Various things

[Ragnarok]

So, basicly I'm a noob at this game. I played the tutorial and a bunch of campaigns but never finished one.
I play in a realistic galaxy with 2 AIs set to 7. I have all XPs enabled, but shipset set to simple.

here are my questions:

- How do you kill AI Fortresses ? Bombers are shred due to the burst fire of the fortress and i dont see anything "artillery" that outranges it (+ no immunity)
- How do you see WHERE a wave is coming from ? I build the warp sensors but i never figured out which wormhole to barricade. Cant you find out where the wave is coming from, assuming you dont kill all but one adjacent warp gate ?
- How do you kill Zenith Beam Frigates ? Just some hours ago i took out 2 systems from the AI (the first 2 ones) and promptly got a wave of 90 ships, mostly beam frigates and some speed boosters. I never found a counter....

[zoutzakje]

hi and welcome to the forums =)
You''ll find out that this game is quite difficult and complex. If you have never finished a game yet, perhaps starting out at difficulty 5 or 6 would be better. That way you can learn all various aspects of the game in a more relaxed way, instead of risking being overwhelmed. (I personally started playing at dif 1, but that was a bit to easy).

Bombers are THE hard counter against fortresses. You will notice the fort's 0.01 bonus against polycrstal, which means he will do very little damage to bombers (who have a polycrystal hull type) compared to other ships. If you send fighters or frigates to attack fortresses, you will stand no chance.

If you have built a warp sensor, and at least one bordering warp gate is alive, the wormhole ships will be coming from is coloured red, instead of green. That's where the ships will come from.

Zenith beam frigates also have a counter. They have a composite hull type, which means that any ship with a bonus against that hull type deals a lot more damage to them than others. In this case, missile frigates will do just fine =)

If you have any more questions about this game, don't hesitate to ask. There are a lot of kind players in this community who are more than happy to help a new player out and give advice =)

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums

- How do you kill AI Fortresses ? Bombers are shred due to the burst fire of the fortress and i dont see anything "artillery" that outranges it (+ no immunity)

Bombers actually are extremely resistant to fortress fire, and are the main way to take them down.  It's probable that some other unit near the fortress was taking out your bombers.

- How do you see WHERE a wave is coming from ? I build the warp sensors but i never figured out which wormhole to barricade. Cant you find out where the wave is coming from, assuming you dont kill all but one adjacent warp gate ?

If you have an advanced warp sensor on the planet being targeted by the wave, the wormhole the wave will come out of is red/orange instead of green.

- How do you kill Zenith Beam Frigates ? Just some hours ago i took out 2 systems from the AI (the first 2 ones) and promptly got a wave of 90 ships, mostly beam frigates and some speed boosters. I never found a counter....

Missile frigates aren't too bad against them, but in general beam frigates are pretty tough, yea.  Approaching them with a more-spread-out force tends to cut down on how much their vector attack hits the maximum number of targets (cutting their effective dps), and generally just shooting them with a ton of firepower (preferably with a bonus vs their hull type) will eventually do the trick

psuedo-edit: ninja'd, that usually happens

[zoutzakje]

nice try Keith
I seem to be stalking this forum to much lately lol

[Coppermantis]

Also interesting to note: Zenith Mirrors reflect fortress fire. They'll die to a lot of units fairly fast, but can really help absorb fortress shots until they do.

[Ragnarok]

I'm having considerable trouble withthe ingame ship spreedsheet. Firstly, when using the "display comparision for ships" pulldown, you cant scroll using the wheel because it will zoom in on the actual gamescreen. I think this needs to be fixed (i.e. pulldown higher priority for wheel than gamescreen).
Secondly, i believe the reference sheet is very poorly done, even though its a great idea. Then again, maybe I'm just stupid.

Here is the situation. I have an incoming wave of 100 armor ships. Since i cant build them (yet?) i dont know their weakness. I know i can see their stats and such i should probably not use fighter class but more like capital ships. So i open op the ref sheet and thats about where it starts. I suppose it should be logical to select armor ship I as the "target", hit "ships i can build" and then see which of the ships i can build offers the best multipliers in both damage and armor vs armor ships. But it doesnt seem like that is working. I feel like the ref sheet is working the other way around, i have to choose ONE of my own ships, then "hostile ships" and then i see how this single ship performs against the different hostile classes that are around.
I'm probably doing it wrong, considering there are like 6 or what different things to choose.

