Plasma starships vs non-combat stuff.. cloaked, under forcefields.

[Draco18s]

Flak are too short ranged.

Either you cluster them around your command station so they can hit those pesky melee units trying to eat your command station (then the plasma siege snipes with impunity) or you cluster them around the wormhole and hope to god that no cloaking, FF immune units escape.

[Kahuna]

Give them Radar Dampening so Missile Frigates/Plasma Sieges have to come in range.

Also that's a bad way to use Flaks. First of all all turrets should be placed between the Command Station and the wormhole. Then place Flaks in front of the other turrets and cover them with Force Fields.

[Draco18s]

That still puts them in front, covered by a force field, where the plasma siege can then peg the forcefield with impunity.  Which it will probably do.

Edit:
Which *math* does 1,250,000 to everything under the FF (over the course of the bombardment that it takes to kill the FF).  Flaks have *gasp* 1,240,000 health.  Oops.

[Kahuna]

And the Flaks are durable enough to not give a shit. If they do. Have Rebuilders near by. Or hell.. remove the FF if you want.

EDIT: Flaks, Lightning and Tractor Turrets always die last when I play. The Force Fields always die first.

[Draco18s]

And the Flaks are durable enough to not give a shit. If they do. Have Rebuilders near by. Or hell.. remove the FF if you want.

See my edit.

You're trying to protect against a unit with the very thing that that unit WTFmurders.

If you remove the force field, the flak won't survive ten seconds, because everything else in the wave will basically just kill them.  Flak are not that durable.

[Kahuna]

Hmm ok. Then it must be the Rebuilders that "keep the Flaks alive".

[Lancefighter]

Keep in mind the goal here is to protect the spacedock(analog for a useful building), not the turrets! turrets can explode all over the place as long as the irreplaceable capturable remains not-dead. 

[Draco18s]

Hmm ok. Then it must be the Rebuilders that "keep the Flaks alive".

Provided that they, too, are not under it.

Keep in mind the goal here is to protect the spacedock(analog for a useful building), not the turrets! turrets can explode all over the place as long as the irreplaceable capturable remains not-dead.

Quite.  And my issue with the plasma siege is that there isn't a "true" counter to it other than "throwing everything at it and see which survives."  Even with my fleetball on-planet I still have to micro my bombers and other anti-artillery units to focus on the plasma siege.

[Toranth]

Flak are too short ranged.

This seems to be true.  The range of a Flak turret (5000) is less than half the range of a Needler or Laser turret (10500, 12000).  It's about 60% the range of a Lightning turret (8000), despite the fact that the Lightning 'range' is pure AOE and can hit up to 200 units in that 8000 radius, while the Flak can only hit 5-7 units in a 500 radius at a maximum distance of 5000.
Of course, hitting 5 targets, a Flak can do 13,000 DPS before bonuses, while a Lightning turret doing max damage (40-200 targets) can only do 1,400 DPS, or almost 90% less.
So, it may be worth it to drop off a little range in exchange for 9 times as much damage.
(Or maybe the Lightning turret needs a little buff?  1,400 DPS is 1/2-1/3 other turrets, except Spider - which has infinite range, Engine Damage, Armor Piercing, and bigger multipliers).

Their point isn't to be better than FFs ... but to provide a way of getting more FFs and also have a tactical wrinkle.

And this is what they get used for in my games.  A FF to protect something is better than nothing.  Even if HFFs were purely worse, they'd still be useful just to have more FFs.

That still puts them in front, covered by a force field, where the plasma siege can then peg the forcefield with impunity.  Which it will probably do.

Edit:
Which *math* does 1,250,000 to everything under the FF (over the course of the bombardment that it takes to kill the FF).  Flaks have *gasp* 1,240,000 health.  Oops.

It takes 200 seconds for a Plasma Siege Starship to kill a Mk I Forcefield.  With the same last shot that killed the FF, it would also kill up to 25 Flak turrets that were somehow under the FF the entire time.
During those 200 seconds, each Flak turret would do 390,000 damage to the Plasma Siege.  So it takes 26 Flak turrets to be able to kill a Plasma Siege starship before it kills the FF they're under.  A full cap of Flak (48) vs a full cap of Plasma Siege starships (2) is an easy win for the Flak, thanks to Flak's AOE.

Considering that Flak are designed to murderize low-hp swarmer units, not duke it out with slow artillery starships, this hardly seems unreasonable.

