Problems with AI Raid starships

[hullu]

Are there any decent counters for these? I'm pretty late in my game and these guys are really causing a lot of save game loading for me since I simply haven't been able to find a decent counter for them.

I'm in a situation of three fronts (playing X map), hard golems, hard spirecraft and lots campaign - meaning at worst I get 2-3 simultaneous spire/starship/markiv-v rushes. Otherwise they're usually not a huge problem for me but when I get unlucky and something along the line of 5-10 raid starships come with the waves they're often pretty much unstoppable, and absolutely so without micro - at least for my defenses. If they get to my home system (which they do if I forget to micro them out, and still I sometimes fail) they pretty much destroy my home command station in seconds, or even a second.

Anyone has any counters for these, and while we're at it, does anyone have any passive counters for these since I really don't like to micro because of one single enemy ship type all the time?




PS. this is definitely not my first game where most of my losses come from raid starships, especialyl in games where they're rare it's often too late to do anything once you spot that the enemy has one...

[soMe_RandoM]

turrets :-

Heavy Beam Cannon, Cap mark 1 or 4 mark 1 3-4 mark 2, 2 mark 3 + 1 mark 4
if you want them to defiantly never get to ur command station full cap these out

Missile Turrets, find these are quit good as they got bonus on ultra light and full cap of theses can take out one

Mobile Fleet :-

Star-ships, they are cheapest in all knowledge and quick to build in early game, best ship against them most time is bomber star ship as they usually stop and target it because on 1-1 they lose (in battle targeting each other), the dreadnought is next best thing get them to hide behind force field then mostly target raiders

if this sufficient then ok i haven't been able to play all expansions and dn if there mobile bonus that does well against them

[Sunshine!]

Sniper turrets ignore radar dampening, ignore armor, and do extra against Ultra Light.  Build 5 of them, and they should be able to one-hit any raid starships that wander in.

[lanstro]

Especially if you're playing against a starship commander, gravity turrets are key to slowing those buggers down for long enough for the rest of your stuff to kill them.

[hullu]

Hmm, looking at some of the above suggestions.... Aren't raid starships immune to 1) gravity (at least in my game they go full speed past the gravity turrets, which I have) 2) missiles, at least they used to be? 3) sniper shots?

Not sitting at my home computer now so I can't check what I'm talking abuot but I had a feeling those 'obvious' counters just don't work for them. I might be mistaken though.

I have the beam turrets though, their limited range makes them somewhat unoptimal for my situation (four wormholes all in diff directions), but they might work, have to look at them.

[Red Spot]

40 mk1 basic turrets gets you a long way (they may scratch the paintwork of your CC but I managed to save my log-CC several times from mk2 raider this way).

[BobTheJanitor]

Raid Starship: "Immunities:    Dark Matter Ammo    Blade Attacks    Fusion Cutters    Area Damage    Black Hole Machines
Armor Boosts    Tractor Beams    Reclamation    Paralysis Attacks    Swallow    Force Fields    Nuclear Explosions    Being Insta-Killed    EMPs"

That might be a little out of date, I think it's from 4.067 or something around there. But I don't think they've changed since then. I had the same problems with these guys in my game. I'd saved in the middle of fallen spire last night, not noticing that ships were breaking through a weak spot in my defenses and so when I loaded the save a raid starship was just coming in to my home comm station. By warping in every fast ship I had from a nearby system and putting them all on it, I managed to survive. But it took a few tries. What is it that the AI is doing that seems to 2 shot all my Raid Starships while theirs can survive just fine with 100 fleet ships pounding on them?

Edit: Oh and they have radar dampening of 8000. Does that affect turrets? Because that could explain a lot.

Edit 2: Ah I see Sunshine already said above that Sniper Turrets ignore radar dampening. Time to go pile up a few. In previous games I had been building these on just about every planet, but then I saw how much metal/crystal they were setting me back and I realized that's not such a great idea. Clearly on important worlds I need to go back to adding a ctrl + click worth of these bad boys.

[hullu]

Thanks for the copy paste of the immunities, seems I was heavily mistaken above.

Anyways, it seems there's plenty of counters, need to work on them. Still I doubt I can stop them if they get into my home system, but defense in depth might help. The problem is the absolutely pathetic amount of hit points on the home command station, and the fact that in my game the raid starships don't come alone, they come in groups of 3-8 or so.

I share your grief though, my raid starships always die in seconds, and the AIs just swoooosh past everything seemingly immune to everything=)

[Suzera]

You could play low ship cap with normal or blitz speed. Raid starship armor doesn't get scaled for it, and missile frigate mk 1s can break over 90k damage even at mk 1 vs ultra-light vastly increasing their proportional damage against them. Everything should probably get their armor double for normal and blitz game speed to keep damage:armor in proportion, but it's not right now. Even if that were changed for the speed setting, mk 2 frigates would break over raid starship armor on low cap.

Edit: Supposedly it works this way anyway. Something might be weird in a calculation, but from raw stats displayed it should work.

I think attack boosts are multiplied in before armor is subtracted, so on low cap blitz with a flagship boost on a mk1 frigate you only lose about 50% of your damage instead of 90%. I'm not 100% sure on that. A much lower % of damage is reduced with mk 2 frigates (about 25% I think, but that is still 3x as much mk 1) and so on.

[hullu]

After playing this game of mine a bit further I will just have to stick with my original opinion. Raid starships are too powerful in AI hands in certain circumstances.