It would be very kind if someone could post a screenshot or setup to show me what i need to do in order to get the result i want (here: use refsheet to see which of the ships i can build perform best vs armor).

thanks




In addition: How would i best deal with this system ?
http://prntscr.com/6xdgu
The P armor is annoying and has many HP, better to capture it despite losses ?


Lastly, i killed a warp counter post and have an incoming wave in 13 (?) minutes. The system being attacked has 3 wormholes of which 2 lead into AI terrain. Despite having a AWS, none of the 2 hostile WHs turned from green to red ?

[zoutzakje]

I''m afraid I can''t help you with the reference thing. Usually I just try to find an enemy planet that has the specific ship type of the incoming wave on it. then I hover over it and check it''s hull type. They worked on something new though. hovering over your wave warning itself should now pop up the info you need. It''s still bugged now though, but that should be fixed for 5.030

Fortunately for you, the planet you're having trouble with seems to have mosly Mk I ships. Building full caps of all your regular ships and just storming the front should work out. If you're still having trouble you can send in smaller waves to make small amounts of enemy ships attack you, instead of the whole planet at once. Usually sending fighters on FRD mode through the wormhole while having some engineers rebuilding them fast can do the trick.

the fact that you do not see the red wormhole glow from the counter attack, is because the counter wave is not like a regular wave. Counter attack waves can spawn on any world, regardless of destroyed warp gates, and they won't spawn from the wormhole, but from the edge of the planet.

Hope to have helped a bit =)

[Ragnarok]

Actually, that did indeed help (the counterwave explanation).
thanks

[Hearteater]

I just threw this together real quick, hopefully it will help you with the Reference Tab.

[Ragnarok]

yo Hearteater, i appreciated the time you spent on that. Unfortunally, what you are describing is already what i did and i find it very much lacking.

Logically thinking (...) what a newbie would want is to select the ship he needs to counter (i.e. choose missile frigate if wave shows 150 missile frigs incoming), then select "show all ships i can build) and then get output in the large window. It kinda works like this currently, but its the other way around. Instead of showing "them > me", it should show "me > them". I'm wondering why noone suggest that yet ?

I know i can basicly look up a ships armor and weapon and manually check my own vessels, but the ref-sheet was initially meant for comparision, wasnt it ? Why then would it only work the "wrong" way.
I mean its not convinient to be forced to choose a SINGLE ship of yourself vs 20 hostile classes, but what you usually want is check YOUR 20 friendly classes vs the incoming single class.

Sorry if that sounds confusing but i really think it would be "better" my way.

[keith.lamothe]

Would it be better if:

1) the dropdown-picked ship was called "target"
2) "me > them" was changed to "target > row"
3) "them > me" was changed to "row > target"

?

"me" just means "the thing picked from the dropdown" and "them" just means "the thing on this row of the table", nothing to do with who controls it or whatever because it can be used to compare for either purpose ("what does this get killed by fastest" and "what does this kill fastest") but I do see that a better term is necessary.

Can anyone think of better terms than "target" and "row" for these?  "row" in particular seems weak, I just can't think of anything better right now.

[Hearteater]

Row is the clearest honestly.  The ">" should be ditched though, I really thought it meant "greater than" when I first started.  How about instead of "Me > Them" use "vs. Opponent" or "vs. Row" and for "Them > Me" use "vs. Selected" or "vs. Target".

But the two greatest changes would be mouse scrolling the dropdown lists and if the Target have a separate Mark dropdown next to it (see image).

[keith.lamothe]

You mean making the mouse wheel scroll the dropdown at all, or make it scroll the dropdown without changing the main display zoom level?

And the separate mark-select is a good idea but is a lot more involved of a change than I'm up for doing with the reference screen in the near future.  It's relatively easy to support for the bonus types and whatnot but will require an entire new form of categorization for most of the rest of the ship types (guard posts, guardians, etc).

[Ragnarok]

Wheel: When you have the ref sheet open and choose the "display comparision for ships" and the pulldown shows up, THEN should the focus be on the dropdown, not the game. I.e. when you wheel up/down, the pulldown actually scrolls up/down, too. Not the gameplay window

The Mark-select addon is a very good suggestions. It would basicly make choosing a ship 5 times as easy/fast compared to the current layout.

[Hearteater]

The Mark selection button should just be ignored/disabled/blank when a non-mark ship is selected on the left.  I wasn't thinking of it as a filter on the ship selection, but instead a modifier to what is already selected.  This would let me quickly bounce between marks of a single ship type.  Plus the selected ship dropdown becomes about 1/5th the size since it only lists each ship type once.