Rad/Flux Shields Moo II

[scratchthepitch]

I'm almost sure heavy mount isn't required but the 3-5 point substraction can be possible.

I ran a test in a current game and regular beams will do damage, so my impression that you needed heavy beams is wrong. There was that natural shielding figure I mentioned, but it was only 1 on the planets checked, so my 3-5 figure may be high. There does seem to be a difference between types since mass drivers were doing their full damage of 6 or 9, while neutron blasters did much less than their 12 & 18 max. This depended on range and was much less than the damage they did to ships. At about half regular mount range, the regular neutron blasters did only 3 damage consistantly - no variable results. The mass drivers obviously didn't subtract the natural shielding figure from their damage since they did full damage. There must be a different way the game figures damage between the different types of weapons when used against planets, but is not used when the weapon is firing against ships.

I don't get why would the regular mount determine the Hv damage? Is it some kind of bug or have you tested it? I think the main point in using Hv is that the higher damage base helps punch through shield damage thresholds etc.

This might be due to different damage amounts for different types of beams. Some do a lot less damage than their stated amount when fired on planets. See above.

No I don't think graviton beams are shield piercing. But the AI rarely seems to have good shields, and even more rarely the hard shields system. And to my knowledge, hard shields negate the shield piercing special, e.g. SP phasors. Heavy armor is supposed the negate the armor piercing ability, but graviton beam is somehow an exception to this.

I meant write heavy armor instead of hard shields. Gravitons are not shield piercing, unless you mod them to be. Thanks for the info about gravitons and heavy armor. Sometimes I run into AI ships with heavy armor that defeats the armor piercing beams, so it's good to know the gravitons can be used then. I frequently run into AI ships with class 5 shields, and they can be fairly tough to deal with early game. But then the ship might only have titanium armor underneath. If they have the tech, they use the shields, but they never upgrade so you see all their original early ships also.

But the catch is that missile boats can retreat immediately after firing their salvo. What can't be seen can't be attacked.

That's true, and it's something I use with fighter carrying ships also.

Sure, battleships cost a lot in the early game, but by refitting them they stay useful for the whole game. This retains the crew experience level which is kinda critical. Small ships become obsolete by the mid game, or at least one will take constantly losses.

I upgrade the early destroyers to be anti-missile/fighter ships. The frigate scouts get upgraded to carry fleet items like scout labs, wide area jammers, warp dissipators and the like. I can get 2-3 small ships for every one next up in size and since I have a lot more planets able to construct destroyers than cruisers and battleships, I'm able to make a lot more in the same time frame. With the early armor, large ships don't take much to destroy and I find giving the other guy many more targets to choose from gives a better chance to win the battle during the early game. I can loose several destroyers without it affecting much, but the loss of a battleship, that I waited impatiently for 20 turns to produce, is much harder to take. If I got lucky and had a planet or 2 that could make battleships in 10 turns, then I would certainly build a few. That hasn't happened in recent games....

Maybe you could elaborate on the settings a little more? What's your timeframe of building up the fleet in large or huge, average tech, impossible galaxy?

My usual games are huge galaxy, average start and impossible. Fleet strategy really depends on the neighbors and how long I think I may have to expand before conflict starts. I usually concentrate on colony ships and building up the industry on the new colonies during the early game, so don't make many warships. If I have an aggressive neighbor, I start building warships much sooner.

In a recent game, an aggressive repulsive attacked before I had any ships built or many planets even colonized. He sent a battleship and a destroyer against my home system. I had 6 turns to build a fleet to oppose him. Building a cruiser took too long, so I built 2 destroyers and upgraded my 2 original frigate scouts. These 2 destroyers and 2 frigates could muster a total of 6 interceptors between them. The home planet had its original star base. When the battleship and destroyer attacked, I had those 4 ships launch their interceptors and then retreat out of the system and relied upon the fighters and the star base. Fortunately, the AI had armed their battleship mostly with interceptors also, so it became a race to see whose interceptors would kill off the other side first. My interceptors got to the AI battleship before their interceptors could destroy my star base. The heavy beams on the star base took out the AI destroyer. Had either of the AI ships lasted one more turn, the AI interceptors would have taken out my home system. The AI kept sending battleships and I gradually built up a small fleet of these interceptor carrying destroyers. When I got about 7 or 8, I even took the war to the AI and knocked out their nearest planet. That was an unusual game where I had very little time till the fighting started and the sort of fleet I built was determined by what I could build the most of soonest that would stop the AI's battleships. My industrial capacity was really pathetic still.

