So here is the scenario I was facing. I was at war with 2 faction and I was crushing them I had a navy of mostly cruiser sized ships with something like ~3 flak ~3 shield ~8 armor and ~8 lasers and my weapons/armor were slightly ahead of them in tech. I know I should refit ships to hard counter my opponents but I was at war with 2 different opponents who used different weapons. Everything was great until those annoying bird brains (no offense to anyone who plays them I'm kinda pissed atm) send in 3 fleets of 4-5 destroyers each. I move to counter with 2 fleets of 4 cruisers thinking this is going to be easy. They crushed me. It wasn't even a fight.



I look at what weapons etc they had after the fight and see that their ships are 40% Flak and 60% missiles. Nothing else. I know this is just Alpha but wow I could just picture the troll face admiral on those ships as he announced "Fire the wall of Missiles!" and watched 4 cruisers die in practically 1 volley.



Are balanced ships just garbage? Should I always just say screw it and put nothing but weapons on my ships? I'm kinda at loss for words after that so I'd like to start a thread on what other people use for their fleet compositions to maybe find out what I'm doing wrong. So feel free to either post what you guys use for ships and/or explain what on earth happened to me in those engagements.

From reading threads it seems like missiles are a little unbalanced, which is something that tuning should take of

Missiles are not unbalanced.

Missiles take time to fire and time to travel.



What makes missiles a real pita is using them in small vessels... Because each vessel can target one ship only... So having 4 big vessels with missiles dealing with 12 small vessels with missiles, the score is usually 4 big ships down, 4 small ships down...

The solution I found to counter missiles was to use a mix of small and big ships, to have lots of flak and some beams and kinetics, which fire right away at the beginning, albeit with poor accuracy.



The comp tends to favor specialized designs, so I try to also customize my ships depending of which adversary I am going against. Makes for lively moments.

I think I'm just going to add 2 destroyers with nothing but Flak on them or would that stop only 2 missiles and still lead to me being crushed?

nope. missiles are pretty unbalanced at the moment. a destroyer spam with literally just missiles will demolish practically anything, practically flak irrelevant.

Darn and here I was hoping it was just me...Btw I am NOT bashing this game I absolutely love it and of course I knew that there would be balance issues in alpha...still kinda sad that so far the only counter is out missile them though...

well to be fair. the missiles fire about half way through the long range phase, and impact just at the end of the long range phase.

what this DOES mean, hilariously. is the medium range phase begins for about 2 seconds. just long enough for the activation of a repair system card.



depending on the long range capacity of your enemy. you can switch out long range card between tactics or defence. so long as enough of your missile ships reach midway through the long range phase your laughing.

I used a completely balanced ship design at the moment on my second game.



This is after it failed me hardcore in one match, but I only had one wormhole leaving, and one enemy to fight, I should have redesigned to just fight him, I didn't and lost. Lesson learned.



Now, I'm surrounded by three enemies to my north, and one to my east. They use different weapons, and are unfortunately popping up all over my empire. My balanced ships so far are winning. I just unlocked the battleship but haven't used it yet.



I normally have fleets of (with 11 supply) 5 cruiser and one destroyer. I've won every engagement with a full fleet, but my enemies are mainly at 7 supply. I find it's important to maintain a balance right now, though it's hurting my research and I think it may come back to bite me in the ass (to maintain powerful balance, you need to research literally every offensive ability.. that takes a while, whereas someone can focus on one tree, get bigger hulls, and unlock more command supply).



I'm not certain which is best, but I've noticed that if I get a + on my first tactics against missile ships then I usually win. My mixture of Kinetic/laser can usually take down 2-3 destroyers in the first wave. I ALWAYS lose at least 1-2 in the first wave, then I repair, repair, for the next two tactics, and have won my battles.



Whereas my mixed fleets actually have a harder time with the non-missile heavy ships. In other words, against known missile ships, go full out offense at start. If your lucky you may only lose one destroyer like I always do.



(I see no reason so far to add more than one destroyer, they simply die too fast).



That said, I've only just unlocked my battleship (which.. SEEMS underwhelming with less health, same fire power, 2x defense as a cruiser using a balanced configuration). But, I don't really know how effective they are yet with 2x defense, perhaps that outweighs less HP than a cruiser, but it feels off.

Sharidann wrote:
Missiles are not unbalanced.

Missiles take time to fire and time to travel.



What makes missiles a real pita is using them in small vessels... Because each vessel can target one ship only... So having 4 big vessels with missiles dealing with 12 small vessels with missiles, the score is usually 4 big ships down, 4 small ships down...

The solution I found to counter missiles was to use a mix of small and big ships, to have lots of flak and some beams and kinetics, which fire right away at the beginning, albeit with poor accuracy.



The comp tends to favor specialized designs, so I try to also customize my ships depending of which adversary I am going against. Makes for lively moments.

Is flak firing ? O_o It's only a counter. No ?

And missiles are just too strong. That's it. The RPS system need more flesh.



To the OP : yes, you'll have to specialize to counter such design vessels. But it's easy as they only have defense versus missiles. Just load beams and you're done. Researching all the weapons isn't hard at all.

At this point missiles just give you a VERY good reason to have a mix of small and big ships in a fleet.

But I agree that they are very powerful as it is.

And yes, it also annoys me when I am on the receiving end.

VieuxChat wrote:
Is flak firing ? O_o It's only a counter. No ?

And missiles are just too strong. That's it. The RPS system need more flesh.



To the OP : yes, you'll have to specialize to counter such design vessels. But it's easy as they only have defense versus missiles. Just load beams and you're done. Researching all the weapons isn't hard at all.

illapa wrote:
I look at what weapons etc they had after the fight and see that their ships are 40% Flak and 60% missiles. Nothing else.

I think your'e misreading the information. My understanding is this is how effective your tech was. Meaning 60% of your missiles got through THEIR flak, and 40% flak... I think you stopped 60% of their missiles too.... Mmm you said you didn't have missiles tho? I dunno it's kinda confusing. It's not their weapon ratios tho, I know that. If you wanna know what weapons and armor they're using, hover over their ships in "auto/manual" screen. I find you need at least as much MP in armor to stop the same MP in offense.

AI is overpowered atm

I'm still out when it comes to missiles, i spammed destroyers with them and lost alot of ships but killed a hell of a lot more then i lost, mainly because missiles work best in the first stage of the fight, and by the time you get to medium range it's either all over for him, or all over for you, So beams...that work best in mid range, never get into their optimal range.



Of course how this will play out in multiplayer is anyones guess, where you can see what your opponent is developing and build ships to counter it. It could be just an AI problem, on losing ships to missile spam, why not spam flak ships, and use a missile efficiency card?



Oh, and one thing i have noticed is that the game tends to calculate the outcome even if ships are destroyed, i had my ships destroyed before they fired their first salvo of missiles, nothing was left...then the enemy fleet got destroyed and i got a draw, so the game obviosly would have recorded who would fire what, and calculated the damage and played out the resulting cinematic. Anyone else get this? Or am i imagining it?

Were all assuming here that the flak mechanic is a firing defence. Is it? If its passive lke shields.and armor then creating flakships is useless, because they would only protect the ship and not the fleet.



Im rocking a laserbuild now, destroyers with 7-9 lasers. Rocking the midrange right now right out of the gate. You drop tactics card for the midrange phase and none shall pass, ai still rocking balistics so nothing but armor.



Im also building ships with fleet repair as standard, gives it more endurance.



On a side note, the first slotable weight support modual, is that price a bit steep for 25 (slots as 28) cargopoints (100 gears)