Armored Golem help

[durzagott]

I was playing a game when I realised that I was probably going to lose. So rather than just quit I decided to have a little fun. There was an Armored Golem in a nearby system which I captured then, eventually, activated.

I expected this behemoth to tear through several systems before going down in a fiery death. So I set it off against the nearest enemy which was a Tech III planet. However it did not even come close to being the Angel of Death I expected it to be. In fact, I'm not entirely sure it even managed to kill ONE enemy ship.

I zoomed in on the battle and I could see the Golem firing it's flame thing (or whatever). I could also the the ships and turrets that were being hit by the fire. However each hit seemed to take off only a tiny fraction of each enemy ship's health. My Golem didn't last very long (a few minutes tops) and by the time it died I can honestly say I'm not sure it managed to kill even one enemy.

Is there something I missing here? Surely something this expensive cannot possibly be so entirely worthless...

[keith.lamothe]

That is odd, yes, the armored golem typically takes down ships rather fast.

Can you post a save?  I can load up a game and make an armored golem fast enough, but it may have been related to the ships you were facing, other circumstances, the phase of the moon, etc...

Thanks,
Keith

[durzagott]

I'll try and grab a copy of the autosave if I can. I was using a friend's PC at the time though, so it may take a couple of days...

[Doddler]

Armored Golem does... 30 shots at 5000 damage a piece every 2 seconds.  If the golem was spreading out his attacks across 30 targets, I can imagine why it might seem like it's not doing much, especially on high tier ships that commonly have 100,000-300,000 health.  On the other hand, the golem has an absurd amount of health and no weaknesses to any attack types, so it probably would take a long time to die.

I found that using golems offensively like that doesn't work very well because especially on MK III and Mk IV planets what ends up happening is that the AI reinforces faster than he can kill them (they give a multiplier to AI reinforcements), which usually results in a beat up golem, a lot of wasted AI progress, and no real discernable progress made against the AI.