I bought the game at around 5PM and unlocked everything in it by about 7.30 - after the two tutorial missions alone I had unlocked all races, hulls, cosmetic parts and a few weapons. Is progression sped up due to beta?
Additionally, missile spam plus destroyer-platform shield boosts are the way to go. Two cruisers with three shield-tanking escorts each and a single wing of fighters is enough to win 8 of the 10 maps (just make sure to use multi-missiles on the cruiser).
What am I supposed to do with the 250,000 honour I amassed since I beat the campaign two hours ago??
Not intentionally as a “goal unto itself”, no. The planned pace of the unlocks is meant to be orderly, steady and simple rather than gruelling, miserable and needlessly-protracted grinding. This is meant to help prevent “EVE Online-itis” from happening.
The current pace may seem too fast, but have you checked what difficulty level you have been playing at?
The pre-release beta’s bundled missions do not yet have Hard and Expert difficulty levels available for most of the missions. It’s possible that your present success is going to become overshadowed by stronger opposition later in the beta. Remember, the cursor tooltip for the Normal difficulty button explicitly says, “A comparatively easy battle against poorly-commanded enemies”.
Intriguing, but please see above.
Despite the current difficulty setting, it’s true that some possible ship designs (and tactical combinations of them) can either be weaksauce, or too much of a good thing. This should be examined further.
Save it for use with the inevitable future tidal wave of player-created game mods. I recall a single mod in GSB1 where if you wished to unlock everything in it, the combined cost for all new hulls and items was approximately 650,000 honor. That’s a very extreme example for just one mod, and not illustrative of the average GSB mod, but it’s still a possible use for your accumulated abundance of honor points.
But I concur with this strategy. I tried it out and it worked way too well. I got 40-something K honor from one of the battles because the missile boats were so cheap and powerful.
Please understand that I’m aware some of the ship designs opposing human players in the bundled missions are more sub-optimal than they should be. Likewise, the present state of some technologies can also allow for ship designs that are a bit super-optimal in some situations. That’s why the pre-release beta exists: to smoke out these outlier situations so they can be examined.
The missile-spam ship possibilities might be too strong, the point-defense destroyer-escort ship possibilities might be too weak, or some combination of the above. I also have to wonder why the enemy AI forces that GrahamSimmons was fighting against did not bash the hell out of his shield-support destroyers by using anti-ship frigates assigned with an “Attack Destroyers” order ramped-up to 100% priority.
Because you range them cleverly behind your cruisers which are a little bit tanky, and you delete all of their orders bar “Formation” so they don’t aggro anything.
A similar fleet composition has gone on to stomp every challenge I’ve tried that’s been posted up online, including the 5 that were (at the time) rated “most difficult”.
I had a setup where I loaded dreads and cruisers all with missiles (dreads had the nukes and cruisers had multi missiles) and then set up a line of destroyers in the front armed only with point defenses and shields. The destroyers took a lot of the brunt (and killed nearly every single incoming missile), the cruisers wiped out the shields and armor, then the dreads went to town on the hull. I also had a few anti-fighter destroyers armed with anti-fighter lasers and flak cannons scattered throughout the fleet, as well as an army of dogfighters to further protect the bigger ships.
I found a much better design. Kraugerisk dreadnoughts loaded with shields and armor and armed with multi-purpose weapons (a set of weapons with max armor pierce, max shield pierce, and max hull damage) and a Kraugerisk destroyer armed with shield support beams. I can go into a 180k game with 90k in ships and win the battle. I am getting 100k honor in a single battle lol.
