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Post by qswitched on Jun 6, 2016 16:30:56 GMT
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PissedaboutretakingCeres
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Post by PissedaboutretakingCeres on Apr 9, 2020 20:11:12 GMT
How about not forcing the people who spent money on your game to try and beat missions which are literally unbeatable before they can use the editor?
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Echo
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Posts: 141
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Post by Echo on Apr 9, 2020 21:16:41 GMT
www.youtube.com/results?search_query=retaking+ceresHere's a YT comment on one of those videos: the basic strategy that I've found for this is to let the missiles come to you, and fire decoys from the carrier to avoid them, for the enemy drones deploy your beam drones as a separate fleet and engage them before they reach your capitals - you don't need to kill them, just need them to exhaust their dV dogfighting around you. then you fire all your own missiles in a massed barrage aimed at the laser frigate's UV laser, and once that's down send in your stinger drones for the kill, with your capitals coming in last to mop up anything they may have failed to destroy. the problem is that even when you prioritize targets sometimes your missiles just don't kill the frigate's laser and you have to restart, and you need to be careful that your stinger drones have plenty of dV for engaging their capitals
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 10, 2020 14:23:56 GMT
www.youtube.com/results?search_query=retaking+ceresHere's a YT comment on one of those videos: the basic strategy that I've found for this is to let the missiles come to you, and fire decoys from the carrier to avoid them, for the enemy drones deploy your beam drones as a separate fleet and engage them before they reach your capitals - you don't need to kill them, just need them to exhaust their dV dogfighting around you. then you fire all your own missiles in a massed barrage aimed at the laser frigate's UV laser, and once that's down send in your stinger drones for the kill, with your capitals coming in last to mop up anything they may have failed to destroy. the problem is that even when you prioritize targets sometimes your missiles just don't kill the frigate's laser and you have to restart, and you need to be careful that your stinger drones have plenty of dV for engaging their capitals There are several different strategies possible. Anyway, the only actually tricky part of this mission is dealing with enemy drones (IIRC the intended method is "dancing" them out of delta-v with repeated small orbital manoeuvres, but employing beam drones as fighters tends to work better). Everything else is painting by the numbers. How about not forcing the people who spent money on your game to try and beat missions which are literally unbeatable before they can use the editor? Why don't you just get good? The game won't be getting easier from that point onwards, you know (unless you count cheesing with Mm laserstars after VO as playing). |
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Post by eternalsorrow on Apr 15, 2020 21:39:04 GMT
but employing beam drones as fighters tends to work better To be honest, that's the only successful application I've found for them. They are a complete piece of shite as an offensive weapon. And even burning enemies's drones and missiles can take minutes. |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 16, 2020 15:31:52 GMT
but employing beam drones as fighters tends to work better To be honest, that's the only successful application I've found for them. They are a complete piece of shite as an offensive weapon. And even burning enemies's drones and missiles can take minutes. As far as stock weapons are concerned they make for decent radiator melters, especially crew radiators. They're stupidly expensive, though. |
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Post by eternalsorrow on Apr 16, 2020 20:34:15 GMT
Laser drones have a too high risk of being disabled before reaching the fire distance. I'd rather pack a few more Stingers which start to deliver the punch immediately. I don't really know how efficient Beams are as radiator melters, but my intuition says that the same amount of Stingers will yield much more of a profit. Especially if the enemy has got a laser ship in his fleet, like in the Retaking Ceres.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 22, 2020 9:53:58 GMT
