Early ship design - best options?

[neilwilkes]

I am just started on my 4th attempt, and the learning curve is still very steep but I am beginning to get there (at least, I think I am) but the thing that is most confusing right now are drives & what is needed for an early ship to do the 'shoot down' mission.
What is needed to do this, please - and what is the most efficient way to proceed?
My current thinking is to immediately go for Kazakhstan (done) then Canada & the USA for boost & army options, plus less chance of serious enemy action whilst getting established. But it is the techs to get the best type of early ship i am struggling with. Especially drives & the power requirements, so any thoughts would be wonderful

[Barleyman]

You just need something that can gang up on a frigate or maybe a destroyer. Three monitors packed with missiles? You might need two groups of two to be able to do the pincer manoeuvre to stop xenos from retreating, though.

First okay drive is Fission Spinner and that takes a while to get. You can just stick on anything which gives you maybe dozen kps with some acceleration, check the drive chart and ship modules spreadsheet for details:

https://hoodedhorse.com/wiki/Terra_Invi ... eful_Links

[neilwilkes]

Thanks very much, Barleyman.
Much appreciated - I had not found that spreadsheet as yet
On my 4th attempt now and still learning the basics - getting there slowly.
It seems to me that once things have gone totally fruit shaped it is better to restart (not save spamming) and learn from the mistakes.

This is a LOT of fun!

[PAwleus]

I like fighting early by using Escorts and as to defend Earth-Luna space even chemical engines on them are enough - they allow travels to Luna and back without too much resources used. However, first decent low-tech engine I really like is Pulsar and I love Advanced Pulsar (over 1g combat acceleration with over 10km/s DV having just 6-9 propellant tanks) - with them you can fight aliens very cheaply (usually, resupplying missiles when having 2 magazines is even more resource-intensive than propellant) and locally defend also Mercury and Mars in the early/mid game. Currently (0.3.35-37), 3 Viper/laserPD Escorts are enough against almost any single alien ship (I even won against alone Dreadnought in 2031 without any ship lost) and in early/mid game a fleet of 3 Viper Monitors with 6-8 Viper/laserPD Escorts can win with small attrition even against Mothership or 2 Assault Carriers with small screen (in one engagement the fleet can usually only heavily damage them, though) when helped by even a singular Escort in another fleet.

[Barleyman]

I moved (Reddit) guides to their own page in the TI wiki, Elouda's diagram is good for visualising the drive performance but you need to check the spreadsheet if the drive has serious caveats, many of them do.

I understand that with recent changes you're no longer quaranteed to get any particular nice drives, apparently the best sure thing is the pulsar drive. I guess Pavos guys are feeling resentful we're boldly ignoring 90% of the drives outright.

In any case, until you have a specific need for ships, there's no point in building them, they will be soon obsolete and drain on resources. You need to whack an alien ship early in but just about anything with enough missiles can do that. Then keep a low profile until xenos go on war footing. You will sweep the skies of laughable tin cans Protectorate and Servants have built without trying.

https://hoodedhorse.com/wiki/Terra_Invicta/Guides

Caveat, in latest patch xenos are more aggressive about going after your mining assets, this might apply to alien-lovers too.

[neilwilkes]

I moved (Reddit) guides to their own page in the TI wiki, Elouda's diagram is good for visualising the drive performance but you need to check the spreadsheet if the drive has serious caveats, many of them do.

I understand that with recent changes you're no longer quaranteed to get any particular nice drives, apparently the best sure thing is the pulsar drive. I guess Pavos guys are feeling resentful we're boldly ignoring 90% of the drives outright.

In any case, until you have a specific need for ships, there's no point in building them, they will be soon obsolete and drain on resources. You need to whack an alien ship early in but just about anything with enough missiles can do that. Then keep a low profile until xenos go on war footing. You will sweep the skies of laughable tin cans Protectorate and Servants have built without trying.

https://hoodedhorse.com/wiki/Terra_Invicta/Guides

Caveat, in latest patch xenos are more aggressive about going after your mining assets, this might apply to alien-lovers too.

Thanks for the tip on the drive. MUCH appreciated.
I understand about needless ship building (not sure why the AI factions do so many poor ones so soon) and only need to shoot one down, then no ships until tech levels are worthwhile. Seen a couple of seriously helpful playthroughs on YT by PerunGaming (although the ads are getting ridiculous on YT now, popping every 10 minutes and every single time IO pause playback I can now guarantee ads within a minute of restarting, even if the last ones were only a couple of minutes prior to that but this is a gripe for YT)

[Ian_W]

(not sure why the AI factions do so many poor ones so soon)

Because by your access to playthroughs and youtube videos, you have the benefit of knowing both the set of probable futures, the strategy of the alien menace and specific useful countermeasures against it's weaknesses, and the AI has simply been told 'Look, there's an alien invasion coming' and has - quite reasonably - gone 'Fast is better than good. I can't risk leaving Earth defenseless in space. We need the ships NOW'.

[PAwleus]

In any case, until you have a specific need for ships, there's no point in building them, they will be soon obsolete and drain on resources. You need to whack an alien ship early in but just about anything with enough missiles can do that. Then keep a low profile until xenos go on war footing.

That's usually true. However, I play on Brutal so keeping a low profile I consider as a weak option I see trying to outpace aliens in resourse gathering as the main strategy there so I need strong enough military presence in space early on that allows me to destroy in space everything they send against my main assets starting from their first Assault Carrier. The main difficulty for me in the current build is maintaining the snowball effect strong enough without loosing all stored Volatiles. So far I am staying on the edge so it's working, though, but I digress - sorry about it.

[DarthVicious]

I am only on my fifth attempt now, so still much to learn. My fourth attempt I gave up at about 2038 with AA stomping all over the planet after the fracking servants gave them China and 30 nukes.

In any case, in my latest playthroughs I have changed my ship building strategy, and become more familiar with manually controlling fleets.

My current strategy is to avoid missile building altogether. Build 2 to 4 pure point defense escorts, and for muscle go with 2 to 3 destroyers with nose mounted lasers. Advanced pulsar engines also helps to evade kinetics. The reasoning is that without missiles, your fleet has a very low military score. So the aliens will not evade, they will engage. No need for pincer attacks.

Your PD ships will entirely neutralise their missiles and kinetics, and your destroyers will plink them to death with the lasers. I might have one missile monitor ship set to manual and hold off on firing missiles till the enemy ships are damaged or running, then use the missiles to finish them off (very cost effective if they have no more PD weapons to kill your missiles).

Having a monitor with kinetic rounds also helps. It keeps the aliens shooting at the magnetic rounds instead of your ships, kinetics have very large magazines, and they are excellent at killing off damaged ships that cant evade, or ships that try flying through your formation.

The only downside is that lasers do very poor damage, so they take forever to kill anything with reasonable armor.

TIP. learn to manually control your ships. Set main weapons (laser cannons) to attack primary target, secondary lasers to guardian mode so they assist with point defense.