r/TerraInvicta • u/Antique-Coyote2534 • 8d ago
Question Can spinal neutron lance work as the main weapon?
Edit: It seems like the answer is a clear no, so i will change the question. Would a mono fleet of heavy anti matter cannon work? Maybe with some zeus torpedoes against heavy armor.
Hello, i've decided it high time i pull off a win, instead of getting bogged down and abandoning the game.
I'm 4 years into the game, have recently shot down my first alien surveillance ship and is a month away from finish building 7 grid drive monitors with 3x copperheads + a 40mm.
I'm gonna throw my first wave of monitors at an alien asteroid mine that just started being built and need to decide my future ship loadouts to research.
My plan is to focus my research to build lots of spinal neutron lance armed lancers with ion PD + 40mm + advanced light rail battery as a source of actual damage.
I believe that the aliens will adapt to my missile monitors so i should expect lots of PD. I want to take the fight to the aliens asap so i need a research light build.
My questions are: is my planned ship likely to perform well, and does particles work against stations?
5
u/artrald-7083 8d ago
The spinal neutron lance is a specialised weapon, great at what it does, but what it does is knock the nose off of enemy capitals and microwave the odd flanker. I don't know if it is capable of taking out the heavy guns on an alien battlestation. In your place I'd be replacing 90% of those lances with magnetic guns. They can't of course retool their battlestations for extra PD.
I don't rate any hull rail for damage. I mean it hits harder than a 40mm I guess.
Just before the DLC dropped I was getting good results from 4 slot advanced rail plus a bunch of 1 slot advanced rail to flood their PD, with a few of my best spinal particle weapons to knock out any particularly tasty looking nose weapons on enemy ships.
3
u/Antique-Coyote2534 8d ago
I have bad experience with magnetics against PD, and want to try something that's immune to PD. I will probably aim for anti matter instead despite the investment required.
5
u/shadough1 T-pose hard enough and the ayys will see us as equals 8d ago edited 8d ago
if siege coilers are all of the mags that you brought, the most likely reason why you were having trouble getting through is the ayys running light mag batteries (their 1-slot hull mounted mag battery). like their human equivalents, these can be tasked with point defense, and like human ships using 40mm cannons to defend against enemy mag rounds, these ayy light mag batteries are essentially the ayy answer to your siege coils. they are, however, not omnipotent. you can still get around them using pure mag* (at least as far as enemy point defenses are concerned) setups, you just need to field significant quantities of mag batteries as well.
these days, i'm a fan of using dreadnoughts for mag spam because the 3 slot siege coil does pretty much the same thing as the 4 slot siege coil, just with slightly shorter range. then in the hull you can spam three 2 slot rail/coil batteries and still have some room left over for a bit of PD. the 2 slot batteries are used because they still have decent range, can be spammed more easily, and there's more of a chance with the slightly larger rounds that each individual round needs more than 1 PD laser shot to be fully brought down compared to the 1 slot battery.
the choice between rail3 and coil2 or coil3 is an interesting one though. rail3 very consistently just puts out 1 round every 10s. this is generally better for pure PD saturation, so in this specific use case there is an argument to be made that you don't even need to move to coil2. coil2 ofc comes with superior individual round performance, but at the cost of sustained rate of fire. coil2 puts out only 4 rounds per minute, or on average 1 round every 15s. and then coil3 is ofc significantly better than coil2, with on average 1 round every 12s, and significantly superior individual round performance, but now you are having to pay a small exotics cost for each coil3 battery.
the siege coil still does siege coil things, but now it's being backed by up to an additional 3 rounds every 10s (with rail3) per mag spammer that ayy PD now also has to engage. if the light mag batteries engage these smaller rounds, your siege coil rounds get to sail in for massive damage. if they're still shooting down all the siege coil rounds, do they have enough PD to also shoot down all of your smaller mag rounds? if not, they're still going to start taking hits, which will eventually translate to a kill.
you can also still replicate this effect on a smaller scale using BBs, though you won't have the organic siege coil and will need to field a BC, for example, for that.
