Demo Question from new player

[licker]

Well,  I guess the 'new player' may be redundant...

Anyway, trying to get into this game because it really seems like I should enjoy it, but I'm not quite over the learning curve yet and while some things I find quite interesting, some things I find annoying because I don't understand them yet 

I did skip some of the 'advanced tutorial' (or whatever it's called) so pardon me if any of this is actually addressed there.

Anyway, I've been playing on a 60 star map with a couple AIs at 4, because I'm just trying to figure out the mechanics really, and I don't have much trouble setting up my home system, building a mkIII energy reactor (err, again pardon me if I get some names wrong, like I said, I'm new), buying a few upgrades (bombers and MCs, engineersII, and oh, I dunno, kind checking out other stuff), queuing up the scouts and the war ships, slapping a couple tractor turrets if I'm not planning on taking specific adjacent systems quickly, and then hitting a couple AI worlds when the fleet gets to around 150, and funneling the new ships to open a 2nd front (if applicable) or reinforcing my 1st fleet if it's going to continue to chew along some specific vector my scouts have highlighted for me, moving science stations around to get the research.

Anyway, I think I get the basic mechanics, capture Adv. Research, Factories, ... target high resource systems, lock off pockets of systems, either to colonize, or to make chokes, destroy data centers, ...

Here's what I don't do (or get).
Select starting position based on special ship.  I didn't even realize this was there at first  , but what considerations are there in picking special ship vs. superior starting system?

Starships...  Don't build them.  Probably should, but other than one game where I captured a Starship construction site I didn't really consider them much.

Stealth...  Don't do it for myself, don't really worry about the AI, but, I know I should, and this gets me to a rather specific question about colonizing worlds and there still being a 'perma cloaked' AI presence.  How do I find it?  How do I destroy it?  Does it even matter?  I did use a couple scout starships in that one game, and in one system I ran one by all the wormholes and found a few cloaked AI ships, but they didn't do anything.  In another system which said there was an AI presence of ~50 I ran a scout ship all over the place and never found anything.  However, in the ~hour that I played that game after taking that system the AI presence never did anything I noticed either.

Do you pop a few tachyon turrets here and there and then decon them (also, how do you decon turrets in 'safe' systems?)?  Or do you just ignore them?  Is there some better detection ship/tech I need to find them?

Also how many engineers do people like to run with?  I usually build a couple extra in the home system, but then I forget to move them to new systems, or build new ones.  I guess I just need to add them to my 'micro' task list and get used to dealing with them.

Thanks in advance, and apologies if I'm missing obvious stuff.

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums

Here's what I don't do (or get).
Select starting position based on special ship.  I didn't even realize this was there at first  , but what considerations are there in picking special ship vs. superior starting system?

Mostly it's a question of what ship you want, though the positioning can be pretty important on some maps like Spokes where you could get upwards of 8 wormholes on a hub world.

Starships...  Don't build them.  Probably should, but other than one game where I captured a Starship construction site I didn't really consider them much.

Which version are you playing?  In the recent betas (3.189 is the latest) you start with a starship constructor ; but if you're playing the demo you're probably playing the official version (3.120) which is a good idea for learning your way around.

Anyway, starships can be very helpful indeed, but aren't intended to be the bulk of your fleet (so you can't just cruise around with a ton of starships and win).  It depends on what challenges you're facing at a given time:

Fleet Starships (light starship, flagship, zenith starship, spire starship) : If you need more firepower (say to hammer down a forcefield and take out an ion cannon), these provide an attack-power boost to nearby ships, and this can make a pretty big difference.  The higher level ones also have rather high hp, particularly in the betas.

Raid Starships are great for hit-and-runs on enemy targets (notably those protected by forcefields); these can actually operate solo to a large degree.

Leech Starships are great if you like to reclaim enemy ships but don't have any parasite ships.

Dreadnoughts (changed to Siege Starships in the betas) were useful to some players but ultimately we felt they weren't distinctive/useful enough so we replaced them with a Siege Starship line recently.  If you're on 3.120 you probably don't need to worry about these; but if you're playing a version with the Sieges they are excellent at taking out turrets at a decent range, as well as enemy starships and other things big enough for it to actually be able to shoot at.

Cloaker Starships are great if you like to be able to cloak ships that don't have their own cloaking.  It's more of an advanced-player thing but some people do very devious things with these.

Neinzul Enclave Starships (CoN expansion only) are great as mobile factories and beachheads, etc.  If you tech all the way up to the MkIV then you don't have to capture and advanced factory to produce mkIV units.

