How do you kill all the little ships?

[Tridus]

I started up another new game today. Things are a lot harder now.

In particular a "splinter faction" even occurred on a planet, and I went to do that. I killed a couple of ships no problem. But one of them seemed to have an endless supply of smaller ships (interceptors, lancers, cutters, things like that).

How in the world are you supposed to deal with those things? There was so many of them that shooting the flagship was literally impossible most of the time, as shots did not get through to the flagship. Trying to attack the smaller ships didn't work, because the sheer numbers made that totally impractical. The anti swarm lasers took some of them out, but not nearly enough... and using them left me a sitting duck for anything that wasn't killed because I wasn't moving for the rest of the turn.

That one flagship and its super army wiped me out and I'm not really sure how I was supposed to fight it. Is this a case of just having to run away?

[keith.lamothe]

2 things come to mind:

1) Gravity Lance.  It hits everything on the line, and it hits what it shoots at (no travel time).

2) Lacking that, possibly use the fire-at-point firing mode to aim where you think the most little ships will be during the turn, and fire the gun most likely to kill them.


But I don't think any of the combats are necessarily "just run away" unless you accidentally walk into some huge 100% hostile blob.  Or possibly if the race is massively ahead in tech.  If you've got a situation against just a flagship or two that seems unwinnable, a save would be helpful to us

[Tridus]

This was like the fourth mission I did (the other three were smuggling), so it's probably not any kind of crazy tech. There was just so many ships that I couldn't do enough damage to actually thin them out, let alone get at the flagship that was in the middle of the pile.

If it happens again I'll try to grab a save. I was annoyed enough this time to not think to grab the autosave from before I died.

[Tridus]

I'm beginning to think that maybe this combat model just isn't for me. After being blown up five more times in the last 10 minutes by taser turrets or other ships just whittling me down, I'm just frustrated at the game.

Maybe I'll drop it down to easy and see if I can get far enough to actually do something on the solar map, because I've barely touched that part of the game at all.

(Feels like I'm not really doing anything as a tester, because I'm just not "getting it" when it comes to the combat and I keep getting killed super early. It's a pretty far cry from how far I got in the Bionic Dues test or into some of the AI War stuff. I really don't know why stuff isn't clicking this time. )

[x4000]

Well, as a tester this part actually can be really useful for us, too.  I think that the combat balance in the current version is a little on the hard side, in terms of your bullets not going fast enough to catch some enemies properly.  It's definitely gone up a lot in difficulty, to be sure.

THAT said, even if you drop the combat difficulty down to You Are So OP difficulty mode (I'm going to put that back in the quick start options list, I think), then it should still be a plenty hard game at the solar map level.  The game is meant to be difficult even if you win every engagement, so if difficult engagements are your trouble, there's no shame in dropping the combat difficulty down and keeping on trucking.  There are plenty of people who play on diff 5 or 6 in AI War and have a blast, you know?  I play on 7, because I don't like the stress of 8.  So I mean, it's whatever makes you have a good time, and let's you play the parts you enjoy.

[keith.lamothe]

in terms of your bullets not going fast enough to catch some enemies properly.

That is a tricky thing to get used to.

On the other hand, I wouldn't want the enemy shots to go a whole lot faster.  Maybe the missiles could go faster (they're generally so slow can't cover the distance to me unless I'm _really_ close to the firing ship, as in "this was a mistake" close).

Anyway, speeding the player shots up to about 3x (maybe 2.5x; don't want to go too high as we've seen what happens when shots "jump" too far in a single frame) and leaving the enemy shots as-is might give a better feel.

[Tridus]

The shot speed would probably help, although my biggest problem in this case was just that the sheer number of smaller ships around that flag ship made it so that there wasn't a way to get a shot to the flagship without going to point blank range (and with that many ships it was suicidal to do that).

It was probably the shield regen change that really did me in. Before in that situation I could dump some power into the shields and even if I take a couple of shots it wasn't a huge deal. Now with how the regen stops, with so many things shooting it was extremely hard to avoid getting hit at all, but even a small number of hits wears you down quickly if you can't regenerate. Combine that with having so many targets that I just wasn't killing enough of them to really make a difference, and it was a pretty ugly situation.

[x4000]

Gotcha.  Generally speaking, as long as you keep moving and avoid the enemy shot trajectories, you can run through it pretty straightforwardly.  That said, the first battle was OP in the last version, and the bigger ships in particular were annoying.  I think you'll like the next version better (coming very soon).

[Tridus]

Actually, thinking about that, what is the point of transferring power to shields now? Doing so is only really useful if you're not getting hit so that extra power can do something.  But if you're not getting hit, do you really need any extra power there at all? I rarely need faster shield regeneration if I'm in no danger of being hit. If I am in danger of being hit, more engine power is a much better way to try and avoid that.

Previously if you knew you were going to get shot, you could dump power into shields to get tougher and eat some of it. That doesn't work now, but with it gone, why put extra power there? If you do and you take a hit, it's wasted.

Cool on the new version. I'll check it out later on he weekend.

[x4000]

For the shields, it's useful to have power there if you are in the midst of being fired at, and you can dodge the shots, and you then are going to recharge your shields quickly in a turn or so rather than over several turns.  That then gives you some leeway to take hits another few turns down the line.  The expectation is that you're not taking hits most turns anyway, so increasing the shields temporarily lets you shrink the gap between when you get hit and when you can next safely absorb another hit.