I dont feel like my champion does things in nebulas.

[Lancefighter]

This seems fairly straightforward. In a nebula, I feel like my champion has very little actual impact. Dont get me wrong, that isnt to say he is completely useless (I'm pretty sure most of the nebula missions if left alone would result in a loss), but sometimes I just dont feel like he does anything important.

In the majority of them, I do a lot of waiting around until my allied heavy units decide to actually do something useful (read: assault a base). At which point I support them by shielding them with the projected shields. And thats about it. I can sit there for a few minutes doing that, and then either the base is dead or I am out of energy. What use are my main guns? I dunno. Dont seem to be very useful. My modules I mean seem kinda important? Not really?

I honestly feel mostly constrained by "does the ai want to use its heavy ships to kill something yet". If that magically is yes, stuff happens. Otherwise..... *shrug*

Outside of nebulas, my champion is basically the strongest single ship in the galaxy. Inside of nebulas, I feel like it is only useful for the shields.

[orzelek]

For the outside part it's quite simple - you can get powerful champion with low AIP = you can decimate most things unless you hit some ship combinations that will do that to you.

In the nebulas champion is slower than anything and can't really close up to fortress. Barring things like flying in squares around dark spire fortress you can't really fight fortresses.
Fortunately after recent AI updates for nebulas your allies are quick in attacking and they defend also so you can go help attackers with shields.
I agree with the fact that most useful thing from champion in nebulas is shield. You can also quickly kill some of enemies due to human champion bonuses. As for other enemies.. they can get to 9m hp and champions dps is not up to tasks like that. You can chase them and try to kill them but it seems to help only a little.

[Soyweiser]

iirc the spire champion ship can shoot the fortresses rather well. The main beam weapon does a lot of damage.

[Bognor]

(Small point, but Chris prefers we don't use the R-word and suggests "reamed" or "decimated" or whatever.)

[Soyweiser]

@bognor, that is a good thing. I'm happy that I see that more and more in indie communities.

Also, decimated is a much cooler word to use than cuddly hug . The english language actually has a lot of different words for being totally destroyed by an enemy. I think the AI doesn't decimate, ream, nor does it destroy or erdicate. It only exterminates.

[LordSloth]

This seems fairly straightforward. In a nebula, I feel like my champion has very little actual impact. Dont get me wrong, that isnt to say he is completely useless (I'm pretty sure most of the nebula missions if left alone would result in a loss), but sometimes I just dont feel like he does anything important.

In the majority of them, I do a lot of waiting around until my allied heavy units decide to actually do something useful (read: assault a base). At which point I support them by shielding them with the projected shields. And thats about it. I can sit there for a few minutes doing that, and then either the base is dead or I am out of energy. What use are my main guns? I dunno. Dont seem to be very useful. My modules I mean seem kinda important? Not really?

I honestly feel mostly constrained by "does the ai want to use its heavy ships to kill something yet". If that magically is yes, stuff happens. Otherwise..... *shrug*

Outside of nebulas, my champion is basically the strongest single ship in the galaxy. Inside of nebulas, I feel like it is only useful for the shields.

The unfortunate problem is you can't retool IN a nebula easily (unless you park an engineer right outside, and then it's close enough to retool once a scenario is shown).

Before the scenario ships started to show better targeting, I retooled my frigate Champion with all Needler modules and shields. This had a huge impact on the number of Light armor hostiles (ones with a bonus against starbases) that I could take down. Now that they show smarter targeting, I have a bit more trouble intercepting enough of them for that to make a difference, and wish the speed modifier was gone. On the other hand, some of my co-op partners tooled up for heavy interception, and since the basic triangle in there is Heavy->Medium->Light (->Starbase), that made a difference too.

You can actually outright murder the starbases with just a little distracting ships from the AI, though it becomes much easier after you get Destroyer. A pair of heavy mount Missile Turrets does good damage while four of them can outright kill one of the smaller stations if you approach it from the right angle, even if you're in a shieldless Neinzul chassis.

[TechSY730]

I'd suggested somewhere to somehow make it such that only shield modules (and other modules that can potentially give up their life for the durability of the champion, any other such types are introduced) are unable to be built without engineer support. This will let you swap out weapon load-outs on the fly, but still prevent the #1 reason why the current system is the way it is now, to prevent rebuilding shields infinitely (thanks to their ultra low build time) and just cheesing the system that way.

[Kahuna]

It only exterminates.

LOL

[Mánagarmr]

At low levels (frigates) your champion is fodder in Nebulas. Once you get the Destroyer, you can start surviving for a bit against the forts and actually help. When you have the cruiser, nebulas are lol. You can take out a fort solo and have no issues beating the scenarios.

I've found that my best bet on low levels is to abuse the shadow shield to make the friendly NPCs live longer against the opposition.

[TechSY730]

At low levels (frigates) your champion is fodder in Nebulas. Once you get the Destroyer, you can start surviving for a bit against the forts and actually help. When you have the cruiser, nebulas are lol. You can take out a fort solo and have no issues beating the scenarios.

I've found that my best bet on low levels is to abuse the shadow shield to make the friendly NPCs live longer against the opposition.

Yea, it feels like the lower levels of champions may need a buff in stats, and the higher levels a nerf in stats. Maybe not a giant amount, but enough so such that nebulas aren't grind fests at first, but high levels don't make the whole game (both in and out of nebulas) trivial.

[Lancefighter]

I actually had the option of a spire destroyer with spire beam cannon modules.

Problem is, that wasnt really much of an option - It is difficult to micro spire beam weapons properly, compared to other weapons.. And it had very few weapon hardpoints. Id much rather just use the human destroyer with 12 hardpoints over the like 6 on the spire destroyer.

[Mánagarmr]

The Spire Destroyer has an absolute monster of a main cannon though. The Photon Lance melts any static or reasonably sized target.

[orzelek]

I tried to use spire frigate. Mounted it with rail cannon special two shields.. and not much more slots left.
It fared much worse in normal combat that human frigate. Fighting stationary things happens not that often - I didn't try to melt starbase with it. But I doubt it would work - they have hp in millions and damage on paper for that beam is 600k per 10 seconds.
And that rail gun is pathetic... takes up heavy slot and then spreads that dps into 10 ships which means none of them will die any time soon. Missiles at least kill what they are fired at not tickle all the stuff around.

Targeting is a bit problematic for most of modules - they will nicely spread fire around (even with focus fire toggle enabled) which means nothing actually dies from their fire. If you want them to shoot one ship you need to give direct attack order and repeat it quite often because they forget that targeting order. This becomes most visible in early nebula fights where your dps is not large and enemies tend to have lots of hp.

[TechSY730]

People may be interested in 9397: Change how Spire Beam weaponry works some to make them worthwhile in the average case, which has evolved into a discussion about how to make Spire Beams not lose quite so much of their effectiveness when faced with small, mobile targets.

Plus, compounding the issue, there are a few bugs where in some cases, the Spire beam will not extend again once the target they are shooting at is no longer being hit by the beam.

[Mánagarmr]

The Spire ship is excellent for siege-type warfare. Assaulting forts, forcefields and other robust things. Trying to use it for general wave defense or planet neutering is stupid at best, inane at worst

The Zenith ship is a mobile artillery cannon with some utility. Great for fighting sturdy, mobile things such as starships, guardians and golems.

The Human ships is a hardpoint monster, meant to nom copious amounts of smaller vessels, but won't deal optimal damage to siege-type targets.