Scout Starships; in the betas there are now mk I-IV of these.  Also, they have the counter-sniper ability now, I don't remember if that was true in 3.120.  The counter-sniper coverage can make them extremely useful when attacking an enemy system.  They're also very helpful when trying to scout stuff that is eating your basic scouts.

Stealth...  Don't do it for myself, don't really worry about the AI, but, I know I should, and this gets me to a rather specific question about colonizing worlds and there still being a 'perma cloaked' AI presence.  How do I find it?  How do I destroy it?  Does it even matter?  I did use a couple scout starships in that one game, and in one system I ran one by all the wormholes and found a few cloaked AI ships, but they didn't do anything.  In another system which said there was an AI presence of ~50 I ran a scout ship all over the place and never found anything.  However, in the ~hour that I played that game after taking that system the AI presence never did anything I noticed either.

You can basically ignore those; personally I really want to get those numbers to go away but players vary on that.  You should be able to kill them by running a tachyon over the wormholes and either shooting them (AI stealth tachyon emitters) or flying some cheap fighters into them (AI mines).  But you can just ignore them.

Do you pop a few tachyon turrets here and there and then decon them (also, how do you decon turrets in 'safe' systems?)?  Or do you just ignore them?  Is there some better detection ship/tech I need to find them?

By decon you mean decommission?  Select them and hit the delete key, then the Y key to confirm.  And there's no levels of cloaking/detection, really, if you have tachyon coverage you'll see them.  There is a "cloaking booster" effect that some cloaked ships use to keep allied cloaked ships from being detected, but that wouldn't really apply in this case.

Also how many engineers do people like to run with?  I usually build a couple extra in the home system, but then I forget to move them to new systems, or build new ones.  I guess I just need to add them to my 'micro' task list and get used to dealing with them.

People vary a lot on engie count.  If you want to be able to bring them to a different system quickly you can assign them to a control group and when you need them hit their number, tab to the galaxy map screen, and right click the desired destination planet.  Also, if you like you can build control nodes that make your command-stations auto-build engineers.  Currently we have control nodes for just making a specific planet auto-build engies, too, but I don't know if that was in 3.120.

Thanks in advance, and apologies if I'm missing obvious stuff.

Sounds like you've done pretty well figuring it out on your own, actually, but yea, there is a lot of stuff

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, I neglected to mention the Riot Control Starship, which is also built by the starship constructor but on a separate tab.  Its role is to do lots of engine damage and generally keep mobs of smaller enemy ships in line.  A Riot can be fitted with a variety of modules (including a forcefield generator), a feature many of us find rather cool

[licker]

Thank you for the replies Keith.

I thought of another question...

After I made my scout starships I wanted to combine them with my fleets, but I wasn't able to just drag a box around everything and have them all selected.  My combat ships would be selected, but the scout would not, nor could I get it to join a control group (though I may have done this part incorrectly).

Is there a way to see the tachyon range on the scout starship? 

What are all the tachyon 'ships' and how many do you need for attacking AI systems where there are cloaked ships?

When I attack an AI system I usually have a group of fighters/bombers/MCs/special at whatever level I unlocked.  I did watch the tactics vids on youtube, but I don't really worry about that because the systems I'm hitting are so overwhelmed it doesn't matter much (well I'm sure it does, keeping attrition down is a good thing, but I'm just not worried about that at this point).

I assign the entire fleet to a control group, then alt-Rclick (I forget what this is called, auto-attack mode or something?) targets, sweeping around the system to clear out the pockets at wormholes or other locations.  This works, but feels inefficient, and, especially when there is a force shield somewhere, even if I click on a rear ship in the shield my bombers and fighters don't move as close as they 'should' from my perspective.  Is there a better way to handle targeting?  FRD is a bad idea in attacks (from what I read), and I don't like to micro targets, but the auto-attack doesn't quite seem to give me what I thought it would, because my fighters/bombers are still fairly spread out along a vector and it appears (though this may not be the case) that not all of them are in range of the target(s).  Of course it's also better to focus fire on a single target to take it out quickly rather than spreading fire evenly, but I'm not sure how that is modeled in the game.

[keith.lamothe]

After I made my scout starships I wanted to combine them with my fleets, but I wasn't able to just drag a box around everything and have them all selected.  My combat ships would be selected, but the scout would not, nor could I get it to join a control group (though I may have done this part incorrectly).

Yea, that's because scout starships are not military units (they don't have an attack); it's the same rule that prevents the box-select from selecting your fighters and engineers at the same time.

