Just started playing the game yesterday and am enjoying it more and more as I get over the learning curve. One question for those more experienced players is what do you do to get the gist of what’s coming up in the battle. I mean obviously, you can determine the enemy race, spatial anomaly and general make-up of ships by look at the deployment phase. The trouble I find is that I don’t know the game well enough and can’t zoom in advance to see what ships are there aside from a general size estimation. (fighter vs. frigate vs cruiser). I still find myself having to run through it blind a couple times to get a feel for what I’m up against and then being able to design a counter.
Is this the norm or are there methods that I’m missing?
There’s some subtleties to it, but yeah, you’re pretty much going in blind. The challenge can’t change on you though, so the advantage is generally yours anyway.
I tend to look at the number and position of the enemy cruisers. If I greatly outnumber them and they’re set against the back wall or a corner, they’re probably tank ships and/or have large fighter counts. If there’s a legion of frigates set forward, you can probably expect a rush. That sort of thing.
I usually make all my ships work as a single unit and make my ships do a bit of everything instead of assigning ships specific tasks because if one of them die, that task cant be completed, for example, taking down enemy shields. I do have different variations of the same ship though. I almost always deploy fighters and the amount depends on if the enemy deploys them. I dont deploy them if the enemy has a lot of tractor beams. I usually dont worry about frigates because they die easily, except for Tribe frigates.