Shuttle trouble.

[snow2.0]

Hi,

I'm currently playing the trial, or trying to.

In a game against 2 ai4s, i've run into a bit of trouble: the second planet i want to take is a mark4 with an Advanced Research Station, but very lightly defended as is.
First there were about 60 defenders, which i quickly reduced to 16 hovering around the command station. Now, however, there are 7 electric shuttle mk4s among those, and the lot of them together seem to evaporate everything on contact.

I've looked at their description, and i really dont see how i'm supposed to proceed here. It says they have 7k range, and supposedly have -100% for frigs, bombers, fighter and laser gatlings, which is namely everything i have. Sending those in, however, they go poof in the first lightning strike.


Bugged or am i doing it wrong?

The -100% refer to them doing NO damage to fighters or frigates, dont they? Also, what do the xxx s mean, next to every ship type in the good/bad list? I do recall my standard and MRLS (or whatever ) turrets wouldnt even fire on Tanks.

[RCIX]

What you want to do is leverage the long range of the best frigates you can buy and pummel them from afar. The other way is to use a few "spotter" ships to set off the shuttles (takes more if you're playing with the latest prerelease since the shots are now staggered  ) then rush them with as many fighter as you can manage.

[snow2.0]

What you want to do is leverage the long range of the best frigates you can buy and pummel them from afar. The other way is to use a few "spotter" ships to set off the shuttles (takes more if you're playing with the latest prerelease since the shots are now staggered  ) then rush them with as many fighter as you can manage.

Of course i realized that my frigates have a range of 8k or that i could use their few seconds of reloading time, but i've set the game to fast fights, and even if i can micromanage it in this small fight, i dont see how it would work out in larger engagements.

[Captain Cake]

The -100% refer to them doing NO damage to fighters or frigates, dont they? Also, what do the xxx s mean, next to every ship type in the good/bad list? I do recall my standard and MRLS (or whatever ) turrets wouldnt even fire on Tanks.

You're misunderstanding how those comparisons work, I'm not too great at explaining stuff so I'll just quote this wiki page,

What Exactly Do "Strong Vs" And "Weak Vs" Indicate?
A: Contrary to what a lot of new players seem to assume, these are not indicative of "bonuses" or "penalties" against other ship types. Rather, this is empirical performance data based on the results of simulated matchups. Here's how it works:

1. The simulation takes equivalent numbers of each type of ship, and then makes them fight.

2. By "equivalent numbers" this means that the relative ship population caps ARE taken into account -- so the simulation would be 10 bombers against 10 cruisers, 10 cruisers/bombers against maybe 3 or 4 vampires, or 10 cruisers/bombers against maybe 30 laser gatlings, based all on their relative pop caps.

3. The results of all the various matchups are stored in the game data and reported to you through the Strong Vs and Weak Vs sections of your hovertips. The percentage is how much health the victor still had left when all of the losing ships were destroyed.

 - If your ship is 95% Strong against an enemy ship type, you know that given equivalent numbers of the two ship types, your ships will win and only take 5% damage.

 - If your ship is 50% Weak against an en enemy ship type, you know that you will probably need at least 2X the normal equivalent number of ships to even force a draw. If you have 3X the normal equivalent number of ships, then you will almost certainly win, but you'd be likely to take severe losses.
In this way, the Strong Vs and Weak Vs can help you really predict what the outcome of battles are, and what the best counters to enemy ships will be. There's so much else to focus on that we felt like having this information right in the interface was very needed.

Same Type Vs Same Type: The effectiveness of any given ship type against other ships of its same type is not generally reflected in Strong Vs and Weak Vs. This is because, given two same-size groups of identical ships, you are likely to have one ship barely survive from whichever group shoots first (unless there was superior tactical maneuvering, but the Strong/Weak simulations intentionally do not account for this since it is too dependent on player skill).

Some ship types are very strong against themselves, and others are unable to even hit ships of their same type (Shield Bearers, for instance, are unable to penetrate the shields of other Shield Bearers). So sometimes a ship can be an effective counter against itself, but not always. And there is usually a better option found in another ship type. Snipers are one big exception to this, since their extreme range makes it necessary that they be an effective counter to themselves.