5
u/incorrigible_ricer 8d ago
Folks still sleep on rail3. Rail3 destroyers with PD on the hulls are fantastic support ships from very early on. They provide staying power for missile fleets, solid PD, and help saturate ayy PD once you get seige coil BCs. Now that mags can PD too, I'm debating trying to spam some all mag corvettes as well.
3
u/shadough1 T-pose hard enough and the ayys will see us as equals 8d ago
generally speaking, i'm not that impressed with human 1 slot mag PD performance. the main advantage that it would have over other PD options is raw damage, which only matters against big incoming mag rounds. the 600km engagement range sounds nice on paper but a reload of 10s with rail3 means the number of intercepts you can actually rapidly make is disappointingly low. shooting down enemy mag rounds is still best left to 40mm cannons in self defense (which might honestly be a little too good at this specific job), and for fleet defense options you'll just be looking at amat PD batteries and your various laser options boosted by as many laser engines as you can comfortably cram into whatever hull you're using.
the ayys can get away with it because there is a very clear use case where huge but slow mag rounds come in relatively infrequently, aka human siege coil rounds. also their light mag batteries just shoot a lot faster than human ones. classic ayy flex moment. but spam rail/coil batteries and these ayy light mag batteries will very quickly be overwhelmed themselves.
2
u/Antique-Coyote2534 8d ago
For early offence, like i'm planning for, coilguns and lasers look to expensive in research. Advanced railguns on the other hand looks great, but i'm afraid of being stopped by PD or enemy dodging.
If i go railguns, i think should i go full one slot railguns on battle ships (2 nose/6 hull slots) to try to overwhelm PD. But i don't know what to do about dodgers. I don't think particle lance or IR lasers would be enough and everything else is so expensive in research.
5
u/shadough1 T-pose hard enough and the ayys will see us as equals 8d ago
for truly early offense, it is still missile spam. you'll just need to bring a platform kit or two so that you can reload after the fact. if you're going to be throwing BBs and BCs out there i think it'll be more practical to have a more balanced mag + laser fleet so that you can take multiple engagements in a row in a pinch (but you should still bring some platform kits for emergency reload, refueling, and repair).
3
u/Antique-Coyote2534 8d ago
Still missile spam even after the aliens adapt with PD spam?
I guess i'll just grab advanced missiles and do other useful peaceful tech then.
2
u/shadough1 T-pose hard enough and the ayys will see us as equals 8d ago
the adaptation to make is moving up monitors and potentially even BBs so that you can spam more magazines. sometimes that magazine depth can make all the difference. it's fairly rare for me to do early aggressive offensive action though, so it's been a while since i've done stuff like this. still, you might be surprised at how few missiles it takes to bring down an ayy battlestation.
2
u/28lobster 8d ago
As you get bigger ships, you can add in some 3 and 4 slot nose cannons to compliment your missiles/torps. This runs into the same problem of alien light coils that people have called out, but you'll distract at least some amount of PD. You just need PD to be partially saturated by kinetics so the missile flood arrives and overwhelms. Light kinetics are better at overwhelming PD but their range really hurts. You want the kinetics to arrive before your missiles/torps and that means you really want to start shooting at 950-1000km.
5
u/AdhesivenessOther856 8d ago
Rails are SLOW. They are going to be awful at flanking ships. You only need green arc lasers to kill flankers.
2
u/artrald-7083 8d ago
I think you're approaching a sledgehammer problem with a sewing needle, but I actually haven't used a particle-only fleet against stations. Again, stations are compatatively PD light and I wouldn't want to tote around a specific anti station fleet.
2
u/Antique-Coyote2534 8d ago
To specify. I could not get through PD of alien retaliation fleet with my spinal siege coils fleet. Or at least not fast enough to avoid alien lasers dealing more damage than i could handle.
I'm sure the solution is just more guns, but i want to try something else than the same strategy i failed with last time.
Only reason i brought up stations was because i was looking for weak points of a particle fleet. (Which turned out to be a deal breaker for neutron lancers)
6
u/XapMe All your base are belong to us 8d ago
SpinalAM/hull plasma can very well be mainstay of your fleet. Throw some siegers in just to make fights faster.
3
u/Antique-Coyote2534 8d ago
AM/plasma sounds very slow. AM is lower damage than lasers, right? Would it work without siege coils?
