Some Feedback

I have a few things I have noticed and a few suggestions:

I’d like to be able to click on enemy ships and see their componants and the damage I am doing to them. This may not be feasible due to the possible “cheat effect” of this game. (see below)

I have only been playing the single player game so far, but this is what I observe:

Plasma Torpedoes fired by my ships miss 90% of the time at long range, enemy ship Plasma Torpedoes hit 90% of the time at long range?

ECM fired by my ships sometimes effects enemy ships, ECM fired by enemy ships ALWAYS effects my ships if fired anywhere around them? Also enemy ships continue to fire on incoming missiles and fighters while encased in ECM effects?

ECM protection has no effect on enemy ECM whatsoever, even with 2 of them, just uses up a slot?

The enemy ships appear to have every weapon slot filled but one, yet continue to repair themselves like they have at least 5 repair units while absorbing at least 3 armors worth of pounding after about 5 shields worth of damage to take down the shields all while moving as if they have a full compliment of engines, not to mention the power supplies all this would entail?

My ships continue to track a lone cowardly enemy cruiser fleeing the battle while being broadside pounded by a group of 6 cruisers that are at half the cowards range with cruisers preference at 100%?

So maybe you fudged the enemies a bit to make them a challenge. Kind of irritates me, probably others as well.

My thoughts on your thoughts, as another fairly new player :smiley:

I think this was a deliberate design decision, to make you spend more time figuring it out from what you can see, to make you spend more time looking at the gratuitous explosions :wink: Good call, in my personal opinion. If we could see enemy ship stats, I’d spend far too much time looking at them :smiley: It would shorten the learning curve a lot though, if we could see. I’m not sure if that would be a good or a bad thing.

The speed of the target ship is very important with plasma in particular, because it has such a low tracking speed. To perceive such a big effect from this, I’m guessing you’re firing from slow cruisers, at faster frigates. You can also get a tracking module that will help a little bit.

This one’s a known bug, that I gather will be fixed in 0.17.

I’ve never seen my ships do this. Are you using “vulture” orders? That would explain this behavior. Also, some of the frigate hulls look pretty big to me, occaisionally I’ve been caught out thinking a ship was a frigate when it was a cruiser, or vice versa. I also avoid setting 100% preferences.

I don’t think this is the case. Once you’ve been playing a while, you’ll start to find you can win the scenarios with a fraction of the points available. By the sounds of things, you need to take a good look at your weapons selection. For example… Only weapons with a shield penetration of 24 or above (27 in some cases) will be will be able to bring down a cruisers shields. Armour penetration isn’t quite so important since there is a chance to do critical hits that will penetrate anyway, but it’s good to fit some weapons with very high armour penetration, to speed up the process.

When I started out, I found the MIRV missiles to be very solid performers. I’ve moved on to more complicated fleets now I’m getting a better grasp of how everything else interacts, but you can roll over most of the single player maps pretty much using missiles alone.

i don’t think the game engine will allow even scenario ships to be loaded that’re illegal.

but anyway … what you’re possibly seeing is a lot of armour bounces - check the statistics after a fight.

I was using Vulture! Armor bounces?

I found so far the best way to win the expert levels of the last few scenarios is to load a cruiser with 3 shields, 3 ultraheavy armors, 1 antifighter, 1antimissile and the rest megamissiles. They tend to just pound their way through all the complications. Nothing pleases me more than watching a rebel missile cruisers shields fall to multiple megamissile impacts.

If the average armor “thickness” is more than a weapon’s armor penetration, the weapon will just bounce off same as for shields. The mega-missiles have both good shield AND armor penetration, which is why I think they are the best weapon for new players. The description is what clued me in as a new player, it says something like “When you absolutely have to destroy every ship in sight…”