Prerelease 3.189 (Balance Changes And Bugfixes)

[Spikey00]

If you really don't have any knowledge to spare towards MK2/3 bombers, then load the starships into the transport, destroy command station, cap planet, clean up with starships?

[Diazo]

... your not getting this - without the starships, how am i supposed to conquer the planet in the first place! My entire game revolves around the use of these starships . . .

I even unlocked mk2 dreads for a reason i cant fathom (mostly to spend resources, actually). Somehow the benefit of having more dps at that range wasnt useful really :\ in the end, it more than doubled the survivibility of my dreadnought stack, so it wasnt that bad :p

Ya, siege's are kind of in an odd spot at the moment.

For me, they are the clean up ship. I take out the AI's long range stuff with my main fleet, and suffer the losses to do so, then bring the seiges in to clean the system up without taking any more losses past that point.

If there's a single long range structure left in the system (fortress/mass driver/neinzul cluster) those siege's don't come through, period.

They are simply too fragile to take part in a fleet engagement, at least for my resource levels. I can't afford to lose even a single siege taking a system without having to sit for a few minutes realtime at +1 speed to wait for my ships (both siege and fleet) to rebuild.

D.

[Lancefighter]

.. .starships? .in a transport? preposterous. Most notably because i am INCREDIBLY careful when it comes to keeping my starships alive - even the CHANCE that one of them is in range of a fortress of OMD is too much.... Same reason i didn't use my siege starships to suicide the fortresses... even though my economy could probably take the hit, I am too scared of losing my precious starships!

Keep in mind each kill they get increases their exp too! my spires are almost ready to hit level 10  

I wish :x


Also, two things contribute to the success of my siege starships as a fleet supplement - A cloaker starship... and very very very very careful fleet maneuvers.



Now, if only the gods be damned forcefield bearers wouldn't stop every single <insert expletive here> siege shot!
I swear, the AI invents forcefield bearers right after i bring out siege starships.

[keith.lamothe]

Out of curiosity, has anyone tried the "mobile beach-head" approach with the sieges?  As in:

1) Clear the wormhole with the normal fleet.
2) Warp in a ff generator.
3) Warp in sieges, make sure they stay under the ff.
4) Place sieges and ff in formation-move and group-move, and move them towards the siege target.

Of course, I forget if OMDs fire through forcefields, but I'm pretty sure fortresses don't

And sorry about the siege shots and ff-bearer bug, definitely on the early-fix list when we have a unity version ready for prerelease.

[superking]

.. .starships? .in a transport? preposterous. Most notably because i am INCREDIBLY careful when it comes to keeping my starships alive - even the CHANCE that one of them is in range of a fortress of OMD is too much.... Same reason i didn't use my siege starships to suicide the fortresses... even though my economy could probably take the hit, I am too scared of losing my precious starships!

A full cap of flagships & Zenith starships can destroy a fortress with no losses, even if being attacked by other stuff; since the 2x HP buff, these guys can absorb incredi huge amounts of damage

[Lancefighter]

.. but can they destroy a fortress at max range from the wh if they have to deal with a grav driller? >.>


In reality, its a non-issue, my standard tactic is to keep my starship task groups under cover of a cloaker starship (those things are countersnipers AND counter-dark-matter!.. AND cloak! now, if only they had tachyons so I wouldnt need to bring a scout starship >.>)

Kieth, while fortresses dont shoot through shields, and they certainly dont have a bonus against them (checked with my own forts), they still put out a TON of damage with their multiple shots...enough to take down a forcefield easily before the sieges get in range, if the AI is paying attention. And I like to keep my precious starships safe

Of course, i still have to hope that the damn ff bearers arent on top of the fort........... i swear, those things make me rip my hair out

[Diazo]

It sounds like you have a fortress in a grav driller system?

Even against a Mk III fortress, a ship cap of Mk I bombers wins while only losing maybe 20 bombers.

If there's other stuff around, you'll need to bring along decoys to allow the bombers to focus on the fortress, but the fortress doesn't have a chance once you can manage that.

Then use transports, a bunch of empty ones screening the ones with your actual ships, to cross the grav driller system to the fortress.

Starships are very nice and I tried a game unlocking primarily starships but I still ended up using my fleet ships just as much.

You can expose your fleet to an ion cannon and just eat the losses, you can't afford to expose your starships to a OMD and replace your losses, costs too much.

D.

[Fleet]

So far, I use sieges to clear out a system once mobile forces are gone, and very often to destroy the command station / shield guard posts in the first place to clear it out (using transports and cloaker starships). I have defense forces waiting on the other side of exit wormholes.

I have not used the siege starships in a beachhead operation yet. It almost always seems easier to just hit the command station or guard posts using tranports with sieges and cloaker starships, sometimes bringing riots to control mobile ships that get too close.

[Spikey00]

--

I wish there was some way you could just salvage a golem right on the spot without repairing it.  Annoying that your engineers automatically go to assist it, and how it multiplies AI waves.  I don't have enough power to toggle it on so I can suicide it into AI-land, and I needed the engineers to assist all the fabs on the planet...

What a pain.

Furthermore, cursed golems are useless, and suck a lot of economy with it, even with 55.9/s.

[Lancefighter]

once you build it, you CAN turn it off! Or maybe thats only the regeneration golem(only one I've put together in a while).. but yeah, worst case you can build it and move it somewhere back where nobody cares about it, and leave it offline to save energy.

[zebramatt]

--

I wish there was some way you could just salvage a golem right on the spot without repairing it.  Annoying that your engineers automatically go to assist it, and how it multiplies AI waves.  I don't have enough power to toggle it on so I can suicide it into AI-land, and I needed the engineers to assist all the fabs on the planet...

What a pain.

Furthermore, cursed golems are useless, and suck a lot of economy with it, even with 55.9/s.

If you want your engineers to not bother repairing it when it's in low power mode, there's a control node for that!

[Spikey00]

Well, it still causes 3X AI waves even if it is put into low-power mode or non-repaired--useless hunk of junk!  I eventually brought it online and suicided it with speed boosters; 150 speed golem is hilarious.

A wave actually was sent to the planet (1 000 MK2 bombers) with four fabs to a wormhole right on two of them, so I started to construct a lot of forcefields over those two.  Turns out the AI wave spawned, got caught up around the radius of the forcefield and I doubt they ever shot at anything because the AI was, I assumed, trying to go for the golem instead and so they didn't fire at anything for some reason.  After about 30 seconds they all disappeared to my main fleet and beam starships because they were all piled up.

[superking]

FF bearers could probably use some love... they are the only FF that dosnt have some kind of regeneration 

[Lancefighter]

THE HELL WITH THAT

FF bearers got enough boost as they EVER will need with the ability to stop an entire starship line from being useful just by BEING THERE.

(yes, i mad)

[superking]

to clarify, I'm talking about the fleet ship FF bearer, not the FF gen structure