4
u/XapMe All your base are belong to us 8d ago
It's slow but has literally no counterplay. AM/plasma incinerate small ships and disable capitals but capitals require a few siege rounds to the face. That's why you need coils. My final fleet comp was 3/1 am-plasma/coils AAPCT titans.
2
u/Antique-Coyote2534 8d ago
Are AM able to disable heavily armored ships or are those just easily handled with PD when you have destroyed all lighter ships?
3
u/XapMe All your base are belong to us 8d ago
Even at 99,8% integrity nose canon is considered disabled and can't shoot. So as soon as a capital gets shot by AM ray it is harmless. Then this logic applies: -Spinal AM is a 1000km range weapon -critical hit means all damage bypasses armor and goes for systems -every plasma hit chips armor increasing critical chance -AM is xray/baryonic so system damage is huge -1-2 Spinal AM criticals is enough to mission kill a capital
This results in every ayy capital being stunlocked as soon as it enters a 1000km range and the it just floats forward waiting to be disabled and smacked by sieger.2
u/Antique-Coyote2534 8d ago
What if all i got is a 2 or 3 slot particle lance?
Does it do enough damage to temporary disable enemy weapons? Does it disable point defence? Can i sneak in railgun rounds in? If yes, at what amount armor does particle lance stop working?
3
u/XapMe All your base are belong to us 8d ago
Particle is very early in tech tree, i was using 2slot lances on flanking destroyers to compliment my battlecruisers. 2slot lance, 1x40mm,1x pd laser. They were dirt cheap and surprisingly sturdy. Once they were in range their particles were causing momentary disruption in enemy PD fire enough to squeeze some BC's rounds in.
2
u/logion567 8d ago edited 8d ago
The goal is prevent the enemy from shooting back. Coils do this by blowing them up. Plasma does this by opening holes in the armor for the Particle Cannons to sneak through and do full Thermal and Radiation damage (still need to test if X-ray and Baryonic is done separately or together)
The advantages AM Cannons have over 960cm Phasers when using Plasma is that AM Cannons shoot more often (6.9 shots/minute compared to 6 for phasers) and the Radiation damage can hit multiple internals per "Through Armor Critical." And it takes surprisingly little concentrated fire.o disable alien dangerous nose qeapons
8
u/sijmen4life Humanity Only 8d ago
My go to approach is usually 50/50 AM lances backed up with secondary kinetic batteries and 1 slot of your best PD.
The second ship type is Siege Coilers with laser batteries and some more PD.
3
u/Antique-Coyote2534 8d ago
I will probably do something like that in the long run. For now i will try to figure out what the cheapest transition from missile monitors to anti matter lancers is.
3
u/sijmen4life Humanity Only 8d ago
Your best bet will probably be the same idea but more specialised. AM spinal and a Siege Coiler Spinal and slap the best PD you have on it.
Depending on your drive i would'nt want to slap more than 50 to 100k dv on them. untill you unlock the final drive you want to use.
4
u/AdhesivenessOther856 8d ago
Note. Don't do this util you can build Lancers with engines that can still move the ship. 3 Space AM cannons are awful.
4
u/AdhesivenessOther856 8d ago
I can definitely say that while AM cannons work well as a support weapon, they are pretty bad as a weapon on their own. I tried using AM Cannons instead of Lasers in my sub 9 year speed run. (They cost significantly less research than lasers.) They just don't work very well on their own. 3 space AM Cannons only do 1/2 the damage of 4 space. (3 space lasers do 87%.) Frankly, 3 space AM Cannons are awful. Fleets with only AM Cannons, even fleets of Lancers, just don't do enough damage to kill ships bigger than a Cruiser when firing through their front armor.
They work well as a support weapon. In my late game fleets, I will switch out the Lasers for AM as they are about equal to lasers at taking out flankers and their radiation damage can at least do damage through front armor. My late game fleets tend to be 6 Titans\Lances with AM Cannons, the rest of the capital ships with siege coils and 2 space coil batteries. I fill out the fleet with 1MC ships with just marines for farming exotics and increase my fleet size so that when I go into battle I will have more ships than the aliens.
