Military command station discussion

[rabican]

MarkII doubles the damage of your turrets ---> Waves will be stopped faster.

Mark II adds 50%  not double. Also gives more transloc shots with much bigger range and increases tachyon coverage. Overall i think its best command station upgrade, especially if you defend multiple points. 5 spider turrents and mk II CMD station alone can take out over 100 units pretty easily.

Harverster exo is definately your friend if you do this though.

2 Things i dislike about translocation effect .

1# is that it is pretty unclear what gets translocated and what not.

2# is that especially with higher marks the translocators translocate ships so that they are still inside range. Sometimes you shoot same ship 10 times in a row and it just hops around all over the place while pack of other ships melt your FFs.

[Kahuna]

MarkII doubles the damage of your turrets ---> Waves will be stopped faster.

Mark II adds 50%  not double. Also gives more transloc shots with much bigger range and increases tachyon coverage. Overall i think its best command station upgrade, especially if you defend multiple points. 5 spider turrents and mk II CMD station alone can take out over 100 units pretty easily.

Oh crap! MarkIII doubles the damages ye ye.. Anyway 50% more damage is pretty good. And thanks for pointing that out.

[KDR_11k]

I think the utility depends on your playstyle as well. If you're playing at a low difficulty like 7 and like to keep your territory connected you get a huge advantage from paving it all with log stations as your ships can quickly race to any system that's under attack. An isolated system might be better off with a mil station since it can't get reinforcements as easily and may need to hold attackers off much longer.

[Martyn van Buren]

Also to answer the original point, if you have to defend two points and you really want to use a mil station for some reason, why not whack it on one and a lot of FF's and turrets on the other?  Translocation + the AI liking to attack command stations should ensure that the ships will get pretty dispersed and are unlikely to hit your second point in anything like their full strength.

[Lancefighter]

Because I need every turret defending .. oh ill throw up a save in a second.

Ok, there we go.

When that exo-wave actually hits is when I lost that game, pretty sure. Mightve been the next one, cant remember. I could probably pull up autosaves.. but its not that important.

What is important is that *there arent enough turrets there to stop waves*. Exo waves will destroy forcefields in a very short time. and I dont really have the spare turret cap for multiple places.

[TechSY730]

Not really sure that's a valid argument for turrets being underpowered. If the AIP (or other ways of "pissing off" the AI) gets high enough, eventually the ferocity of the AI is so much even for a cap of EVERYTHING the human can get their hands on optimally placed and managed can handle. Does that mean everything is underpowered? No, rather you shouldn't let the AI get that "mad" at you in the first place.

Now, of course, the question is how high is a good "balance point" of AIP before caps of a reasonable amount of buildable stuff unlocked, and how does that vary with difficulty?
These are tricky questions.

(And keep in mind, there is no such balance point for difficulty 10 )


EDIT: I am not saying that turrets are or are not underpowered. Rather I am saying that the fact that the AI can get strong enough to overcome the max reasonable potential of turrets is not a strong enough argument for being underpowered. Rather, you need to give a good case that this point is hit fast enough to make turrets not really worth it or it reaches that point fast enough to the detriment of the "fun factor" of the game.
EDIT2: And also not be on difficulty 10. If you can show degenerate behavior on anything <10 (even 9.7), then you have a case.

[doctorfrog]

Interesting to see peoples thoughts.

My breakdown is the Military Station is a 'wall' that the AI bashes its head against, combined with turrets, including some sniper, I can pretty much ignore the system and be off doing stuff with my fleet.

Yes, I have stragglers but the turrets kill them eventually.

Logistics on the other hand are like mud. They don't actually stop the AI, they just slow it down. They are much weaker then military stations when left alone, but if you turn your attention to a system with a logistics station and micro, logistics are much more powerful as the slow enables you to pick apart an AI wave.

Which is why I like Military Commands as they are now, the translocating shots vastly increase the survivability of them, which is what I want as my attention is off in another system somewhere and it is on its own.

D.

This is mostly how I see them as well. I'm mostly a 7 player (arguably the type of player the game should be adjusted towards, as "Normal difficulty" is probably what the majority of players use). Even in a poorly defended system, a Mil station can give me quite a bit of time to rally a defense, as the translocation shots act as an inverted form of kiting. It's the cartoon version of a bully holding off a nerdy kid as the nerd flails frustratingly out of reach.

[Diazo]

When that exo-wave actually hits is when I lost that game, pretty sure. Mightve been the next one, cant remember. I could probably pull up autosaves.. but its not that important.

What is important is that *there arent enough turrets there to stop waves*. Exo waves will destroy forcefields in a very short time. and I dont really have the spare turret cap for multiple places.