Laser drones have a too high risk of being disabled before reaching the fire distance. I'd rather pack a few more Stingers which start to deliver the punch immediately. I don't really know how efficient Beams are as radiator melters, but my intuition says that the same amount of Stingers will yield much more of a profit. Especially if the enemy has got a laser ship in his fleet, like in the Retaking Ceres. Laser drones are harder to disable in the first place because a laser drone with weapon shot off is still a threat (as guided KKV) and laser drone with damaged propulsion can still track targets. Stinger without propulsion can't aim, while Stinger with destroyed weapon had ammo explosion make hash of its internals. Both are wreckage and only a threat to smaller ships if they accidentally collide with them (had gunboats killed by Stinger wreckage). OTOH some stock ships like laser frigate and gunship have massive Achilles heel in form of non-redundant aluminium crew radiators and are ripe picking to lasers. Beam drones do just fine in this role. Also, unless they aren't adequately cooled there is pretty much no downside to ignoring range with lasers especially if you outnumber enemy lasers (the only slight disadvantage is that you expose your delicate mirrors). |
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Post by eternalsorrow on Apr 23, 2020 22:45:21 GMT
Aluminium radiators on warships potentially exposed to nukes is a joke. I'm playing with redesigning stock ships now, and they've got a HUGE upgrade potential while keeping them in mass+cost+dimension limits simultaneously. Especially the Corvette, it sucks since it got an AAA battery instead of a normal power supply for its coils.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 24, 2020 10:50:11 GMT
Aluminium radiators on warships potentially exposed to nukes is a joke. I'm playing with redesigning stock ships now, and they've got a HUGE upgrade potential while keeping them in mass+cost+dimension limits simultaneously. Especially the Corvette, it sucks since it got an AAA battery instead of a normal power supply for its coils. I've been redesigning stock ships with stock modules for quite some time (or more accurately designing counterparts fitting within the same performance envelope and budgets), with pretty good results (usually able to take on 5x-10x originals, my 2.5kt stock module cutters solo Vesta guns blazing), although they all tend to end up being in my particular build style: steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1371073716 |
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Post by eternalsorrow on Apr 24, 2020 11:14:42 GMT
I've already checked out your designs, and they are very good. Learned how to do some stuff after their reverse-engineering. Well, that's not exactly the same as "redesigned stock". Stock ships have some designated role, weapon layout and external design. My aim was more of removing fatal flaws rather then complete replacing stock crafts with new ones withing the same limits. And even this constrained approach can yield a HUGE improvement over the stock.
Also, I don't consider stock ships as an any kind of a good benchmark, even in high numbers. Mighty Gunship can be easily taken down by a Missile Schooner's single missile salvo, which is pretty absurd; I'm not talking about <1kt player-built gunfighter with a hard conic nose. No redundancy, no smart layout, presence of a pure civilian-grade equipment such as aluminium radiators and very sparse fire due to the single 60 MW reactor.
And I'm not even a major ship constructor, I've dived into it only recently.
I'm thinking about replacing the stock ships completely and re-making a campaign with their redesigned versions based on core modules. That should make the game a bit more difficult and significantly more interesting due to the smarter enemy design without major drawbacks, and still leave some place for optimizing.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 24, 2020 15:47:39 GMT
I've already checked out your designs, and they are very good. Learned how to do some stuff after their reverse-engineering. Well, that's not exactly the same as "redesigned stock". Stock ships have some designated role, weapon layout and external design. The main issue with keeping the flavour of redesigned stock is two-fold: - Lack of good stock NTRs other than methane ones
- Specialization being crippling for all but smallest ships, as with generalist ships you can reuse powerplant, radiators, engines, good portion of crew and armoured hull for multiple weapon systems. With specialized ships all of that get added as overhead to each ship. There is really no good reason to not drop a laser PD grid onto a missile ship or carrier, or to not add a bunch of 60-100MW CGs and a spare laser to a Solar Lance (I think small, specialized ships are going to be more popular on defending side for variety of reasons).
