I was playing here and I've been attacked by pirates. K. Used the counter-missiles action on the first phase. Dealt some damage to them, but at the ending at the long-range 1 hit of their missiles destroyed my whole fleet. WTF? Missiles are too overpowered or am I doing something wrong?

Screenshots or it didn't happen.

Anti missile cards only help anything if you actually got _any_ flak on your ship. And missiles will annihilate small ships so its easily possible that what you described happened but a little more information would make it easier to help you.

Yea I'm having the same problem against some Horatio fleets. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but ill have 7 ships (total 7700 power) vs his 2 ships (680 power). And i find that no matter how many flak defenses i put on my ships or how I play the fight out with cards or whether or not i have my hero there, the result is the same. I loose 2 ships and win the fight.



This was with 7 Fusion Pellets for Flak Defense per ship. Making a total of 252mp flak defense per ship. It Appears to make zero difference to the effectiveness of missiles.



I seem to loose 1 ship for every one of the enemy ships with missiles no matter what the tech, the power or the cards played. This surely can't be how the game is intended to be. The implications of this are that as long as you use all missile offense and have at least an equal number of ships to your opponent, you can't loose a fight. Worst case scenario, you draw. Even if you are massively behind in tech.



And the missiles are all invisible about 99% of the time... i think i saw some once. So your ships just blow up at the last moment of the long range phase like the OP said.



Hopefully somebody can tell me what I'm doing wrong.

The only counter to missiles is flack and sheer health. So, when you pile on shields or plating, that will do 100% jackall to missiles. They pack a serious punch, and have a high chance of critically hitting. Be thankful that Pirates don't bring heros, my typical early build is to pack Destroyers with 5 or 6 units of missiles and build a fleet Hero with a Dust Missiles card. Basically you spend 30 something dust and get increased min/max to crits and higher crit chance to missiles. Play 'Dust Missiles' at the beginning of the round, by the end of turn 2 everything melts. I've taken two Destroyers against a Cruiser using that strategy and, even though it had AA and nailed a couple missiles, dropped the Cruiser in one salvo. Even though it had blasters and I hadn't researched shields yet, one ship survived. The chances going into the fight were hilariously sided against me, probably 10:1 if I could put a number to the power-share bar.



Quite simply, the AI never bothers to outfit their ships with AA because everyone else is using physical guns, so plating is the name of the game. Cruisers and bigger hulls is where they usually do AA first, but Corvettes and Destroyers never have any missile defense. This is about the only way I could see mass-Destroyer fleets working end game, they just don't have the lasting power to make the other weapon choices last. Missiles can be dumped from the very first phase and pack enough punch to make up for the two-phase delay they take to hit. It's very common to see at least one of my ships drop by the beginning of phase two, so it makes sense in the end. Especially if anything survives the first salvo, the end of phase two/beginning of phase 3 is the last salvo and, by that point, everything you have is close to death anyways. Better to drop your last shot before death and have it count for a full phase-worth of damage than die right at the beginning of a phase without any shots in after, as you're dead.

I've had decent results with flak defence... As said before, if you don't up your defence against missiles, you can be shredded by them.

Ok I've started having good results vs Missiles now that I've started using the "Ultimate defense card" but before then I was getting Zero Effect from 7 Fusion flak canons per ship (Flak: 252mp per ship).

rogue_gamecube wrote:
Quite simply, the AI never bothers to outfit their ships with AA because everyone else is using physical guns, so plating is the name of the game.

This is not entirely accurate. In my current 1v1 vs Hissho, I've gone exclusively missile ship, and never altered. And I met a Hissho "Warrior 2" class vessel that was armed with Kinetic-78 and protected with Flak-84. Seems intelligent, right? Like it's the right thing to do?



But after 80 turns I've also met:

"Warrior 4" Missile-100, Deflector-115

"Warrior 5" Kinetic-100, Deflector-144/Shields-23

"Warrior 6" Beam-150, Deflector-144/Shields-23



So it doesn't seem to be designing defenses to protect itself against my attacks.

Meh, kinda pointless to be going into detail about this stuff in the alpha build, especially with AI usually being a bit dodgy in games anyway. Just need to deal with it till they finish the tuning. If this sort of issue persists after that, well, that's when we get our pitchforks and torches out. <(^_^)>

IMHO (I am not a dev on this game) this type of feedback is useful. By now, the best players are probably as good as the best QA players in the company. This is where tuning *comes from*.

Darn dodgy AI and their lack of thoughts for right now, but i know i stop Missiles because I have not lost ships to them yet. I also put enough points into armor to increase HP enough. so not really sure. Also living Armor helps cut down damage over the whole battle.

I tend to be able to shoot down most missiles with between 3-5 CM packets. Always using best available. As long as it doesn't push me over half my tonnage on support/defense. My designs are more for thinning the herd and having enough armour to take the leftover punch then stopping them all. As a secondary part of my design philosophy. My primary design philosophy for avoiding missiles, is not to let them launch. So I build my ships to reduce the enemy to orbital debris in the first two salvos. Is why I tend to make at least half my tonnage beam weapons. Rest is basically even split between shields, deflectors, armour and CM. Once I unlock tonnage modules I add faster engines, but never before. tend to not put better engines on the DDs, rather using the fleet dragging engines on the BRs and larger, scaling the engine size to the hull size. Whatever leftover tonnage there is after I pack in the beams goes to an extra 'best I can fit' armour module. Only fails if the enemy has significantly better armour/shields then me, and are flying full on missile boats that could take the punch and launch. My ships aren't designed to take a saturation launch. But with the armour and CM, most of the heavies will survive to mop up in the second round, which is always a Nano-Repair for me, as well as the third, in case the second gets blocked.



As one of the techs says. The only thing better then surviving the blow, is not to get hit by it at all.

Haphazard wrote:
Yea I'm having the same problem against some Horatio fleets. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but ill have 7 ships (total 7700 power) vs his 2 ships (680 power). And i find that no matter how many flak defenses i put on my ships or how I play the fight out with cards or whether or not i have my hero there, the result is the same. I loose 2 ships and win the fight.



This was with 7 Fusion Pellets for Flak Defense per ship. Making a total of 252mp flak defense per ship. It Appears to make zero difference to the effectiveness of missiles.



I seem to loose 1 ship for every one of the enemy ships with missiles no matter what the tech, the power or the cards played. This surely can't be how the game is intended to be. The implications of this are that as long as you use all missile offense and have at least an equal number of ships to your opponent, you can't loose a fight. Worst case scenario, you draw. Even if you are massively behind in tech.



And the missiles are all invisible about 99% of the time... i think i saw some once. So your ships just blow up at the last moment of the long range phase like the OP said.



Hopefully somebody can tell me what I'm doing wrong.

Do they have higher tech in missiles then you do in flak? If they do then just having a ton of flak won't help they missiles will just evade.

In my last game vs UE I noticed that they were stacking over 800MP of missiles on their dreadnoughts. Basically there was nothing I could do against that many missiles. The only saving grace is that they had 0 defense vs energy and kinetc and no armor upgrades. I tried to kill it before it could fire.