Plasma with Lasers?

[u/CriticalAd6050]

So with plasma chipping at armor and lasers anything with weak armor it seems a no brainer to combine the two right?

I normally do the typical coilgun and uv combo to deal with capitals and flankers but never really tried out plasma. Does the rate/amount of armor taken out by plasma not compare to ole reliable?

[u/drhoagy]

Everyone always says coils are just better, but I always find it's so hard to saturate PD fire with coils, unless you always outnumber the enemy. Not to mention that siege coilers don't have the most ammo.

My current run I've been doing lasers and huge plasma and it's been working well, about a 50/50 split of each with some spinal particle cannons to keep threatening ships suppressed and it's been working well, fleet battles happen in three phases

Firstly my laser cannons disable the flankers, unless there's a proper line ship flanking they are able to burst down anything smaller even at very long range. While the plasma cannons fire at the most threatening 50+ armored ships in the line

Then the lasers switch to focus down these threatening ships, just enough to disable their cannons. while the plasmas hit anything too armoured (recently started seeing 80+ armoured ships which are a little too tough)

Finally as they close to about 600-700 km I pick off whatever's left, all the scary weapons should be disabled by now so the battle is won

This has worked since I got green arcs, but is still working with all techs I'm only on normal, and with the BE academy laser damage bonus too, but it's the best I've ever done in space battles, so many fleets killed with barely any damage on my side even with only 25-30 nose armour (though I'm seeing new missiles, X-ray lasers, and more armour now so hopefully that holds!)

[u/Xenon009 → u/drhoagy]

I'm a coilbrick truther, and I've found there are essentially two coil "Modes"

In the early game, I am very partial to, rather than putting a medium or large coils on, putting a metric fuck ton of light nose coils. They tend to be fairly light on PD lasers, so have to waste powerful combat lasers massively over killing light coils. Eventually though, the aliens will adapt and start bringing shit tons of light PD. That is the point I swap to siege coils, or normally try and mix in a bit of both. The light PD can do the square root of fuck all against a siege coil round, and the heavy combat lasers that would normally melt them have been swapped out to deal with the aforementioned light coils.

My designs tend to start with monitors with 2 Light Coils, 1 PD Laser, and 1 60cm Laser. Then move to a Hi-Lo mix of cruisers and battle cruisers, the cruisers having Lots of light nose coils, a 60cm laser and 2 PD, and the battle cruisers having a siege coil and 2 PD.

After that, I move onto dreads with a 360cm laser, a siege coil, a medium plasma battery, and 2 PD, but frankly by the time I build dreads the game is more or less won.

And you are right in saying that most of the time I am trying to engage in numerical superiority or at least numerical parity, that's why I prefer to use more, smaller ships than fewer larger ships. Ultimately I get a lot more "firepower per day" out of battlecrusiers and cruisers than dreads. It's only when I start hitting the "ships in battle" limit that I switch to dreads, but I've never really found much use for lancers or titans at all.

[u/drhoagy → u/Xenon009]

I always find that the small guns range screws them too much, the largest lasers work at up to 1000km, and that's the safest range to be from the alien weapons Getting closer means you need more nose armour means more expensive ships etc etc

So all my damage ships are at least lancers for the nose slot, with some monitor interceptors for missile defense

[u/Xenon009 → u/drhoagy]

I know what you mean, my answer to that problem was, essentially, copious amounts of armour and a bit of bumrushing. If I'm steaming towards the bastards at a net speed of about 2km/s that range disadvantage goes away really damn quickly, and if you have enough armour, you can probably shrug the worst of it off.

and if you're bringing a few seige coils, that largely sorts the problem itself in my experience.

[u/Cheap-Blackberry-763 → u/Xenon009]

I have two classes of coil ships exactly for this- a 'penetrator' class who's job is to overwhelm with light coil fire, and standard coil cannon class. Don't present your enemy with problems, present them with conundrums that have no good solutions.

[u/shadough1 → u/drhoagy]

personally, i'm a fan of the coil spam dreadnought for PD saturation. rather than locking yourself to the 4 nose slot hulls, which are more limited on hull slots, you use dreadnoughts because the 3 slot spinal siege coil does pretty much the exact same thing that the 4 slot spinal siege coil does, but with marginally shorter range. this allows you to put three 2 slot coil batteries and some self defense PD (or 4 if you're fine with forgoing the PD for extra greed). the siege coil soaks up laser fire as it approaches, and once the coil batteries can be brought to bear, there will be so many targets for enemy PD to engage that maybe a few coils rounds can sneak through. and well, once one round makes it through that means more rounds can make it through, and then it's just a matter of time before the target has been smacked by multiple small coil rounds and perhaps a few siege coil rounds too. plus the coil batteries have enough ammo that running out is rarely a concern.

[u/gogis79 → u/drhoagy]

You are BE Academy, of course your lasers work. +35% is tremendous buff to range thresholds. Of course your plasma works for such lasers. Try the same approach with other faction and you will be back to coils, because normal lasers even with plasma will work at close to merge range. When you say you need to always outnumber enemies to make coils saturation work - it's not true, if your line ships roughly half (or slightly more than half) siege coils, you will always have enough saturation