why progressing through MOO and MOO II was so enjoyable.

@Bullethead

Yesterday, however, I was beginning to perceive a lack of rock-paper-scissors after unlocking everything in no time with the pure plasma spam (it had been the plasma-missile spam until I ran into the Parasites).

Alas, plasma is highly spammable; a combination of it being just so strong at what it does, and many other cruiser-gun options being a tad too weak, or redundantly cookie-cutter, or sometimes even both.

@Bullethead

Nothing to it, I’ll just plasma-spam my way across the universe in the campaign. Or so I thought. Just now, however, in my very 1st battle, I ran into a phalanx of 3 Alliance Alligators {“Cocodries” as we say down here) that were just blocks of solid armor, no shields. My plasma balls just bounced off harmlessly while they picked me apart with theirs. So now I have to fit either lasers or missiles into my designs again. Yay! Variety and complexity are there in there :).

You’ve met your first GSB “tanks”. A mildly unsporting tactic, existing mainly because of the game’s way of calculating your ship’s total armor resistance value. The Proton Beam has an armor penetration value of 73, and that’s as high as the weapons go; if your armor resistance is above that, only the 3% chance of random critical hits can ever bother you.

If you’ve also installed an armor repair module, maybe not even that can stop you. Ouch.

@Bullethead

Thing is, however, after this battle, I tried to replicate the design myself. I found that with 2 medium plasmas, a supercharged engine, a minimal power plant, and a small crew module, and all the rest superheavy armor, I could a ship with a higher average armor than the armor penetration of any weapon in the game. IOW, the ship is indestructable barring a huge number of “lucky hits”. So then I tried to make a similar thing for each race and ALMOST could. The poor Tribe of course has no hope and I don’t think the Order can QUITE manage it but comes very close. The Parasite Bulletmagnet is especially detestable because it’s got flak and a revenge scrambler :).

Even if you can’t push your tank’s armor resistance above 73, raising it as far as approx. 67-70 still results in a type of ship that’s damn hard for an enemy to interfere with across a time interval long enough for your other “normal,” non-tank cruisers to raise some hell.

One preferred tactic is to use Formation orders to place your armor tanks some distance ahead of the rest of your fleet, with the conventional fighting ships perhaps 200-300 units behind them. Generally speaking, this will exploit the game’s AI features such that your enemy will go somewhat berserk in wasting time trying to burn down most of your dummy ships. While he’s focusing his fire on ships that register the impacts as a mere tickle, your own conventionally-designed ships (via long-range guns like cruiser plasmas or multi-warhead missiles) are throwing a hail of destruction at the enemy which reduces his numbers rather smartly by comparison.

@Bullethead

So what happens in a campaign battle when both sides have indestructable ships?

Not much, that’s for sure. IIRC, if neither side causes any non-shield hits on the other for three consecutive minutes, the battle ends by default. That should apply to both GSB as well as Galactic Conquest.

@Bullethead

Anyway, this is getting off topic. Back to killing fighters. Why is it that slow rocket/painters are more effective than fast rocket/painters, at least when staying together and the enemy fighters aren’t?

Agreed; these other points are worthy of other threads, some of which may already exist and have been unread for a good long while.

I truly wish that I knew why the fighter situation you described should have the effectiveness that it does. Anything that’s so counter-intuitive bothers me…as with you, I like knowing why I get killed, so I’m bothered by having no further light to shed on this perplexing issue.

[HypercubeBorg]

@Bullethead

3. Contrary to what I’d been led to believe, the slower I was compared to the enemy, the better I did.

My 2 cents about this topic: Federation fighters have slower speed but they have more hitpoints: they were damaged by enemy fire, but when they hit the enemy they more likely destroy it!

[Bullethead]

@Archduke Astro

You earned it. Oh, and your word agility of the Austro-Hungarian hoch-Deutsche variety gets you a bonus point.

In that case: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06643umEJZg

Alas, plasma is highly spammable; a combination of it being just so strong at what it does, and many other cruiser-gun options being a tad too weak, or redundantly cookie-cutter, or sometimes even both.

I don’t have a philosophical problem with spamming. I was in the military myself where it’s all about achieving fire superiority, which I suppose could be called “bullet spamming”. And the expected USSR naval tactic was to missile-spam the US fleet, only it was referred to as “rolling back the defenses” because “spamming” sounds too civilian, even though Spam’s fame is of military origin :).

So, I find it perfectly natural that in GSB, you have to spam the enemy (as in apply shield damage faster that the enemy’s shield recharge rate). Given that the only cruiser weapons that can affect the reflective shield are plasma and missiles, you thus have to spam with 1 or the other, or a combination of both. Philosophy, IMHO, only comes into play when you consider the environment you’re building your ships for. In 1-off battles against a known, non-Parasite enemy race, missiles are a valid choice. But in the campaign, if you’ve invested heavily in missiles and suddenly run into Parasites, you’re screwed for the long-term because, due to budgetary and logistical constraints, this isn’t something you can change quickly.

You’ve met your first GSB “tanks”. A mildly unsporting tactic, existing mainly because of the game’s way of calculating your ship’s total armor resistance value

IMHO, this is more of an AI exploit. Despite having having supercomputers and the evidence of their eyes, your ship captains ain’t smart enough to realize that they can’t possibly hurt such targets. OTOH, if you make it so the AI will only apply its weapons to targets it can actually affect, the all-armor “tank” will disappear overnight.

I truly wish that I knew why the fighter situation you described should have the effectiveness that it does. Anything that’s so counter-intuitive bothers me…as with you, I like knowing why I get killed, so I’m bothered by having no further light to shed on this perplexing issue.

Well, I guess I’ll have to go do some experiments. Be back in a while.

[Aeson]

I would agree with HypercubeBorg - when using rocket fighters with painter support in a dogfight, speed becomes somewhat (or entirely) irrelevant - the painters lead to many essentially guaranteed hits on the opposing fighters, and so having the ability to survive more hits is better than having a higher chance to dodge the attack. I used this line of reasoning to design an Imperial fighter to counter Bullethead’s own Tribe fighter swarm challenge (#4931895 if you haven’t seen it).

When target painters are involved in sufficient quantities, there is more benefit to having high health than high speed. When fewer target painters, no target painters, or nothing helped by the presence of target painters are involved, speed dominates.