My suggestion is to have your scout starships on a control group #, and use shift-# (whatever number you used) with your military already selected (or press the # and then shift-box-select the military).  Alternatively you could keep the entire fleet (including scouts) on a single control group #, and have the sub-groups also assigned to their own #s if you like to do it that way (I often keep my fighters and bombers on 1, missile frigates on 2, etc).

Is there a way to see the tachyon range on the scout starship?

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure; does the usual hold-z (or z+x) not do it?  At some point we went back and added a bunch of those secondary ranges to the drawing logic for that, but the scout might be confusing it.

What are all the tachyon 'ships' and how many do you need for attacking AI systems where there are cloaked ships?

A fairly large number of ships have tachyon emitters; but you don't generally need many unless you're fighting an AI Type that uses tons of cloaked ships.

I assign the entire fleet to a control group, then alt-Rclick (I forget what this is called, auto-attack mode or something?) targets, sweeping around the system to clear out the pockets at wormholes or other locations.  This works, but feels inefficient, and, especially when there is a force shield somewhere, even if I click on a rear ship in the shield my bombers and fighters don't move as close as they 'should' from my perspective.  Is there a better way to handle targeting?

In the betas we've added a context menu with a "paint attack" command which basically works as a massive shift-right-click on every enemy in the paint-attack box, and it will apply the usual autotargetting sort logic to make sure the right ships shoot the right other ships first before moving on to their less-optimal targets.  Of course, we're going to need to refactor the paint attack command as it leads to out-of-memory crashes if using it with (for example) 4000 ships versus 4000 enemies, as it then has to queue 16 million attack orders.  But it usually works great for the more moderate scale.

But Alt-Right-Click ("Attack Move") is still very useful for some things.  I typically put my fighters and bombers on attack move and my missile frigates and other long-range stuff on paint-attack (because they save a lot of time by moving onto the next "box" when all the previous targets are dead, instead of actually moving to the designated point).  Attack move has the advantage of going after stuff even if it wasn't in the area to begin with.

FRD is a bad idea in attacks (from what I read)

Generally, yes.  Putting your cleanup drones on FRD isn't that bad an idea, depending on how much fire they take.

I don't like to micro targets, but the auto-attack doesn't quite seem to give me what I thought it would, because my fighters/bombers are still fairly spread out along a vector and it appears (though this may not be the case) that not all of them are in range of the target(s).

The automatic logic for selecting targets (when you haven't given explicit orders) is actually really sophisticated; the game burns quite a lot of its cpu budget on evaluating and sorting targets.  The automatic logic for chasing and firing on an already-selected target isn't rocket science, but I'm not aware of any particular problems with it.  They should certainly all get in range; have you seen any confirmable/reproducible cases of that?  And by "spread out along a vector" do you mean that they spread out into a line and don't hit all at once?  You can use Group-Move (G+right-click) to have all ships in the selection maintain the same speed, and Formation-Move (J+right-click) to have them offset their destination by their current offset from the averaged-center of the selection; the upshot is that G+J+right-click makes them maintain the same relative positioning while moving.  There are also interface features for making those movement modes "stick".

Of course it's also better to focus fire on a single target to take it out quickly rather than spreading fire evenly, but I'm not sure how that is modeled in the game.

Focus fire is not always advantageous, it's a complicated thing.  But yea in general I'm a huge fan of the "minimize the area under the enemy's damage-over-time curve" approach, so I added a couple control nodes ("Sniper Focus-Fire" and "Non-Sniper Focus-Fire") that will make your ships somewhat modified auto-target-selection logic to make stuff die as fast as possible.  Bear in mind that this won't necessarily mean that ALL your ships fire on target 1, then target 2, etc, it's quite likely that your fighters will all fire on one target, your bombers on another, your missile frigates on another, etc.  That's because they have rather different bonuses against different target types and are trying to optimize their damage output.

[licker]

Good stuff Keith, really helping me understand what I'm seeing (or think I'm seeing, since I may just not be recognizing it correctly).

The ships on the 'vector' are lining up this way SHIPS------------->TARGET so there is a range spread within the fleet (withing the same class of ship, I understand that fighters would have a different position than bombers potentially), not sure if that matters, but does seem they should 'clump' or make a T more.  Though, again, perhaps that's just how I think it should look, but the actual performance is exactly fine.  Though to some degree this could also be me mixing MarkI and IIs...  hmmm, I'd have to check again the composition of the fleets.

