A new level of bu.......

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DarthVicious
Posts: 98
Joined: Sun Oct 30, 2022 7:38 pm

A new level of bu.......

Post by DarthVicious »

A Project Exodus escort bombed one of my Mars colonies (yes, a T3 colony), with TWO battlestations, and only using 1 nuclear missile and wiped it out (on speed 2) and this didnt even count as an atrocity.
The Mars Incident 03.png
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The Mars Incident 01.png
The Mars Incident 01.png (321.95 KiB) Viewed 2290 times
This happened just after an Autosave (on the 17th of the month).

This is so many levels of bullshit.

1. Why is project exodus bombarding my bases? The servants, sure, but Exodus?
2. A nuclear barrage from a huge fleet, sure, two battlestations PD might not be able to knock them all down, but a single torpedo?
3. This stupid bug (which everyone abuses by blowing up Alien basis with nuclear armed corvettes) should have been long since addressed.
4. Do you have any idea how long it takes and how expensive it is to build a COLONY!!!? With battlestations!!!! To be taken outt by 1 bloody escort with 1 bloody torpedo.
Richard Baxton held off four waves of mind worms. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character. People need heroes. They don't need to know he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy.
DarthVicious
Posts: 98
Joined: Sun Oct 30, 2022 7:38 pm

Re: A new level of bu.......

Post by DarthVicious »

A further problem is with auto resolve.

If you have missile equipped ships, you always win the autoresolve, without even using all your missiles.

A PD heavy fleet will always beat a missile heavy fleet despite having a much lower combat rating when you actually fight the battle. And the aliens are much less likely to evade your fleet if you don't have missiles, because it looks like you have a weak fleet.

The game massively over values missiles and torpedoes. For your end game victory, just build a lot of missile ships to inflate your fleet score. Just don't use them in actual combat.
Richard Baxton held off four waves of mind worms. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character. People need heroes. They don't need to know he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy.
PAwleus
Posts: 107
Joined: Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:58 pm

Re: A new level of bu.......

Post by PAwleus »

I don't agree with your second post:

1. It's not true that you always win with the autoresolve while having ships equipped with missiles - try to win having 3 missile(Rattler or Viper)/Laser PD Escorts with engines not better than Advanced Pulsar(and DV in range of 9-15km/s) against an alien Dreadnought. It's possible manually and with luck you won't even loose a ship but autoresolve will fail you. With pure missile Escorts autoresolve will also fail you as such Escorts will still usually have less combined combat value than an alien Dreadnought

2. Missiles are not overvalued (at least not much) but they demand of you to learn how to fight using them - not intuitively perhaps, but they rely much more on ship maneuvers than other weapons and they have easily missed features, eg. did you know that Rattlers can be an amazing last chance PD weapon?

It's true that missiles are overvalued in some circumstances but they are also undervalued in others. In my current Brutal game fighting only manually, still only using missiles as offensive weapons and ships with engines not better than Advanced Pulsar I've acquired over 800 Exotics before 2034 by combating alien ships so I wouldn't say missiles are overvalued.
anonusername
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Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 11:10 pm

Re: A new level of bu.......

Post by anonusername »

PAwleus wrote: Tue Nov 29, 2022 11:31 pm I don't agree with your second post:

1. It's not true that you always win with the autoresolve while having ships equipped with missiles - try to win having 3 missile(Rattler or Viper)/Laser PD Escorts with engines not better than Advanced Pulsar(and DV in range of 9-15km/s) against an alien Dreadnought. It's possible manually and with luck you won't even loose a ship but autoresolve will fail you. With pure missile Escorts autoresolve will also fail you as such Escorts will still usually have less combined combat value than an alien Dreadnought

2. Missiles are not overvalued (at least not much) but they demand of you to learn how to fight using them - not intuitively perhaps, but they rely much more on ship maneuvers than other weapons and they have easily missed features, eg. did you know that Rattlers can be an amazing last chance PD weapon?

It's true that missiles are overvalued in some circumstances but they are also undervalued in others. In my current Brutal game fighting only manually, still only using missiles as offensive weapons and ships with engines not better than Advanced Pulsar I've acquired over 800 Exotics before 2034 by combating alien ships so I wouldn't say missiles are overvalued.
Cheesing alien dreadnoughts with missile escorts only works because the ayys don't use enough PD. A human fleet with good PD will murder those escorts in a fight, but lose autoresolve. I have lost autoresolve to AI human fleets when my PD superiority is such that they can't land a single hit, even with their railguns!
PAwleus
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Re: A new level of bu.......

Post by PAwleus »

Do you really think that AI human fleets know how to fight using missiles? If you fight an alien Dreadnought the way AI human fleets do then your 3 Escorts will also be destroyed and you will also not score a single hit (Edit: at least on Brutal - I don't remember what the Dreadnoughts are composed of in other difficulty modes)
Edit2: I am not saying autoresolve is OK
Ian_W
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Re: A new level of bu.......

Post by Ian_W »

anonusername wrote: Wed Nov 30, 2022 12:44 am
Cheesing alien dreadnoughts with missile escorts only works because the ayys don't use enough PD.
Cheesing alien dreadnoughts with missile escorts only works because the *early* ayys don't use enough PD. They soon learn though, and their later ship start stacking much better PD.

You're missing a nice bit of subtlety in making the early aliens vulnerable to the easiest weapon system for humans to get, and the one closest to what they are using as standard in the 21st century.

Later in the game, missile spam does indeed get eaten alive by ayy ships with enough PD.
DarthVicious
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Re: A new level of bu.......

