Turrets: What do you think of them?

[orzelek]

My systems would feel empty without turrets. I'm unlocking at least Mk I of laser and missile ones, sometimes spiders but I didn't test them yet with recent targeting updates. Also tractor Mk II or even III if enemy uses swarm type of ships.

I never used gravity ones - they seem to be uber costly for their behavior. Maybe I'm missing something there but slowing down enemies(and you at the same time) to speed 8 doesn't seem very useful on very small area.

Since I'm playing without trains the counter dark matter turret remains unused. Counter missile one also usually - both of them have really to low caps to be used to protect my defenses.

I'm mostly building set of tractors almost on wormhole and then other turrets about half mrls range from wormhole in groups of 10 turrets of each type - later expanding that to 20 or more if in key points (with unlocking higher marks of turrets).

[hfbrooklyn]

1. I like all the turrets, Because I like to have a large number of ranges/reload times/ damage types. But my favorite, i'd have to say, is the level three MLRS. Spamming these will eradicate fleets, murder starships, and effectively cover two wormholes on a planet you don't want to take but have to travel through.

2. I dislike lightning turrets. They don't seem to do a hell of a lot of damage and, worse, you only get 33 of them. Thinking about them again, I could probably work them into most of my defenses, but I just found 33 distasteful.

3. I HAVE to have, on every planet, spider turrets. Anyone wondering what's the point think of it this way: You have a planet with five or so enemy entry points. This planet is important enough you want to defend it heavily. You can't afford/don't have the number of turrets to defend every point. This is what I do:
I put tractor threes on each wormhole, maybe two or three. Then I build five-ten spider turrets + 5-10 snipers. Finally I heavily defend just around my command station. Now, the enemy units will get stuck by the tractors and the spiders will pick off their engines one by one. Even if they're core ships they wont be able to get anywhere near my command station. Depending on how far the station is, you can take out 100-200 engines like this. And then just have the spider turrets slowly kill them. Starships can go down like this too. The only thing you have to worry about are melee ships and inf engine ships.

4 My special turret are counter turrets. I played a game where the AI just spammed missle frigs so I put a few counters down and problem solved. Worked the same way against dark-matter firing parylyzer.

[XRsyst]

Grav turrets are situational, but are indispensable when facing an enemy that uses lots of ships that aren't affected by tractors (Mad Bomber AI is an example).  Lightning turrets are the most valuable IMO as the most dangerous thing that can happen is usually 2000+ ships pouring through a worm hole, LTs will do greater DPS than anything else in this situation.  Sure, other turrets will do a better job against 100 ships at a time, but anything can handle 100 ships at a time, not anything can handle thousands of ships at a time.

[Draco18s]

Tractor Beams and MLRS, though I use Basics and a few snipers as well.
Beyond that, more MLRS and more tractor (and higher level).
Above that?  Gravity Wells and Beam Turrets (beam turrets of higher level fire more shots--beams--even though the tooltip doesn't say so, which is why lowering the listed damage is actually still better).

[FrostyThePyro]

I LOVE spider turrets.  Engine damage, unlimited range, never misses, only way it could be better is if it had reclimation too.

Sniper turrets are distincly meh, though I did have an intersting game with a single planet as a chokepoint, where I put all 170 snipers and some 40 spiders, and super fortress, and ion cannons.  It was a good planet.

For other turrets I like lasers (good range not horrid damage) and MRS (damage), though I rarely unlock em.

Counter snipers are to protect bombards or other extreme range ships from ion cannons on enemy planets.

Basic turets are fine, but generaly if I unlock them its just because of their reltively low knowledge costs.

Lightning turets are kind of like heavy beam turrets, much bender in the AI hands then yours, due to low unit caps.

Tractor beams are nice, though the energy costs can stack up fast if your not paying attention, and I tend to spam engine damage so they arnt as major in my defence as many others.



Though my general use for turrets (other than a few spiders on every planet) is to build absolute tonnes of em on boarder planets or planets that are going to be raided and are far from my fleet (assuming I dont have teleport raiders/stations or other super fast defenders) bring in hoards of of engineers to rapid build them, and scrap em when I need em elsewhere.

[vonduus]

Sniper turrets are distincly meh, though I did have an intersting game with a single planet as a chokepoint, where I put all 170 snipers and some 40 spiders, and super fortress, and ion cannons.  It was a good planet.

Of late this tactic is becoming doctrine in my fleet. For a long time I put perhaps ten sniper turrets on all planets I owned. But then I tried putting all 170 on the same planet, and suddenly sniper turrets are a weapon to reckon with!

[wyvern83]

Greetings all, first poster here. Just wanted to say I'm am enjoying this game and I am very impressed with: 1. The level of developer and community involvement in further developing this game, 2. The expansive articles, wikis, reviews, and forum posts, 3. The great diversity and variability of the game with its many options and possibilities, and 4. The great AI and the fact AI personae selection is more than substantial in comparison to other games like Starcraft or Supreme Commander where options are not nearly as deep or meaningful feeling when it comes to tailoring and scaling your AI experience. This were the four things, in addition to x4000's design goals which sold me on this game. The steam sale just made the decision that much easier as I had just decided to buy the game after finishing the demo and hitting the 3 hour mark for my first campaign when I found both on sale.  