Anyway, it's the demo, so as you note, some things have changed.  I appreciate your insights though, even if they don't all apply anymore to the demo version, I think once I feel I have a better understanding of the mechanics I'll  jump into the full version though, don't worry 

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, you should be able to get the beta updates in the demo version without a problem.  The demo is actually exactly the same program, it just has logic to apply a few limitations if you haven't entered a serial key

There's an updates button on the main menu that you could give a try.

On the ships-lining-up-along-the-vector thing that's because the ships are (generally) all trying converge on that one point.  If you use Formation-Move (J+Right-click) they will actually pick a destination offset from the clicked point such that when they all get there they will be in the same relative position to each other (that's probably confusing, but if you try it you'll see).  Combine that with Group-Move (G+J+right-click all told) and they maintain the same speed and thus the same relative positioning throughout the entire move

[Ozymandiaz]

I find using lots of cleanup drones reduces the damage they are likely to take since the cleanup is so quick

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, they're pretty cheap too, so if you have a big clump of them you can just V-right-click to FRD anchor them in deep space, and they'll teleport out to take care of remains as needed.

[Lancefighter]

on the subject of starships...


I am a fairly heavy starship guy. I love starships. In any given game, you will probably see me unlocking spire starships before any regular ship is mk2 :p

By the end, ill probably have picked up the entire riot line, and mk2 sieges..

generally, riots and fleet starships work well together, but i ALWAYS ALWAYS have a scout starship with them. You absolutely can not deny that the countersniper (and counter-spider!) flarestuff is amazing. Oh yeah, and the tachyons are nice too i suppose. (they see about as much use as the coutnersniper part... so a lot :p )
Thankfully, sieges dont need countersniper support, and if they are close enough to hostiles that the tachyons are useful, you have an even bigger problem ^^
On the other hand, if you have ZR, you should ALWAYS keep a cloaking starship with both groups. Oh man soooo useful.

[Diazo]

Here's some more details on the tachyon units, there are 3 units of note that have it.

Tachyon drone: You start the game with this unlocked. It's a cheap, slow, with a short-ranged tachyon emission. For use when the AI is throwing the occasional cloaked ship at you, but it's tachyon range is so short any sort of serious cloaked ship attack will destroy the drone as almost everything in the game has a longer weapon range then it.

Scout Starship: Again, short ranged tachyon emission but much speedier. Attache a couple of these to your offensive fleet so it has tachyon along with it (and scout ability and counter-sniper aswell.) Not something I build straight off usually though.

The Decloaker: Has to be unlocked with knowledge but has a decently high HP and a very long range tachyon emitter with a 15,000 range. For comparison, missile frigates have a 10,000 attack range. However, since this costs knowledge, I only unlock it when I'm fighting a stealth type AI or the AI has multiple cloaking ship types unlocked.

There are other ships with tachyon ability in the game, but these are the main three that I use.

That's my $0.02 anyway.

D.

[Lancefighter]

tachyon drones are cloaked, however, so if you just need them for start of game wh defense, they dont die too often.

I have used them as suicide units before lighting warheads to 'tag' hostile tachyon emitters (cloaked ships ignore aoe) so i can slip in cloaked units

[TheMachineIsSentient]

A point on interface usability when you are selecting... Here are some alternate methods:

On the right side of your screen, you will see all kinds of little square boxes with icons. You can select your control groups, all ships of the given type on a planet, targets of interest, and more!

If you go to the galaxy screen, you can click on the find tool and select ships of a given type.

On the bottom of your screen, you can see the number of ships you have selected. You can click on this and it will show you the composition of your fleet selected. You can select any ship on this menu and it will select all ships of that given type in your selected group! This is also very handy for gauging relative health of ships.

I hope this helps. I actually use all of these features for the interface, as some are globally useful like the galaxy screen or just per-planet ( most everything else).

I forgot to add... Engineers,  max them out and try to get level II engineers at least. These are like medics for most everything in the game- including your fleet ( press v+ctrl+right click to have them heal anything damaged during an offensive)- and they also increase the build speeds of your production facilities.

[licker]

Thanks for the tips guys.

I've got a bit of a cold tonight, and will be out of town for the weekend, but I'll probably be thinking about what to try when I get back  

Edit:  DLed the beta and the upgrades to the demo, but wow, things are different eh?  Turned off the two upgrades, but am still confused by all the new stuff I am starting with...

Advice?  Are the Manufactorys off at the start?  They didn't appear to be.

[Lancefighter]

the manufactories change one resource into another, and are inefficient - itd be pointless to have them all running at once. If you need one resource and have space of the other, they will turn on though