ArrowLance wrote:
I'm fairly certain all resistances work the same, they block X amount of damage and let the rest through each phase. Also I'm all but certain the animations are after the calculations and that the calculations are not based on what happens in the pretties.

Go look at missile stats, missiles will have a "AA Avoidance" stat and the AA defense is labeled as "Interception".



It's worded very differently from the others.

I do love to rig my Annihilators with almost nothing but armor and missiles. Trying to achieve something like Cylon Basestars. Unfortunately, the ships don't seem to "feel" like launching their thousands upon thousands of Entropy Missiles half the time. But when they do, it is quite a spectacle to behold, I assure you.

I already have 5 heroes, including 3 admirals and 2 system managers. One system manager is managing my ship bulding system, and the other my research system (lots of tundra planets). I got everything set up well, it is just this stupid I am dealing with.



Just tried the game again, had my 10 ship fleet engage an enemy 2 ship fleet. They had nothing but missiles, I like my lasers right now. First volley of losers I annihilate both missile ships, none of my ships go down and the enemy never even had a chance to get missiles off (that happens around the 3rd volley). Still ended up losing two ships in the little battle conclusion window on the map. Very annoying bug.

I did an experiment in the game I played today. I designed the Avenger (Destroyer-class), which had all three weapons and all three defensive systems. I then designed PT (missile), LT (beam) and KT (kinetic) Cruisers (again, all Destroyer class); each one focused on the obvious weapons, and also had more weapon pods and fewer defense pods than the Avengers; also the PT and LT each had one kinetic weapon as well. (Note that all designs had the same tech level of weapons and defense.) I then built equal-sized fleets of Avengers and an even mix of Cruisers and through the magic of Save Game sent each fleet against the same Horatio enemy fleet. To my surprise, the Avenger fleet did much better than did the Cruiser fleet. I need to play with this a bit more and figure out why.



But in any case, I love watching those missiles hit. I want to build a missile battleship next, with heavy defenses, and see how it does. ..fritz..

Well your bound to lose destroyers and corvettes to missiles. Their health and tonnage is too low to make them good at defending against more than 1 major weapon type without sacrificing what their intended for, hard hitting offense for a low production cost. And with the starting 3 heroes, that I usually start off with you have 1 governor, 1 omni, and 1 admiral type. I use both the omni and governor to power up my best systems, ones with major population sizes that are guaranteed to have a lot of fids. And I have those heroes focus on food and production because if you have 2 major systems producing battleships and cruisers in 2-3 turns you can augment your small ship losses using the smaller systems whose production wouldn't be high enough for cruisers or battleships to come out in a usable limit but they can get out destroyers or offensive/defensive cruisers that you can use as buffers for the big ships while also dealing massive damage to the enemies fleet.

The current game I am in, I have one REALLY fantastic ship building system and one not bad one while the rest are garbage. Problem is between this bug/whatever and general attrition, my ship yards are busy just replacing losses right now for my 3x 13 cp fleets. I could probably build another fleet if I didn't have to deal with the missile bug.

I've noticed the "lose ships during report phase" from unfired missiles as well, it may have something to do with the game not going through the process of showing, graphically, the missiles but still counting them as being launched and therefore hitting their intended targets, or maybe its a bug. Either way I could care less about losing destroyers to a missile salvo, I love to use torpedo boats especially against the bigger fleets the AI usually have, and I usually have at least 1-2 flak mods for my bigger ships just in case of the "fleet o torp. boats".

There's nothing worse than seeing an auto-battle report where both fleets destroyed each other



At the very least it seems that flak defenses are one of the most effective in the game. After retrofitting my fleets to deal with the Horatio menace I seemed to score almost one hundred percent interception with even just a few high level flak systems

Edraii wrote:
Go look at missile stats, missiles will have a "AA Avoidance" stat and the AA defense is labeled as "Interception".



It's worded very differently from the others.

I've noticed that, but have noticed no functional difference in their number crunching.

wokelly wrote:
Has anyone else noticed that the missiles still get kills even if the ships do not launch them during the battle. So far I have encountered several battles were the missile only enemy fleets get anhilated by my lasers before they let off a volley, but in the after report screen I am down several ships. VERY annoying, especially since I am dealing with rapidly built enemy fleets which I also think is a bug. Makes it hard to play, may stop until that patch next week comes out.

This doesn't happen all the time for me but I have absolutely seen this happen before...



And YES rapidly increasing enemy fleets and score is a bug that hopefully will be fixed in the coming update

wokelly wrote:
Has anyone else noticed that the missiles still get kills even if the ships do not launch them during the battle. So far I have encountered several battles were the missile only enemy fleets get anhilated by my lasers before they let off a volley, but in the after report screen I am down several ships. VERY annoying, especially since I am dealing with rapidly built enemy fleets which I also think is a bug. Makes it hard to play, may stop until that patch next week comes out.

I had a game where everyone was tossing around missiles and I had this happen dozens of times though usually it was my fleets that died "without firing missiles". I was losing pretty hard and ended up killing the enemy with dozens of suicide cruisers. They always died, but always took another ship with them regardless of the firepower of the enemy fleet and regardless of the size of the ship and eventually I started to pull ahead. It was like Stalingrad, the average life of one of my ships was a single turn.

