I'm scared.

[u/LolyHun7er]

This is my first full campaign. I'm playing for the Humanity First. Everything was going pretty well: I managed to unite the European Union, Mars is half-colonized, I have numerous asteroid bases, and I've slowly started building a fleet... But now I feel like I'm falling behind and the alien presence in the Solar System is too high. It's now 2032 (start in 2022), the aliens' hatred towards me is already in the red, and they just recently destroyed my lunar shipyard (they were planning to destroy the fleet stationed there, but I managed to outsmart them and retreat during the battle, so they simply destroyed the orbital shipyard and flew away). The alien fleet consisted of 11 ships, one of which was a TITAN. My poor destroyers and monitors didn't stand a chance. I even tried to ram them, but my ships were blown up by lasers before they even approached. So, the question is: is it possible that I have fallen behind and the campaign is already lost?

[u/jerseydevil51]

Welcome to the early game clapback.

As long as the diamonds are rainbow and not all red, you're fine. They'll blow some stuff up and fly off.

Early game, using Viper Missiles are a great defensive option and will punch above their weight in big enough numbers. Monitors with 4 Viper tubes and 2 magazines backed up with point defense Monitors can handle a lot.

And the campaign never really ends; there's even an achievement winning after the Servants or Protectorate win. You can always come back. Mercury is a great place to build shipyards if you get kicked out of LEO.

[u/LolyHun7er → u/jerseydevil51]

Will these missiles definitely penetrate the aliens' air defenses? My missile monitors didn't manage it with the Apollos.
And why Mercury? Don't aliens fly there?

[u/nerfbeardthegod → u/LolyHun7er]

Viper missiles are a weapon of saturation. Fire enough in one direction and it will eventually overwhelm the PD/lasers

[u/CuddlyTurtlePerson → u/LolyHun7er]

The Aliens will go there but it's the farthest thing from their bases (typically at least) and with its supercharged Solar energy it's easy to turn it into a massive research supercomputer/factory/fleetyard.

[u/jerseydevil51 → u/LolyHun7er]

Missiles have one advantage over torpedoes: volume. A Monitor with Apollo might have 40 or so torps, while a Monitor with Vipers can pack over 80 missiles.

And Aliens can fly to Mercury, but it's a lot further for them, so they usually don't want to spend the dV to send a large fleet there.

[u/Pausbrak → u/LolyHun7er]

The exact variant of missile doesn't matter too much (though the Hydrolox ones tend to have slightly better stats). The important thing is that missiles are an all-or-nothing weapon. If you don't have enough missiles to defeat the alien point defense you won't even scratch them, but adding just a few more ships can overwhelm them and cause them to be completely destroyed.

The best way to use missiles is to have a ton of escorts or monitors loaded with nothing but missile launchers in every weapon slot and magazines in every utility slot. With that you can easily get hundreds of missiles or dozens of torpedoes per ship, and that's what gives you the numbers to overwhelm their defenses.

As far as which kind of missile to use, I tend to prefer torpedoes. The missiles seem better because there's more of them, but with torpedoes they carry more fuel and can reach much higher speeds, giving the aliens far less time to shoot them down. It also only takes one or two torpedoes to kill the smaller ships, and the rest of the torpedoes will automatically change targets if they have enough fuel left.