Post by DarthVicious »

DarthVicious wrote: Tue Nov 29, 2022 5:07 pm A Project Exodus escort bombed one of my Mars colonies (yes, a T3 colony), with TWO battlestations, and only using 1 nuclear missile and wiped it out (on speed 2) and this didnt even count as an atrocity.
As a follow up to this ... I gave the game a break for an evening, and loaded an earlier save the next day. Maybe some funnies that I am reading too much into but ....

1) I noticed that if i just leave some escorts in orbit or close by then the human factions don't bombard anything. The aliens might still try to bombard, but they don't use nuclear missiles, so the LDAs see them off easily enough. The constant repairing of bases or chasing of single corvettes is tiresome though.

2) I eventually abandoned or gave up on my handful of asteroid bases. They were just too painful to keep defending and repairing. Once I took Jupiter, I just built up some bases on Io and Ganymede. The noble metals aren't as good but its sufficient, and the abundance of water and volatiles make those resources near irrelevant. The regular metals are also super-abundant, but I really battle to keep a good supply of noble metals. Had to adjust my ship designs to reduce my dependence.

3) Likewise with exotics. At one stage I went overboard using exotic modules in my ships. Not enough Ayys to keep me supplied though, so again I had to adjust my ship designs to not be too dependent on exotics. The current resource hurdle now is antimatter. Firing up the Mercury supercolliders.

I expected to win the game faster once I consolidate the Inner planets, but now I am slogging through Saturn and the Centaurs, with two heavy assault fleet and a bunch of Marines. I could use the nuclear corvettes, but it feels too much like cheese for me. I have long since finished research, and just doing repeatables.
Richard Baxton held off four waves of mind worms. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character. People need heroes. They don't need to know he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy.
rookie.one
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Re: A new level of bu.......

Post by rookie.one »

Sorry but reading your 1st post just made me LOL. At least now you know how the poor xenos feel when your nuclear excorts enter their systems to drop a nuke and be gone before they can respond :lol: .

On your second post:
DarthVicious wrote: Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:57 pm 2) I eventually abandoned or gave up on my handful of asteroid bases. They were just too painful to keep defending and repairing. Once I took Jupiter, I just built up some bases on Io and Ganymede. The noble metals aren't as good but its sufficient, and the abundance of water and volatiles make those resources near irrelevant. The regular metals are also super-abundant, but I really battle to keep a good supply of noble metals. Had to adjust my ship designs to reduce my dependence.
I see astroid mining more as a throw away / I expect them to be bombed. Resulting in just building power/mining complex/maybe a point defense array if its for something like water/volotiles mid game.

For asteroid bases that are important to my resource income I tend to build cheap replaceable modules (in my last serious run I prospected Luna for a total of 3 and Mars for a total of 6 fissiles, so i had to rely on Asteroids):
Colony Core with mostly tier 2 and tier 1 modules: like settlement mining complex and 2 farms 2 fusion arrays for basic power supply / sustain. Rest of the base then are fusion piles and pda's for defense and to fill up the slots and make it less like a tier 2 module is hit. Anyways, whatever gets hit during a bombing run, i can replace it within like 30-90 days. 4-6 pda's with UV phasers blast any alien ship out of the sky fast enough that only 1 module should be destroyed, if its more than one ship maybe some more modules will be destroyed but as i said, those are cheap/fast to replace.

Later on with better drive techs (Advanced Antimatter, Deadalus Torch) you can consider using rotating defense fleets to defend your asteroid bases, but that is more an opportunity to farm exotics than it is for defending those bases as multiple pda's just work fine.
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johnnylump
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Re: A new level of bu.......

Post by johnnylump »

@OP What build are you playing?

There have been changes to the bombardment mechanics on the validation build, so it's hard to incorporate this as feedback when we don't know what version of the game it's arising from.
DarthVicious
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Re: A new level of bu.......

Post by DarthVicious »

rookie.one wrote: Wed Nov 30, 2022 8:07 pm Sorry but reading your 1st post just made me LOL. At least now you know how the poor xenos feel when your nuclear excorts enter their systems to drop a nuke and be gone before they can respond .
DarthVicious wrote: Tue Nov 29, 2022 5:07 pm 3. This stupid bug (which everyone abuses by blowing up Alien basis with nuclear armed corvettes) should have been long since addressed.
DarthVicious wrote: Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:57 pm I expected to win the game faster once I consolidate the Inner planets, but now I am slogging through Saturn and the Centaurs, with two heavy assault fleet and a bunch of Marines. I could use the nuclear corvettes, but it feels too much like cheese for me. I have long since finished research, and just doing repeatables.
I make a point of not using the corvette cheese, and rarely use autoresolve anyway. I am knocking over alien bases with 4 Lancers using superheavy phasers and 60+ nose armor. There would be no point to the game if you abused stuff like this, at least for me.
Last edited by DarthVicious on Wed Nov 30, 2022 9:35 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Richard Baxton held off four waves of mind worms. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character. People need heroes. They don't need to know he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy.
DarthVicious
Posts: 98
Joined: Sun Oct 30, 2022 7:38 pm

Re: A new level of bu.......

Post by DarthVicious »

johnnylump wrote: Wed Nov 30, 2022 8:58 pm @OP What build are you playing?

There have been changes to the bombardment mechanics on the validation build, so it's hard to incorporate this as feedback when we don't know what version of the game it's arising from.
I am playing 0.3.42, validation build on Steam. However, this game was probably started in an earlier build. Not sure if that makes a difference. Been going at it for weeks lol. it just cost me a reload thats all. The human factions rarely bombard if you have a defending fleet (or so it appears), so my parking a couple escorts in low mars orbit seemed to have stopped all random bombards of the bases there.
Richard Baxton held off four waves of mind worms. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character. People need heroes. They don't need to know he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy.
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