Careful here, an exo-wave comes because you have extra toys of some sort enabled.

You are supposed to have to use said toys to defend against the exo-wave, not leave it to your turrets.

Or, an exo-wave is supposed to be able to overpower turrets alone if you don't back them up with the toys you have enabled to trigger the exo-wave.

Accounting for AIP, game length, and so on of course. An early game exo should be small enough to be handled by turrets, but a late game exo should walk over your turrets if you don't back them up.

(In my opinion as I currently understand game balance.)

D.

[Lancefighter]

Meh. After playing a few more games, I clearly need to reevaluate how I play this game. I keep getting hit by combinations of spire shard recovery waves, and normal waves at the same time.

Not really sure if the problem is "i need to be more careful about waves", or "i need to lower the difficulty".. Maybe I should just set both of the ais to turtles, and then slowly and surely dominate them with my massive tools of domination. (note: The game in which I linked, one was a turtle. I havent seemed to manage to get past 3 hours or so without one of them turtling)

[KDR_11k]

I think the AI just knows when its units will arrive and tries to time waves to coincide with that.

[Varone]

After looking at your choke points i made some adjustments based on how i defend. I feel your allowing the enemy to spread out in your system way too much. They just charge through your turrets blasting them to pieces and dilute your defence power.

If you look at the save i've encircled the wormhole where they come in with shields so they are trapped when they come in. They can't get to any of your turrets and they waste shots on mines and the shields. If you could place your spire city within reach of the wormhole but not so near that the shields overlap the wormhole you should be able to hold these systems for a long time into the game.

This method benefits from unlocking more beam turrets so you can quickly deal with hunter killers when they come and focus the beam damage on all the incoming ships.

With this setup i reccomend military stations for the boost and the quick rebuild if a raid ship snipes it. Logictic stations have no use if the enemy can't even move.

[Lancefighter]

I consider the whole 'entrapment by forcefields' thing a form of cheese, tbh.  I mean I can see its application, I just dont want to use it.
Otherwise, It occurs to me that save is about an hour early :\ I didn't save the game after i built my third and fourth cities, i think.

And finally - I lost that game to raid starships ignoring forcefields >_>

[ZaneWolfe]

Actually I find Military command stations to be incredibly useful, but then that may very well be because of my particular play style. I tend to play 7s with Golems, Spirecraft, Botnet, and Fallen Spire enabled (actually all 4 of those I always have) on Maze style maps. A Spire City with a Military Command, using the MKI and MKII Spirecraft Attritioners, as well as spider and sniper turrets, can hold off almost any normal wave the AI throws at me. Throw in some Heavy Beam Cannons, add Counter-Sniper/Missile/Dark Matter turrets, and a grav turret, all of which are covered inside the City Shields, and you have a choke point that can fend off most exo forces without needing micro or even a fleet to defend it.

The translocating shots bounce around enemy fleet ships while the spider and snipers tear them apart. The Attritioners are doing 7.8k per second to everything not immune to attrition damage. Add in the counter turrets on the City to reduce the things that can fire on the shields, the grav turret to prevent things like Eye Bots or Raid Starships from diving the command station or the turrets through the shields, while the Heavy Beam Cannons just add to the sheer power of the city defenses against the few things that are not being bounced all over the planet by the command station. Later on, I start putting some Mobile Repair Stations and Golems in there just to make sure it never gets breached.

Admittedly this is a niche build, and I might be the only person who plays like this, but I feel that it goes to prove that properly utilized the Military Command stations can be incredibly powerful. It may be a niche piece of tech, but used right it fills that niche very well IMO.

-edited for better reading/spellcheck

[keith.lamothe]

I think the AI just knows when its units will arrive and tries to time waves to coincide with that.

Wave timing is totally independent of other waves or other forms of attack, actually   But eventually it will happen upon the right timing.

[Sunshine!]

I really like military command stations, I'll pave all my planets with mk1 stations.  If a small enemy force manages to get through while you're occupied elsewhere, the translocating ability will keep the enemy force bouncing around not doing anything, keeping supply lines intact while you deal with whatever else is going on.

Mk3 military command stations are complete monsters.  A mk3 military command station will make a mk1 ship or turret do mk2 damage, mk2 ship or turret do mk4 damage, and mk3 ship or turret do mk6 damage.  I also believe that a currently-tractored ship will not be translocated, so if you've got a strongpoint you need to defend from an exo-wave and you've got enough tractor beams, you just need to deal with the larger ships that aren't getting tractored.

Maybe just adding in a toggle for the translocator would be okay?  Or make the military command station mk1 cost 250 knowledge to unlock, make it modular, and give it the option of a translocator, multiplex tractor beam, forcefield, or some kind of higher damage weapon?