Non-Military Ship Types: The Strong Vs and Weak Vs only includes military ship types, turrets, and other things of that sort which can fire. Some ships are stronger than others against other ships such as harvesters, command stations, constructors, force fields, or other heavy defenses. Mostly it just takes experimentation to see what works best with these, but some ships that have a specific weakness will note it.
Force Fields, Fortresses, And Other Heavy Defenses: Bombers and Space Tanks both have very significant bonuses against these types of ships. This is generally noted in the hovertext for the target itself.

Starships: Fighters have a moderate bonus against starships, and tend to be an excellent counter for them. For some of the more extreme AI-only starships (such as the Core Starship), other measures may also need to be employed (Mobile Force Fields, other ships pitching in, etc).

What is happening with you is your fighters are just vaporizing when they get in range so they don't have a chance to retaliate. However in the simulation it will be a proportional number of each ship type of the same mark. In the simulation the fighters aren't dying immediately so they have a chance to retaliate and once a handful of shuttles go down they're outta steam.

Also the XXXs beside the % represents how long the simulated battle took to complete. (*I'm not 100% sure about this someone please correct me if I'm wrong*)

I agree with RCIX, frigate might be the way to go here, though sniper turrets might work as well. Or you could try to bait them away from where you need to be and use spider turrets or something to destroy their engines, then they aren't a threat anymore and you can take then out at your leisure with ships that out range them.

[eRe4s3r]

Sending in starships would work too, if they are engine damaged you can pummel them with frigates.. or a fortress, or turrets (turrets would work really well too)

if all fails, build a forcefield on that planet and put a bunch of your fighters beneath it and move them in a group into range of the shuttles ;p

the -100% does not mean they do no damage, it only means that if both groups of ships would meet at their max caps and on EQUAL LEVEL the fighters would win, if you had MK4 fighters... that is.

MK1 fighters are not even in that calculation (which is why that entire strong vs weak tab is one huge non-information panel, it literally does not tell you how ships perform if the levels differ, its just a general guidance ie, fighters usually work well against shuttles of the same level ,p)

[snow2.0]

How is damage actually calculated then?
Until now, i guessed that the attack value was the damage/hit, before shields etc, and adjusted according to target weakness/strength.
What do the values shown indicate at all?

So far i've assumed that the Attack value showed damage done per shot, before defenses (shields, weakness/strength).

Now, in this example i have 7 shuttles with 3k attack each one-hit a frigate (-fleet of 150).
My previous assumption would've lead to an estimated damage of 21k, less than a frigates total 'health' and still before whatever defenses might be applied.



Edit: a bit of search-use (why is "relevance" the preferred order? how is something from mid 09 more relevant than any recent update?)
i've found out that shuttles have been boosted in 3.0, and that from 3.015 on to the unstable versions the nerfstick is continually beating away at them.

Well, nice. Those things had me scared. In fact they still do; just annihilated half my fleet by accident... again. The only counter for them in AI hands is bringing more ships with loads of HP and carefully navigate them around the border of the brizzling death zone. Or micro-managing the engine-crippling which i dont really see as an option. (Fun, not work, eh?)

Now, my question remains, what good is the attack value displayed? From the quote up there i gather that ships do not only use different weapon types for fun, but apparently also have armor of various kinds that is, however, NOT shown.

[x4000]

The beta versions are not particularly unstable, but they are not as polished as we would like.  Generally there's not a large risk of crashes or what have you, it's more a matter of balance being out of whack or whatever.  When crashes are reported -- they do happen -- we fix those extremely quickly.

At any rate, so yes, the beta versions currently have the shuttles adjusted.  The basic attack power is the general value that the ships will do against most other ships.  However, I personally pretty much never look at it.  If you want to know exactly how much one of your ships will do versus a specific target, you can select your ship and then hover over the target, and it will give you the exact damage it will deal, along with the percent change of hitting the target from your current location.  There is not a way to do this in reverse at present.

The main tool to use for telling which ships are good against which others is the strong/weak data.  Unfortunately, in some of the releases (I can't remember if 3.016 or not, but definitely 3.0), that data was out of date for shuttles specifically (but right for everything else). That was my oversight, and I apologize for that.  For an explanation of why the damage mechanisms work the way they do, please see this wiki topic.

Hope that helps!