Stock craft are mostly built of fatal flaws, though.  If it's any consolation, my "Dragon" class gunship and its variants actually started out as heavily modified laser frigate back when everything was a (tapered) cylinder or (truncated) cone. Gunship does have some redundancy, just not enough and in areas where achieving redundancy and good layout is actually the hardest (crew, due to G-forces concerns), while neglecting the rest (radiators, reactors), even though it would be much easier to achieve resilience there. It has two 60MW reactors, BTW. Also, most of the stock ships have four flaws: - Poor maneuverability - you probably don't need hours of burn time for the kind of engagements that happen in COADE, but being able to dodge enemy fire for a few minutes is nice to have.
- Explosive modules nestled right besides crew modules ensuring spectacular crew kills. I do my best to build ships to survive even ludicrous ammo explosions (or make them nigh impossible).
- Low power for given armaments.
- Disproportionately large amounts of armour - armour doesn't move you closer to victory, it only makes winning harder for the enemy. Weapons (supplied with right amount of power and ammo) or propellant (fed into right amount of engines) usually make for more effective armour than armour as far as damage prevention goes as dead enemy cannot shoot you.
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Post by eternalsorrow on Apr 24, 2020 16:45:38 GMT
My flaw. Still not sufficent though. Agreed, stock ships are basically gunboats with engines needed only to move through the map mode. I've done a bunch of experiments with high-gee crafts yesterday, 0.75-1G seems to be optimum there. Larger thrust leads to problems with crew capacity, dV management and low burn time. Badass 2.5g drone gunfire evasion is cool, but impractical, at least with core modules. Main thing there. Some crafts (which don't rely on 60mm cannons) got sufficient armament but are not able to use it normally. Armor is a crucial thing for any gunfighter since there are no much of ways to escape damage on artillery fight distance. But stock crafts got a crappy single aluminium-carbon-without-stuffing Whipple shields in best case which are more of a placebo; stock armor is absolutely not capable to be at least a baseline for a player's further armor investigations.
For example, a Corvette with a double 0.35m Graphgel-stuffed Whipple shield + 1 cm Diamond is able to tank anything Voitenko (and your Valravn-E Corvette too) is able to shoot by using sloped nose.
Also, I'm surprised how easy it is to build an armor against stock weapons. Yes, they still can rip anything outside, but the armor itself will be fine. From a game design and progression view, it would be meaningful to have a Stock-Custom division of armor also.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 24, 2020 21:35:01 GMT
Agreed, stock ships are basically gunboats with engines needed only to move through the map mode. I've done a bunch of experiments with high-gee crafts yesterday, 0.75-1G seems to be optimum there. Larger thrust leads to problems with crew capacity, dV management and low burn time. Crew issues are easy to avoid but there is no sidestepping endurance problems so this seems to be the sweet spot. Armour to defeat weapons is a losing battle. Attacker only needs to pierce it in at most few places while defender has to put it all over.
It's best to only put enough armour to tank some fire, every gram more is better put pretty much anywhere else.
Unsurprising given that any of my stock module ships is shooting stock guns, of which only 60mm cannon and sniper CG are reasonably accurate.
What's the utility of armour past the point where everything outside of it is shredded? The ship won't be going anywhere or fighting anything with power generation gone, no weapons and crew slowly baking in own waste heat, even if still has engines and delta-v. You could have gotten more offensive power, manoeuvrability, delta-v or redundancy instead. Also, I don't go for large swathes of thick, monolithic diamond for a reason. |
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Post by eternalsorrow on Apr 25, 2020 9:33:03 GMT
Basically, "tank some fire" was my point. Ships needs some amount which will let to kill the enemy before getting fatal damage. The reason here is that with the smart layout and retracted radiators you are completely safe from an incoming fire. That's very useful against multiple drone swarms you can meet in VO for example, since 5-6kms in most cases won't be enough to evade all of them without engaging and abusing AI issues.
And that armor won't weight much, armor zoning in help. That layout is a bit overkill, but 33mm and 60mm guns are surprisingly hard to tank. Layered/thick ceramic seems to be a solution, but further experiments needed.
The topic went pretty far away from the intended theme, it's better to continue in the ship design thread.
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