Questions about PD, possibly bugged

[Dartanis]

Sooooo... Ive been testing the skirmish/fleet combat mechanics of the game fairly... extensively the past couple of days. Trying to figure out what weapons work and what dont. I may or may not have also pissed off ET beyond the point of no return with my ingame testing once I found what works in skirmish mode. Not the point, but I would like to know how the aliens cool off if they keep sending fleets to take out my mars shipyard and I keep blowing them up? Could they pick a different target? Maybe?

To the point:
During my skirmish testing I encountered the Alien Missile Frigate, and kept losing to it. Badly. With every prebuilt and selfbuilt design I had. This led me to testing different PD variants in order to figure out HOW your supposed to beat this damn thing if the prebuilt 800 combat power Titan keeps losing to it 3-1. My testing found the following, and Im wondering if this is intended: Laser Point Defence, seeminlgy all variants mounted on ships, only fire toward the sides. And at extremely short range to boot. Now I dont know how long 200 km is supposed to be in skirmish mode, but I dont think its supposed to be barely the length of the ship. The Phaser variant fires faster but otherwise has the same problems as its earlier iterations. I wrote off Laser PD as inefficiant.
I next moved on to testing the 30mm Autocannons to see how well they fare. I could not get them to shoot. Period. They did not shoot at enemy ships, they did not shoot at incoming mag rounds, they did not shoot at incoming missiles, side, front, back, up, down, nothing. Im going to assume thats bugged.
I then tried missiles as PD and hoo boy do the missiles intercept the first enemy missile in a salvo. They deffinitely get the first one and then fail to reaquire targets and everything else goes through. Maybe make missiles on defencive mode aquire different targets in the enemy salvo so they are acualy worth trying in that mode. Discarded as non-functional.
I then went back and tried the Point Defence Particle Beam because nothing else was working. Its not great at intercepting projectiles, but it makes an effort. It fires at what actualy looks like 200 km, and does a pretty good job at intercepting missiles. If only it had the firerate of laser PD. But PDPB does not seem to upgrade because Im assuming its supposed to be a stopgap untill you get lasers and phasers. That are considerably worse.

Is all this working as intended? Point Defence Arrays and Layered Point Defence Arrays seem to have a much longer range variant of the Laser PD that absolutely shreads enemy missiles. Im assuming thats whats supposed to happen.

And while I applaud your effort to give multiple options and pathways to success, I am pretty convinced that most early game weapons tech outside missiles is functionaly useless against the aliens (and possibly other human ships too), and while that could be somewhat fine, even what should be midgame tech Visible Light Green Lasers in all their variants do not do remotely enough damage to engage even the smaller alien vessels in combat and expect to be able to destroy them. A look at the upgraded laser variants may be in order as there just isnt enough fine control in ship combat to allow you to get close to the enemy reliably. And even the prebuilt skirmish ship with 4 UV phasers has trouble destroying a single 114 combat power corvette.

ps. While I hopefuly have a captive audience, after the last patch the Dreadnaught class alien vessel seems to have found a plasma cannon, a regular turret variant, that aquires targets farther than its Spinal Mag Cannon, or my missiles. And even after stacking 30 layers of armor on a monitor it seems to still sometimes randomly 1shot my ships. I had success destroying Dreadnaughts before, but now combat starts well beyond the range of my missiles and the damn Plasma Cannon begins firing almost immedietely while it takes me a good bit to get within missile and torpedo lock on range.

I like the game, but I wish that if so many choices are included, a few more of those early choices would be viable. Though to be fair, some of this is probably just bugged at the moment.

[tstein]

Agaisnt the aliens.. make more number of smaller ships. Do not waste time on armor since their weapons are very strong.

I use several smalle ships with Lasers (not th e PD only that can intercept missiles. Keep the tightly packed so one covers the other. One ship behind is a missile barrage ship and that is the one that does the kill