[Draco18s]

Flak are too short ranged.

This seems to be true.  The range of a Flak turret (5000) is less than half the range of a Needler or Laser turret (10500, 12000).  It's about 60% the range of a Lightning turret (8000), despite the fact that the Lightning 'range' is pure AOE and can hit up to 200 units in that 8000 radius, while the Flak can only hit 5-7 units in a 500 radius at a maximum distance of 5000.
Of course, hitting 5 targets, a Flak can do 13,000 DPS before bonuses, while a Lightning turret doing max damage (40-200 targets) can only do 1,400 DPS, or almost 90% less.
So, it may be worth it to drop off a little range in exchange for 9 times as much damage.
(Or maybe the Lightning turret needs a little buff?  1,400 DPS is 1/2-1/3 other turrets, except Spider - which has infinite range, Engine Damage, Armor Piercing, and bigger multipliers).

You mean 15 times as much damage as a lightning turret (14.8288, to be more precise).
And no, for turrets "more damage at the expense of range" is not a good trade.  Range is everything for a turret, because it can't move.

That still puts them in front, covered by a force field, where the plasma siege can then peg the forcefield with impunity.  Which it will probably do.

Edit:
Which *math* does 1,250,000 to everything under the FF (over the course of the bombardment that it takes to kill the FF).  Flaks have *gasp* 1,240,000 health.  Oops.

It takes 200 seconds for a Plasma Siege Starship to kill a Mk I Forcefield.  With the same last shot that killed the FF, it would also kill up to 25 Flak turrets that were somehow under the FF the entire time.
During those 200 seconds, each Flak turret would do 390,000 damage to the Plasma Siege.  So it takes 26 Flak turrets to be able to kill a Plasma Siege starship before it kills the FF they're under.  A full cap of Flak (48) vs a full cap of Plasma Siege starships (2) is an easy win for the Flak, thanks to Flak's AOE.

Considering that Flak are designed to murderize low-hp swarmer units, not duke it out with slow artillery starships, this hardly seems unreasonable.

Oh I agree that Flak are designed to murderize low-hp swarmers, not artillery starships.  Someone suggested giving Flak a bonus against artillery for precisely this (poor) use.  Which is why I was arguing that it was stupid.

Also, if it takes 26 (!) of them to deal with a single plasma siege with Force Field protection, then they're doing a really shitty job of dealing with the problem.  The whole point of the turret rebalance several versions ago was to make it so that fewer turrets were needed on every planet.  Effectively every 1 turret we have now is the equivalent of I think 5 turrets from sometime before 4.0.

Giving them a damage bonus against artillery isn't going to change that, either.

[MaxAstro]

...I remember when the running complaint about dreadnaughts was how pointless they are.

Ah, bubble sort at work. 

I definitely agree that plasma siege starships are singularly more dangerous than any equivalent starship the AI can throw at you other than raid starships.  However, I love how useful they are in player hands and don't want to see my lovely anti-forcefield team get nerfed.

I still think making hardened FFs be hardened against plasma siege attacks is a good compromise, even if it means reducing the cap on HFFs (or maybe only giving higher mark ones the protection).

[Aklyon]

Lightning turrets, they can stand up to getting shot at some. They'll still die if theres too much ship, but such is the fate of a frontline turret.
Flak turrets are mostly helpful as not terribly durable decoys for anything else you have in the front.

[Lancefighter]

Did some testing - Hardened forcefields mitigate 62.5% of a plasma siege shot. As in hardened forcefields are always worse against plasma siege than regular forcefields. They DO seem to pass that mitigation along to things under them - A space dock, which normally dies in 6 hits while under a forcefield (which dies in 25 hits), will take 17 hits while under a hardened forcefield.

However, this is only against Mk1 plasma siege. Where a mk2 plasma siege will deal 100k to things under a normal forcefield, 

Since bbcode is not my strong point, I made a spreadsheet.


This should be readable. Its really not, but whatever.

To me, this seems to show a few critical flaws - One, Hardened forcefields are actually still as terrible as I thought they were, and two, it takes four hits for a mk3 plasma siege to destroy a spire civilian leader under a forcefield. Six, if under a hardened. That takes 24 seconds. 24. (or 40).

[ZaneWolfe]

I still feel that Hardened FF needs more than just an HP buff. They need to do SOMETHING other than be just a rather thin wall.

[Kahuna]

Increasing their armor to 999999 would help too.