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Post by nate2010 on Sept 24, 2016 11:58:59 GMT
yeah I played that mission probably 8 times, the ship would be wrecked but not dead and I'd fail. I even had it one time where I killed the ship but there was 1 small fleet of enemy missiles left that managed to survive intercepting me and entered a stable orbit. killed the ship, and failed due to the missiles being alive. Hits were always easy but the time I finally killed the ship really felt like just luck. I dont get how that ship can survive the entire payload of nukes, which happened multiple times. very very frustrating mission
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Post by etranger on Sept 24, 2016 14:21:13 GMT
It's all about getting "impacts" rather than proximity hits as best I can tell in my dozen failures.
I guess setting a flyby is better than an intercept, but I set intercepts and then gave a short burn at the beginning of the merge and then coasted for a while before switching the missiles back to intercept. Second salvo of 20 strikers (with interception staggered by a second each to avoid fratricide) killed the target.
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Post by bletchleygeek on Sept 24, 2016 14:28:41 GMT
It's all about getting "impacts" rather than proximity hits as best I can tell in my dozen failures. I guess setting a flyby is better than an intercept, but I set intercepts and then gave a short burn at the beginning of the merge and then coasted for a while before switching the missiles back to intercept. Second salvo of 20 strikers ( with interception staggered by a second each to avoid fratricide) killed the target. That's a pretty good tip, thanks!
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Post by cardshark on Sept 24, 2016 15:11:03 GMT
How do you stagger the missiles ?
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Post by etranger on Sept 24, 2016 17:06:51 GMT
How do you stagger the missiles ? Manually switch the engines off and then flip them on (set to intercept) in sequence during the approach.
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Post by nate2010 on Sept 24, 2016 23:35:57 GMT
How do you do that? are you clicking on each missile then clicking on the engine to disable all of them, then reenabling them in sequence?
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Post by cardshark on Sept 25, 2016 0:47:47 GMT
Remove current standing order of your missile fleet. There is a button at the top corner of the left bar to separate all missiles, which will list in your left bar separately, unpause and give them their order one at a time which should give them one second give or take between them, depending on your click per minute. Helps a lot as well do get through flares, and I didn't suffer too bad as far as I can tell from point defense able to pick them one after another. That's the sort of thing that'd deserve a button "stagger impact" or something, to gain a bit of comfort, but i'd consider this really low priority.
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Post by withcarbos on Sept 25, 2016 23:33:49 GMT
I have the exact same problem as OP. I kill the rocket easily enough, but the enemy just tanks all other damage. Sometimes I can kill a radiator or two, or his missile launchers, but the crew modules stay intact no matter how I come at the problem. I have tried small waves, big waves, I've gone all-in, and ... nothing. Watching close up it seems clear I am achieving few to no direct hits; they all look like proximity detonations, usually somewhere behind the enemy. Once, I killed his rocket while he was accelerating, and that took him straight into a fast solar orbit – and out of my reach. Hilarious, but still a loss.
And I've tried staggering the missiles, as suggested above. This commonly leads to a non-trivial number of missiles simply overshooting the target, and expending their delta-V attempting to turn around.
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Post by shiolle on Sept 26, 2016 3:42:12 GMT
In my experience, targeting the sip instead of subsystems makes a lot of difference. I couldn't do enough damage by 'judiciously applying nuclear ordnance' until I deselected all subsystems I've been targeting, and then even those striker nukes became much more deadly.
Now in that same mission the enemy launches killer fleets of 50 striker missiles which are ridiculously easy to defeat be intercepting with one striker nuke at a time. If the missiles were flying straight, the nuke would be able to kill 3-7 missiles at most, but all 50 of them try to intercept the nuke. It's far more effective to just disable the nuke's warhead and let the missiles collide with it and each other disabling all 50 of them.
That also highlights another question: how do you set a proper kinetic counter fire? So, let's say there are 50 missiles approaching. I launch 50 missiles of my own and upon intercept each of my missiles selects one enemy missile and tries to take it out. That should be doable, right?
