Gratuitous Space Battles....

[MobBoss]

Me and a few friends of mine just picked this up off Steam, and was just wondering if anyone local had messed around with it, and if so, had any tips or suggestions ship designs, and/or tactics and your overall experience with it.

Thanks.

 

[Maniacal]

I have it on GamersGate but have not dared to touch it lest it gets in the way of studying. Everything I've heard about it has been great and I can't wait to install it in May.

 

[FriendlyFire]

I use frigates with most weapon slots and fill them with missles for long range missle fire, minimal shields and minial engines. These sit in the back well away from the enemy and provide a powerful firebase.

Heavy ships up front, Minimal engines, light armor a strong mix of lazer types for mid range, mix type of strong shields. Advance targeting, Advance shield regen. Any spare slots are filled up with anti fighter or more llikely mid range missles.

Anti fighter frigates, mid shields, light armor, anti fighter defences, easily take down enemy fighters and bombers. These sit just behind the big boys on mission where enemy uses fighters and safely swat down small fighters but are useless once it complete its role for the rest of the battle.

Given how many MMOs you play Mobboss you should have no problem with number/stat crunching you ideal ship and fleet. But I cleared all misson on hardest difficulty with my build handily

 

[MobBoss]

Very nice FF, sounds solid. I like the idea of the missile frigates. Thus far I have been cruiser heavy and using frigates and fighters as escort support for my heavies (anti-missile, anti-fighter).

Seems to go pretty quick and am making thousands of honor points each battle for unlocks.

Spent some time last night looking for a data spreadsheet, but couldnt find one. May have to do my own.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I just picked this game up with the DLCs on sale last week (via Steam). Absolutely loving it.

I'm always adjusting my ship designs to the point where I've had to adopt some naming conventions due to the sheer number of them, and after playing the Galactic Conquests (has to be purchased as a DLC ) I've captured many ships from other players' fleets and enjoy looking at how they make their ships. Sometimes you come up against a fleet you've just never seen anything like before. For instance I came across a 2 cruiser fleet that was so heavily armored my entire fleet was unable to do any damage to it. Or a fleet that was made up entirely of really fast frigates with short-range high-dps guns that rushed my ships and ripped them to shreds.

Lots of depth in this game.

 

[GoodGame]

I got this game plus the conquest mod. I like it in theory, and the execution is decent, but the gameplay pretty much leaves me cold. I've played it about 10 hours, and got bored (kind of want my $30 back to be honest). +1 for decent theme/battle music, and more professional looking than most indie Steam games.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Yeah, $30 is a bit steep. Getting the lot for $10 was a nicer proposition.

The game reminds me a little bit of the way I used to play Supreme Commander, where I'd play a multiplayer battle and then store the replay and probably watch the replay at least once or twice. For me at least, watching the replay was more captivating than the actual gameplay during the battle. You have more time to consider the tactics being deployed by your AI minions and how they can be improved in future.

It's really interesting IMO that they've pulled off a game where the player basically does nothing while the battle takes place. It just goes against what most people would assume to be basics of game design. It's also deliberately over the top. I saw this small blog post linked to on the GSB forum, where cliffski lays down the underlying idea of the game. Basically that it's a WW2 naval combat themed game but adapted for a space setting.

Apparently there's a similar-named land-based game on the way too. Probably Gratuitous Land or Tank Battles.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

I've played this game, but it was a few months ago and I haven't touched it much recently- I just have too many games to play and Starcraft 2/Team Fortress 2 are pretty big time sinks.