Frigates are immune to AoE, but the Wrath Lance is not AoE.
The beams only damage the first target they hit, that is why transports can soak for targets hidden in their shadow behind them.
Anyways, for the record:
Cap Mk 1-4 Teleport Raiders: No damage. WTF?
Apparently, when you give Teleporting units a Right-Click attack order on a unit, they teleport on top of the center of that unit and then the "unstack" logic proceeds.
However, when all 4 beams of the Wrath Lance cross in it's center, not a single raider survived to get a shot off.
Cap Mk 1-4 Teleport Raiders (Try 2): Okay. Manually moving them next to the wrath lance, and then giving the attack order actually works better then I expect. I have not cleaned the rest of the system up, but the raiders do 12% damage before dying. I think I could get that up to 15% damage if I cleaned the other stuff up?
Cap Mk 1-4 Teleport Raiders (Try 3): Cleaned up the system some, looks like I got 17% damage done to the wrath lance in exchange for losing all my raiders (640 ships).
Repeat this sacrifice of 640 teleport raiders and I get it down. (It was about 25% damage done for the next waves to kill it.)
The biggest thing seems to be that luck plays a big factor. Despite the graphic, the beams don't quite cover the screen. I'd have about 50 teleport raiders the wrath lance could not kill, it was the strategic reserve that spawned fighters that actually finished my waves of raiders off.
This actually is more painful then I'm making it sound. The wrath lance is most of the way across the system from my entry wormhole. Anything that can't teleport would eat 3 wrath lance passes as it closed.
That's what cloaking is for of course, but cloaking the equivalent Mk I-IV bombers would be 384 ships. I don't think transport hopping the bombers in would work. Unloading them would activate the wrath lances and if you use the wrath lance to destroy the transport to unload automatically, I suspect you would lose a lot of the bombers the transport was carrying because the leading edge would destroy the transport, leaving the trailing edge of the beam to destroy the bombers just unloaded.
Also, replacing a cap of teleport raiders is only about 60% the resources of replacing the same cap of bombers. My economy is screaming badly enough about throwing away raiders like this, I don't want to think how long bombers would take to rebuild.
So, my suggested changes on the Wrath Lance would be as follows:
Drop the health to 80 million or so. Once you've figured out how to destroy the wrath lance, it becomes a grind. I sat there waiting until my raiders were rebuilt, then gave them an attack order, then waited until the next wave built.
The other suggestion is to slow down the speed of the rotation. That would remove the gaps where the beam turns that just randomly leaves ships alive, but would also give ships more time to do something before the wrath lance came around and destroyed them.
Anyways, that's my thoughts on the subject.
D.