Has anyone else noticed that the missiles still get kills even if the ships do not launch them during the battle. So far I have encountered several battles were the missile only enemy fleets get anhilated by my lasers before they let off a volley, but in the after report screen I am down several ships. VERY annoying, especially since I am dealing with rapidly built enemy fleets which I also think is a bug. Makes it hard to play, may stop until that patch next week comes out.

I learned that well a good 20 turns before one of the other AI goes and wins an economic victory :-P

I'm guessing everyone has gone up against an AI or Pirates that seem to be in love with torps/missiles., I'm a beam man myself



Not really complaining, I just hate going up against missile boats, I'll warp in take them out in the first phase and still loose 2-3 ships during the report phase as the missiles/torps haven't landed yet.



I like them but seriously you'd want to stick them on a suicide ship as they take FOREVER to shoot, reach the target and reload

Edraii wrote:
I find missiles pretty balanced, the reason they "Seem" so much stronger is that they deliver all their force in one go...

I think defenses work differently to, AA has a chance to kill a missile entierly or let the full damage trough while the shields and barriers are like an extra shell of armor that drains.

I'm fairly certain all resistances work the same, they block X amount of damage and let the rest through each phase. Also I'm all but certain the animations are after the calculations and that the calculations are not based on what happens in the pretties.

I find missiles pretty balanced, the reason they "Seem" so much stronger is that they deliver all their force in one go...

I think defenses work differently to, AA has a chance to kill a missile entierly or let the full damage trough while the shields and barriers are like an extra shell of armor that drains.

AWMoore wrote:
Usually in my case, my missile-laden cruisers would take light beam beating early half of the Long Range act, then by the middle of the Long Range act the enemy would start dying as my missiles reached them, and by the end of the Long Range act the enemy would be dead, but as the victory screen goes up 1 or 2 beams would still make it to my weakest ship(s) and blow it up. Stupid cruisers.

Battleships never die. (May or may not be an exaggeration)

Usually in my case, my missile-laden cruisers would take light beam beating early half of the Long Range act, then by the middle of the Long Range act the enemy would start dying as my missiles reached them, and by the end of the Long Range act the enemy would be dead, but as the victory screen goes up 1 or 2 beams would still make it to my weakest ship(s) and blow it up. Stupid cruisers.

From what I've seen so far missiles are incredibly powerful. I learned pretty early fighting against the Cravers that missile defense is very important... It really sucks to watch your superior fleet destroy a bunch of tiny ships that nonetheless launched their missiles off before your ships killed them...



Then you get to watch your ships explode right as the Victory message comes up

Hissho was hitting me pretty hard with beams last game, at one point going at me with a fleet of 7 ships with 9,500 damage. I fought back with a fleet of 4 Battleships with Plasma missiles and Shielding (I still had far smaller damage number than the fleet I went up against). Sabotage as first card, Repair as second card. The Hissho fleet was raped by my Battleships, I lost all of 200 damage while the Hissho lost all 7 ships. I have to say, they may be slow, but they sure do pack a punch. It's all in how you play your cards...

Missiles seem to me to be great one moment, then a bit poor the next, they require quite careful planning to most effectively use

Missiles are the worst on suicide ships because they risk being destroyed before they launch their volley in a phase.

Settius wrote:
I might try fitting out some cruisers as missile boats, my latest game was Battleships and Cruisers with the odd Dread thrown it filled to the brim with Beam weapons, eats everything at range. I dislike it when I'm on a two front fight, one was Kinetic/Missiles and the other was beam weapons, made keeping track of my fleets annoying but also incredibly fun



It would be good if Scouts/Destroyers got avoidance/tracking bonuses against larger ships due to their speed, I'd love to be able to have larger ships start in phase 3 and smaller ships speed into Phase 2 or Melee straight away even if they die they could unload a payload.

Only thing I don't like about beams is they require that strategic resource (hexasomething?) to upgrade. IIRC the other two options seen to be resource free.

johndram wrote:
I tend to use ships with very heavy defense (5+modules) as my missile boats for that reason. Load up a cruiser with large amounts of missiles and focused defense against your enemy and you have a very strong fleet that can take on double it's MP without losing too much armor. Couple a couple "kill" fleets full of missile cruisers with some "scout" fleets made up of cheap destroyers and you can have a very flexible army. Just use the destroyers to see what weapons your enemy is using, retrofit your cruisers (if needed), and blast away.



With that said I'm in love with Kinetics. Sure the take a little hit at range, but once you close in they ravage enemy ships.

I might try fitting out some cruisers as missile boats, my latest game was Battleships and Cruisers with the odd Dread thrown it filled to the brim with Beam weapons, eats everything at range. I dislike it when I'm on a two front fight, one was Kinetic/Missiles and the other was beam weapons, made keeping track of my fleets annoying but also incredibly fun



It would be good if Scouts/Destroyers got avoidance/tracking bonuses against larger ships due to their speed, I'd love to be able to have larger ships start in phase 3 and smaller ships speed into Phase 2 or Melee straight away even if they die they could unload a payload.

I tend to use ships with very heavy defense (5+modules) as my missile boats for that reason. Load up a cruiser with large amounts of missiles and focused defense against your enemy and you have a very strong fleet that can take on double it's MP without losing too much armor. Couple a couple "kill" fleets full of missile cruisers with some "scout" fleets made up of cheap destroyers and you can have a very flexible army. Just use the destroyers to see what weapons your enemy is using, retrofit your cruisers (if needed), and blast away.



With that said I'm in love with Kinetics. Sure the take a little hit at range, but once you close in they ravage enemy ships.