In most games, I would guess somewhere between turn 100 and 150 is when I start building cruiser size and above. It's usually after the initial expansion phase is done and about the time I get battle scanner, fusion and mass drivers. If I'm playing a non-creative race, then I use what I got. At that point, I upgrade the surviving earlier interceptor armed destroyers and build between 1 and 2 dozen cruisers which rely mostly on beams. Once these are built, I switch to battleships.

The AI is toast anyway by the time I get sub-space teleporter or similar. In the best battle I can remember, I had 4 titans equipped with beams, the teleporter, and xentronium armor against roughly 48 battleships plus some smaller ones, all with adamantium armor. All of the AI fleet was destroyed, with zero losses for me. I didn't use time warp facilitators or phasing cloaks either.

Yeah, late game battles are fairly easy. The first time I was confronted with a huge AI fleet I figured that was it. But it turned out to be fairly easy to destroy. The AI will pack in huge numbers of weapons instead of the specials that can make those weapons much more deadly. If you have death rays, your capital ships can simply wipe out the marines on the AI ships and then send in destroyers with transporters and the sub-space teleporter to capture them. It's kind of obscene to capture titans with destroyers, but....

 

[barseer]

I ran a test in a current game and regular beams will do damage, so my impression that you needed heavy beams is wrong. There was that natural shielding figure I mentioned, but it was only 1 on the planets checked, so my 3-5 figure may be high.

Umm. long post. But be aware that the current shield class is also applied to planets.

So if creative researches Class III and radiation shield then the planet blocks 3+5=8 damage, i.e. nukes (even mirv nukes) are completely useless then.

 

[scratchthepitch]

Umm. long post. But be aware that the current shield class is also applied to planets.

So if creative researches Class III and radiation shield then the planet blocks 3+5=8 damage, i.e. nukes (even mirv nukes) are completely useless then.

I didn't know that. Thanks for the info. That explains why I've seen varying figures of "natural" shielding on planets without added radiation, flux or barrier shields. It's not not a "natural" shielding at all. When I checked some planets in saves from a recent game and saw the "natural" shielding was 1 on all of them, I thought senility had set in and my memories of seeing different figures were wrong. In the game saves I was checking, the alien race only had class 1 shields, no others yet, so that explains why all their planets only had 1 "natural" shielding. The 1 comes from the class 1 shields, not something the planets have "naturally". In the past, the higher shield figures I saw must have been because the owner had class 3, 5 7 shields.

This explains why it seemed some beams that should have been able to damage a planet couldn't in past games and why it seemed the game used their regular damage figures instead of their heavy when determining whether a heavy beam could get through the shielding. Still don't know why my mass drivers were not affected by that class 1 shielding, yet have been affected by radiation shields in the past (they had points shaved off their damage figures). There is also the difference in damage ratios between the types of beams, with neutron blasters doing much less damage to planets than to ships. I'm guessing that with the latter, it's because the neutron blasters had continuous, this increased the damage against a ship, but that continuous doesn't apply to planet damage. Probably all the specials don't work against planets since the mass drivers had armor piercing and autofire and the autofire was not counted in the planet damage like it is in ship damage. This may also explain why shield piercing on lasers seemed to make no difference to their planet attacks, since I found lasers in the past to be virtually unable to damage planets, regardless of whether they had shield piercing or not.

 

[Reapers]

Best it is to be researched toward plasma. With 2 miniaturisation costs the plasma heavyload only 13 carriage space. In the beginning 50. Thats very much. When you drop some special systems on board und I kill with one titan 6 till 7 deathstars. Unfortunately I can´t make a screenshot. In order to come by shield, I take disrupter heavyload and hyper-x. That is enough for the shield. In the beginning I take missles without any options. Try to kill the watcher on orion and capture the absorber field and the xentronium armor. The other both or not so interessted.
(I hope everyone unterstand my english^^)