On Topic:
That aside, I had a couple questions regarding this,

Sniper turrets are distincly meh, though I did have an intersting game with a single planet as a chokepoint, where I put all 170 snipers and some 40 spiders, and super fortress, and ion cannons.  It was a good planet.

Of late this tactic is becoming doctrine in my fleet. For a long time I put perhaps ten sniper turrets on all planets I owned. But then I tried putting all 170 on the same planet, and suddenly sniper turrets are a weapon to reckon with!

Where do you guys put the spider/sniper turrets in system? And can I assume both of you use tractors in conjunction with the snipers/spiders? Do either of these turrets really always hit regardless of range and what would be a good threshold number of each for meaningful effect? I really like this idea and would like to try using bulk groups of both turrets for ranged interdiction in border systems so any recommendations would be appreciated.


(My reason for asking:
I got rolled by a CPA of 600 in my first campaign around 3 1/2 hour mark and lost all of my steppe worlds since the intended choke world was way underdeveloped at that point and none of the steppe worlds had defenses so I had to abandon them in favor of saving my two main planets. At the time I hadn't known that I could scrap things and so had purposely been "saving" turrets for future major locations. As a consequence of now knowing better, I am looking for a moderate turret defense scheme that is out of the way and likely to tie up CPA vessels time wise and long before they do too much damage.)

[FrostyThePyro]

I actualy tend to use spiders without tractor beams, you can place one on non important planets, which will stop a line of enemy ships when they pass through the system, and 5-20 in more important systems.  The spiders job is engine damage, and when something gets engine damage and stops, there is not a huge use for tractors as they are still stationary (though in important systems you still use tractors to hold the initial group for the regular turrets).  A ship frozen were it is out of range of your stuff is as good as being destroyed.

And yes, sniper/spider turrets never miss.  Chance to hit is based on range to the target, weapons max range, and targets sheilds.  As snipers have essential infinate max range, they will always have 100% to hit.

[ShadowOTE]

Fortresses + spider turrets = awesome.

We had a game go horribly wrong (lvl 7 sledgehammer and a lvl 9 experimentalist on a spokes map) where we had the bad luck to send scouts down the chain and unlock 200 ships from a tier 3 experimentalist world 20 minutes into the game. In doing so, it killed off a home command station. That led to a 1400 ship raid from the experimentalist, narrowly defeated but at the cost of another home planet and a core station (at which point we had 3 players with 1 world each and had been unable to take either world we attacked thanks to ridiculous raids resulting from 260 AIP). The third raid wiped us, but not before we had an entire system filled with disabled ai ships.

Though we lost, we did get to see that the combo combined with AI indecision caused ridiculously absurd losses for the AI (the game lasted maybe 90 minutes before all three of us died, but in that time we had 4700+ kills from fortresses alone, leading to a 3170% K-D ratio for the fortresses - 6 built, 3 destroyed).

[FrostyThePyro]

oh yeah, I put the expirimentalist on my no fight list, decoy drones+microparasites, even on lvl1 planets, too much for me to get started with.  Speed boosters dont help either.

[ShadowOTE]

Yeah, it was a rather nasty surprise to see them hop 3 worlds in 20 seconds. As soon as the ai progress started spiking, we knew it was over, but it was still fun to see how long we could hold out. Then again, if the AI had decided to go for a blob attack instead of splitting up and wasting time on secondary targets, or even had just started out using a good number of  its available bombers simultaneously on the mark 1 forcefield around our command stations, it wouldnt have taken more than a few minutes to wipe us.

[Draco18s]

if the AI had decided to go for a blob attack instead of splitting up and wasting time on secondary targets, or even had just started out using a good number of  its available bombers simultaneously on the mark 1 forcefield around our command stations, it wouldnt have taken more than a few minutes to wipe us.

The AI makes mistakes, that's what makes it so good.

[ShadowOTE]

True. And in any event, it was pretty clear we didn't have any hope of winning. But it was amusing to see the sledgehammer ai drop 300 ships on us after its friend sent 4000. We barely noticed... though it did do a better job grouping its ships together than the experimentalist.

[Kryzite]

Fortresses + spider turrets = awesome.

We had a game go horribly wrong (lvl 7 sledgehammer and a lvl 9 experimentalist on a spokes map) where we had the bad luck to send scouts down the chain and unlock 200 ships from a tier 3 experimentalist world 20 minutes into the game. In doing so, it killed off a home command station. That led to a 1400 ship raid from the experimentalist, narrowly defeated but at the cost of another home planet and a core station (at which point we had 3 players with 1 world each and had been unable to take either world we attacked thanks to ridiculous raids resulting from 260 AIP). The third raid wiped us, but not before we had an entire system filled with disabled ai ships.

Though we lost, we did get to see that the combo combined with AI indecision caused ridiculously absurd losses for the AI (the game lasted maybe 90 minutes before all three of us died, but in that time we had 4700+ kills from fortresses alone, leading to a 3170% K-D ratio for the fortresses - 6 built, 3 destroyed).

That was a fun game!

and yeah i did have a pretty insane kill to loss ratio lol

[ShadowOTE]

Yeah, for fortresses at least. Way too many high tier ships for our mark 1s and 2s though, so you ended up with probably the only positive kill to death ratio on the team. Throw up the screenshots if you've got them!