The game I'm doing is perhaps a bit too difficult for my skill level, but still, all the dozens of times I've had to load my game is raid starships during a mass offense, mass being something like 20-30 spire starships with the high mark escorts plus a dozen or two starships. Not once has my command station fallen on anything else but those raid starships, and it rarely happens until the enemy has more than three of them at once in my home system. What annoys me in this is that they're absolutely unstoppable without micro, they ARE stoppable with my armored golems and spire starships with micro, but without micro, no chance.

For the record I'm playing diff 7 spire hammer and diff 8 <something-easier, forgot now>. I'd find this difficulty somewhat easy without LotS campaign but LotS bringing in all these raid starships really seems to bump the difficulty. Gravity turrets don't do anything either, since the sheer number of escorts destroys anything they have range to destroy in a second or less - earlier I actualy thought raid starships are immune to gravity turrets, but nope, it was just the turrets being destroyed so fast.

[Suzera]

I agree that raid starships are awfully balanced right now because they are HUGELY variable in difficulty between ship caps, game speeds and early game where they are tough vs late game where they are trivial with regards to AI vs Humans, and then turn around and are terrible humans vs AI almost all the time, but there are certainly a lot of things you can do.

Important things checklist:

1) Are you playing on normal or blitz speed with low ship caps (it really should make a ridiculously huge difference in being able to blow up starships, especially with the attack boosts)
2) If it is a big attack and your fleet is brought home to defend, make sure you are being sure to use at least flagships and light starships (munitions boosters if you have them) to break over the armor level better
3) Fortresses will own raid starships, HARD. On normal/blitz, a mk 1 fortress can kill 1.5 mk 1 raid starships every 6 seconds. 3k knowledge
4) Despite what the devs are saying, sniper turrets are still pretty weak on efficiently killing raid starships (9.25 shots to kill mk 1 on normal/blitz), and fighters do relatively nothing since frigates are the UL attack bonus and fighter AP doesn't get anywhere near (Raid Starship armor - Fighter damage per shot). Don't rely on those unless you really like putting 30-40 sniper turrets on two planets and leaving the rest open.


Here is the list of units TO try to use for blowing up raid starships:
-Fortresses (just get fortress mk1. Seriously, do it regardless of raid starships)
-Missile Frigates (boosted with flagships especially) (far less useful on epic speed and/or non-low ship caps because they are already on the damage-armor edge)
-Siege starships (I know radar dampening, but high damage per shot = armor is more trivial. put near CC or WH) (less useful on epic speed, but still ok) (probably don't need above mk 1)
-Autocannon minipods (particularly useful in high cap since they annihilate armor ratings with -1200 or so armor/s at just mk 1 cap, -3600/s with mk1+2 cap) (less useful in lower caps because armor damage doesn't seem to scale)
-Sniper ships (don't know if these ignore dampening, but these are ACTUALLY good against raid starships anyway)
-Spire Gravity Drainers
-Zenith Bombards (see siege starship notes, plus less useful on high cap)
-Just look it up on the reference table for the rest, but the above 4 are probably the best anti-raid SS bonus ships

[hullu]

Fortresses might've been good, kind of forgot to use them. Or well, didn't forget, I just was under a mistaken impression that getting mk 4 fleet ships would be more useful.

Still with most of what you proposed is that if you keep fleet in frd they probably won't get the raid starships without micro. Fortresses might if they're held back enough so the other enemies get stuck with your fleet and raids are among the first ones in fortress range. Although with somewhat more permanent units (like fortresses and sniper turrets) the manual targeting which leave behind the 'preferred target' might actually make a difference.

Oh, how I wish that auto-frd was more configurable. Is it even overridable? I would definitely love to have most of the galaxy in auto-frd, but some select ships not...

[Suzera]

Don't FRD first then. Blow up the raid starship, then FRD. FRD is very very inefficient even without factoring in Raid Starships. Right clicking a raid starship once while paused with your fortress or missile frigates + flagships is barely micro. It's one extra keypress and a couple extra mouse clicks that you wouldn't even need to do every time.

If you want some ships not in FRD, just give them a different order that isn't FRD and they aren't in FRD anymore. If you're global FRDing in controls you should either stop doing that or stop complaining that ships are being dumb (or suggest a codeable way to make it better, which is tough). You can, if I am not mistaken, set a rally point with the FRD modifier from a dock and newly built ships will then FRD and gather at the clicked position, without having all your ships everywhere FRD all the time by default. That way you can manually move them to FRD elsewhere, have all new ships built into auto FRD, and also have some ships you manually give a different order to not FRD.

The only mk 3 fleet triangle ship that is any good against raid starships are missile frigates, and really mostly only in low cap or normal/blitz speed normal cap. Everything else that is default and can go through wormholes kinda sucks except siege starships and to a lesser extent bomber starships in normal/blitz.

[zebramatt]

If single planet suppression controls are some day added, they'd be useful for having all your ships auto-FRD except certain key systems.

[hullu]

Yea I need to learn to play with auto frd off. Often when I turn it off it just makes more harm then good, since then I forgot to frd fleets that are supposed to be FRDd and I lose systems and stuff to that =)

Anyway, the usual frontier-defenses-failed rush in that game was 5-8 raid starships at once in my home system. That really takes micro to get them all, even with a good supplement of ships, golems and capital ships:) But yes, there's a lot to improve in my defenses too.

Personally I'd love the option to override auto-frd to off. I love having most of my fleets in auto-frd, but certain key units I'd rather have stay inside force fields, or stay back for whatever reasons - like in this example I would probably have wanted to keep my two armored golems next to the home command station force fields to deal with anything that gets through. But I haven't at least been able to find such a control