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Post by plastic1d3 on Sept 26, 2016 5:20:34 GMT
I did it by beating the two missile waves. The easiest way to stop them seems to be launching waves of 5 striker missiles, getting an intercept, and letting your missiles drift. The enemy will waste all their DV turning around, or fratricide their nukes in the case of them. At some point during this, get a wave of Strikers to the enemy ship, either by flying around their missile waves, or sending the survivors of big wave after the collision with their missiles. This should destroy the enemy engines, leaving them to drift.
Once that is dealt with, I simply sent a wave of 10 Devastators on a leisurely intercept so they'd have a lot of fuel for terminal corrections. This is easier if you didn't put the enemy ship into a big spin. A few of the devastators made it past point defenses, and one flew up the tailpipe for a direct hit. That direct hit vaporized everything but a small ring of armor from some part of the ship, which had been sent flying into a hyperbolic orbit.
TLDR: Stop the missiles, cripple the engines, kill with 25 MT nukes.
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Post by withcarbos on Sept 26, 2016 7:08:32 GMT
I've attempted this mission at least fifteen times. The enemy missile waves are easily defeated by decoying them; I usually take no or just superficial damage. This part is easy.
As for the hard part: I have tried targeting all the various subsystems, and not targeting any. I've tried small waves of five, and I've tried big waves of twenty. I've tried this with Strikers and I've tried it with Devastators. I've tried intercepting, and I've tried flying by; with closing velocities both large and little. I've tried staggering and I've tried it with full homing and controlled homing - and I've given all kinds of orders without staggering.
Every time they disable his rocket engine - usually on the first shot - and little else. Sometimes a missile launcher or a radiator is destroyed as well. Once, a gun. If I attack with Strikers in waves of five he destroys two or three. If I stagger them, he destroys all. If I stagger larger waves, as many as a quarter to half will overshoot and miss completely (maybe I'm too slow at reassigning orders?)
Most Devastators survive to detonate. But once again, damage is superficial. I even had a wave of ten detonate all as one, and his armor matrix was still green, all round.
What am I doing wrong?
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Post by ryujin on Sept 26, 2016 7:57:07 GMT
There's a few things you can try after disabling the ships engines with normal nuke use.
The nukes are meant as area effect/disabling weapons, so they have proximity fuses that will go off before impact (it really should mention this). Try disabling the nukes or using the delay setting to get around the proximity fuse detonating before impact. Ironically it seems just crashing the missile into it as a KE weapon with a disarmed nuke can do more reliable damage. You also won't have to deal with the first missile chain detonating everything once it gets close.
Also try scattering the missiles before guiding to get more spread.
you can also disable tracking once the missiles get close, espcially if it has no engines, for a more shotgun spread.
Then pray it hits something important while they try to chase the tail of the ship. It took me a few tries to get lucky.
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Post by jakjakman on Sept 26, 2016 17:21:19 GMT
The thing I'm most confused about is how the missiles still manage to miss the enemy ship to the rear when that ship is dead in space due a damaged nuclear rocket.
As long as my missiles still have delta-V left and are homing in on the enemy ship, they definitely should not miss to the rear of the ship. In fact, if the missiles have sufficient delta-V in their tank, then their acceleration should be high enough to overcome any evasive maneuvering of the target ship, correct?
Also, anyone know what the proximity delay detonation button does? Why would that be useful?
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Post by withcarbos on Sept 26, 2016 20:01:55 GMT
There's a few things you can try after disabling the ships engines with normal nuke use. Try disabling the nukes or using the delay setting to get around the proximity fuse detonating before impact. Ironically it seems just crashing the missile into it as a KE weapon with a disarmed nuke can do more reliable damage. Disabling the nukes worked: launching wave after wave of four or five bricked Strikers on Full Homing until he had insufficient guns, or crew, or both, to do effective shooting. I could then start pummeling him with nukesplosions again, and so a couple waves of five and five Devastators, staggered by ~750 milliseconds or so on Full Homing, took him out. More than fifteen tries, for certain.
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Post by Gabost8 on Sept 28, 2016 1:35:30 GMT
I have tried probably 12 times already and I still can't manage to kill it despite attempting everything in here.
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