Kyu wrote:
the flak as a viable counter point can be rendered moot by the aggressor teching into multiple, or all, weapon types.



missiles also have a single major drawback, you can always retreat without taking damage. If your opponent has been auto-ing everything and not paying attention, if you have beams/kinetics you can use offensive retreat safely.

i had once the same strategy but to many of my retreat tries failed and on this way i loss more ships as if i fight against them on the normal way

ZumboPrime wrote:
Your retreats fail when you have no friendly or neutral systems to retreat to. If you're in the middle of enemy territory and haven't captured any systems yet, you can't retreat. You're just giving the enemy a free victory and sacrificing your ships.

Well, it's probably true but it's not the only situation where retreat=sacrificing a fleet. I remember at least one exemple where my fleet had cleary two eligible systems where to flee and got destroyed anyway without sustaining any dommage during the battle … So be careful with the retreat it can be tricky.



PS : it was pre-Polaris.

maur4395 wrote:
I personally haven't ever had it fail but I personally use energy weapons more than missles since they seem to be much more effective in all phases. But keeping ahead in flak is important, and as far as flak shield ships are concerned I am almost positive that would work. Flak is centered on ships that have the modules so I doubt it would help your 'heavy' hitters. That is, in the current battle model.

Your retreats fail when you have no friendly or neutral systems to retreat to. If you're in the middle of enemy territory and haven't captured any systems yet, you can't retreat. You're just giving the enemy a free victory and sacrificing your ships.

Good flak, is all I can say.



I've never yet been in a situation (although wrt multiplayer haven't done much, to be fair) where I can't outfit my ships with enough high-quality flak... Concentrate enough of it, and it makes you virtually immune to missiles and torpedoes - whilst Kinetics and Beams will consistently do some damage even on up-armoured/shielded opponents, flak of the same amount has the capacity to entirely negate the damage done by missiles by destroying them before you even hit you.



Couple that with Camouflage, or Ultimate Defence, or accuracy sabotage and - against AI at least - I've built fleets that are entirely immune to damage by one missile-heavy faction without really having to invest overwhelmingly in flak research...

I make ships with well rounded defenses and adjust them according to what the enemy is planning so that if you are lacking an area, you are not completely destroyed because I had a little bit of each.

Beam cruisers beat missle spam.



The point is, you build cruisers with ~4-6-8 beams or missles(better a mix of two types of cruisers in your fleet) and all the rest is armour, in the entering phase, use barrier or missle destruction/ camoflage.



Your cruiser will survive a single salvo of 2 destroyers-glass cannons if at equal tech(and especially if you have the HP-and XP-increasing facilities), and will destroy 1 or 2 of them in the long range phase already, then you use repair card, and your cruiser regens 50% HP(10% per firing round*3+ 20% repair card) before next missle salvo will hit and kills the remaining destroyer, but even if 2 destroyers survive first phase, one of them will die before firing the next salvo, and missles are less accurate in mid-range phase.



Then, due to survivability of cruisers, they would get expirience=> more HP, while glass cannons pretty much can not accumulate a lot of expirience.

If you're not building your ships with extra hp and the best repair module for your tech level/ship type then you deserve to suffer.



They aren't overpowered, people just aren't countering them correctly.

Glass cannon > Tanks.



Cheap/mini glass cannon > Glass cannon.



Tanks > Cheap/mini glass cannon.



Lern it, love it, and possibly we should tech the AI it. (If it's going to stay, we should build the combat to directly support, show and even thrive off of it.)

Wisper

Super secret information!

The easiest way to beat torpedos - take more armor

extra armore is 20% less efective then flaks, but repair card and repair module make incredible effect!

Racial traits and leaders can help significantly. If you have optimal defense (up to +15% defense?) then that can help tremendously. Also by having a leader specialize in defense your fleets can negate up to 92% damage.



Mostly it boils down to tech. Your flak needs to be better than his missiles, plus you could try a bit of armor just to increase your ship HP. If your defenses are adequate you shouldn't be taking much damage from any single type of offense.

I have tried it several times just to build mini glasscannons. Its just beating them with their own tactic. And the best is: The glasscannon players hate it^^



The trick is to know what will happen next. You construct miniglasscannons, he will react and will counter with miniminiglasscannons. Afterwards you make a fleet of well protected Dreadnoughts his miniships are not

able to harm (Flak + Beams).



Thanks for the idea with the defensive retreat, didn't know this would work.



Important: you will lose your miniglasscannons in EVERY battle, don't be afraid of this...

Uggh, another post about missiles being unbalanced. Clearly there is a problem. Amplitude, you need to look into this.



Since it's pretty clear to me that nobody understands how missiles work (see my post, top of page) I'm going to make a post and request from Amplitude that they take the time to explain it. It's ridiculous we don't know it it works and it makes it impossible to discuss balance.



EDIT: It's up. Let's hope Amplitude gives us the geeky details.

Beefhater wrote:
i had once the same strategy but to many of my retreat tries failed and on this way i loss more ships as if i fight against them on the normal way

I personally haven't ever had it fail but I personally use energy weapons more than missles since they seem to be much more effective in all phases. But keeping ahead in flak is important, and as far as flak shield ships are concerned I am almost positive that would work. Flak is centered on ships that have the modules so I doubt it would help your 'heavy' hitters. That is, in the current battle model.

hey all!



how by the dark gods of chaos do i beat torpedo's!



or counter them i've fought my friends many times and every time if they decide to have torpedo's or spam them i cannot counter and even if i win it costs me 75%!



I know you use flak i understand that, and also using camouflage or sabotage i know those as well.



but they still do not seem to work enough most of the time ive only ever seen one ship survive a volley that was using camouflage and flak.



if i had say 2 ships and attempted to use them as a flak barrier would that work? cause what im doing atm is having say 3 armour 3 flak lasers torps and what ever...



what i am thinking for my future ships is 7 flak 4 armour and only lasers or something like that?



any advice on this will be very helpful!

the flak as a viable counter point can be rendered moot by the aggressor teching into multiple, or all, weapon types.



missiles also have a single major drawback, you can always retreat without taking damage. If your opponent has been auto-ing everything and not paying attention, if you have beams/kinetics you can use offensive retreat safely.

Kareal wrote:
This is the solution right here. The game's combat looks like rock-paper-scissors with the three weapons and it is, but its rock-paper-scissors in half a dozen other dimensions also, if you can't beat them in one dimension choose another one.

Well said! Couldn't have explained better

Grubsnik wrote:
The key to winning against glass cannons is to build even cheaper glass cannons. If your opponent doesn't have any flak or extra hitpoints, just make ships with barely enough firepower to kill a ship of their own before exploding... a small ship like that only costs ~50 production. The way to compete against the cheaper glass cannons is to reduce the amount of missiles his ships are carrying and either add some flak or just accept the wasted space. Either way, it will soon become possible for you to equip your own ships with flak enough to withstand his missile barrages.

This is the solution right here. The game's combat looks like rock-paper-scissors with the three weapons and it is, but its rock-paper-scissors in half a dozen other dimensions also, if you can't beat them in one dimension choose another one.

A similar questionline can also be found here: /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11359-are-missiles-op

And as I stated there, I do not think it needs to be balanced out by maximizing the amount of weapons or defenses. That would give less strategic differences. Besides, in the other thread are quite a few option to counter missile fleets.

I gotta admit that this glass cannon ship is a problem that needs to be balanced out. I would like to see a max load out on ships. EG, maximum number of a given weapon type implemented.

A second option is to invest heavily in beams and hope to crush his ships in the very first round of combat, before missiles are launched, but that probably requires a significant tech investment which I don't think you have.