As usual, I am initially failing to get any benefit out of the new weapons. I loaded up a cruiser with them, and as far as I can tell, they fired singely, not as a Death Star-like single blast, and also tickled more than hurt, as my cruisers were slaughtered. Swapping in cruiser lasers while preserving the rest of the design yielded a quick win, so I don’t think the overall cruiser design was the issue.
How do you use the swarm disruptors effectively? Are they as low DPS as they seem?
edit:
Positive Points
awsome looking ships, a nice return after the butt-ugly Order
The fancy visual effect only occurs when fired in the frontal arc. Damage is unchanged.
The Disruptor is an extreme-range weapon. Optimal range is 850 meters.
The poor damage and overwhelming shield penetration makes it more comparable to plasma than a beam weapon, but it’s got an excellent tracking value… which sort of puts it in a class of its own.
They’re good for bringing shields down but are a tad slow to use them alone. Not as good against armor but not horrible either. Two or three on each cruiser and they start hittin pretty hard specially with some cruiser lasers.
Great pulp-SF feel with the streamlined ship designs and ‘Ancient Egyptians in Space’ theme.
Smart bombs deployed en masse are a terrific missile defense. A nice side-effect is that they also work rather well against those pesky rocket dogfighters, as long as you can keep your fighters on a close escort and draw the enemy in. I also like how packing these seriously limits your ability to use any type of missile. They’re pretty light on crew or power consumption too, which is nice.
Disruptor beams are cool as long as you think of them like artillery. The DPS does seem low but that’s offset by their range, tracking, and shield-breaking capability.
Considering I’m always fighting against crew restrictions when it comes to designing frigates, the Nest is a very helpful module.
The fighter targeting module seems to help your escort fighters bring down attackers a little faster, although this could just be my imagination.
Weaknesses:
The low-DPS and long range of their primary weapon lends itself to a slow-paced, grinding fighting style. Most of my fleets so far have been based around a wall of tractor & smart bomb tanks with disruptor glass cannons to the rear. Invariably I’ll have a wave of faster cruisers with CLs waiting in reserve, but the main part of my fleet doesn’t so much ‘Swarm’ as ‘Crawl’.
It’s a bit dissapointing that the fighter target booster can only be used with torpedo’s and rocket fighters due to the high power requirements(unless you drop the engine).
I haven’t even started designing Frigates! celebrates
And I like the disruptor. I used one cruiser with three disrupters (one on each wing, the last in center), and I put a cruiser laser in the very front slot. Added a couple support weapons and I had two of these wipe the tutorial mission clean. They also did very well in one of the scenarios.
They may be a bit too effective. I set up a missile vs. Plasma spam personal challenge on Defend Caspian IV. Fed Panthers with 8 Multi missiles vs. Swarm Sekhmet with 4 Plasma (Cruiser Beam and Tractor Beam take 2 of 3 remaining hard points). In the front hard point is either a Guidance Scrambler or Swarm Smart Bomb. Engagement distance 1160 for Fed, and 950 for Swarm.
Using the Guidance Scrambler the Swarm lost 10% to 89%.
Replacing Scrambler with Swarm Smart Bomb, the Swarm wins 85% to 10%. Once the Fed was down 85%-63% they almost never hit the Swarm ships again with their missiles.
That’s a huge swing just by changing one defensive module.
I don’t think Goa’uld (and congrats on spelling it right - can you pronounce it though?) primarily because the Goa’uld ships were primarily pyramid-based (Hatak-class motherships, Alkesh bombers, cargo ships) except for the death-gliders, which actually didn’t look much like birds at all. Unless you squint really hard.
The Swarm are impressive. It seems like everything is inexpsensive, so you can field more ships.
Because of their high speed and low cost, Swarm fighters are among the best.
The cruiser disruptor beams seem effective.
It’s fairly easy to build a good, fairly cheap frigate.
With frigates, it looks like 4 hardpoints is the most you can get.
That cruiser hull with 8 hardpoints and 7 additional slots; it appears to be serviceable enough. It’s great for weapon spam. For a balanced ships, you can buy that hull on the cheap, then use less than all 8 hardpoints for weapons; and add in some additional standard components instead of weapons; maybe go with 3 or 4 weapons instead of 8.
The disruptor beam seems to be fairly effective. It’s got great range for a beam; and seems to whittle away at the other side’s ships at a decent clip.
The thing which knocks down the incoming missiles is very cool; expensive, but cool.