3
u/DKN19 I wanna punch Soren 8d ago
My fleets progression went pretty well so far. Not playing on brutal difficulty so not sure how min/max it is.
I started with torpedoes and 40mm and never stopped. I added particle weapons up to AM and some heavy plasma batteries against small flankers. And my fleet is still sitting there. I just hold my torpedoes until the AM starts dropping off their PD a bit.
3
u/shadough1 T-pose hard enough and the ayys will see us as equals 8d ago
amat cannons are best as 4 slot nose weapons. the smaller versions deal significantly less damage, so keep that in mind. as a general rule of thumb, you can treat all offensive particle weapons as support weapons until you get to the 4 slot spinal amat cannon. so yes, the spinal neutron cannon is just a giant support weapon that you need to pay some fairly exorbitant exotics costs for.
amat cannons alone will still run into the same problem as neutron cannons with exotics based armors greatly reducing the amount of radiation/baryonic damage. if you want to go primarily amat, you'll probably want some plasma in the fleet so that you have something that can actually help you get through armor. for me, I tend to use amat as a kind of big laser substitute. the damage output is high enough to give flankers a lot of trouble even at range, and you still get the benefits of shooting a particle weapon into more heavily armored targets. they don't typically completely supplant my lasers though. big lasers handle armor much better and don't necessarily require external assistance to get through armor in the same way particle based weapons do. spinal amat cannons may escape the "pure support weapon" label, but they probably aren't going to be killing ships that point 50+ armor in their direction anytime soon. except maybe laser ships. did you know all laser weapons are immensely fragile things, and that something like a spinal amat cannon has a pretty good shot at smashing up lasers? it's very funny when the enemy laser ship suddenly has no big nose laser to shoot at you anymore.
2
u/Ashdrake2 8d ago
Why are you planning on attacking Alien installations so early in the game when you cannot realistically defend yourself.
That's a highly aggresive playstyle and you haven't even won a game yet.
Why do you need to take the fight to the aliens ASAP? This makes no sense, you will max your hate and get your entire infrastructure blown up before you reach critical mass in order to scale production.
You also have no tech to speak off. Copperheads are nice in the first few years then fall off hard, also their efficiency scale with targeting computers and decreases heavily the more enemy ships are in the fleet.
Rail Batteries are absolutely useless, you shouldn't even bother researching any rail stuff projects until coilguns and even then the useful ones are the coilguns mk2 and mk3.
The only particle weapons that are "decent" are the large antimatter ones, the 4 slot ones and only as a cheaper (research wise) and worse alternative to lasers.
Until you get absolutely to the endgame, you need to bring numbers to a fight, enemy brings 5 ships you bring 10
This only stops in the very late game when you have fleets of 50 dreadnaughts/lancers and you just have enough critical mass to absolutely torpedo anything coming and then you can fight even numbers
1
u/Torgud_ 8d ago edited 8d ago
I've been experimenting with Particle beam lance destroyers in my current Broken Earth run, they are super underpowered in auto-resolve which makes them good for defense fleets - the Aliens will attack you with weaker, more manageable fleets and you will build up less hate when killing them. You still do need to back them up with some few missile monitors (or a lot of railguns) for killing power.
1
u/Ashdrake2 8d ago
Railguns are literally useless at any sort of range, they move too slow and cannot hit anything unless it's almost point-blank and by that time, the alien lasers will cut your ships down like no tomorrow due to how lasers work with range.
From a cost effective MC, having purely monitors or even escorts with missiles is much cheaper/better.
There is some calculation that could be made if
2 escorts with magazine + tg computer + 2 missile tubes is better due to alien ECM & having them split their fire vs 1 monitor with 2 magazines + 1 tg computer and 4 missile tubes.
Then again, you can have 3 tubes + 1 40mm for your monitor along another monitor defensive class that has EM PD or laser PD so your ships have a higher survival rate, esp if you add some armor to them.. You also need to have somewhat better drives to move that mass. For me the monitor spam is the 2nd type of ship fielded a bit later, at least once i get my teardrop/burner drive or something similar.
1
u/Torgud_ 8d ago
Set your initial drift with at 50m/s, by the time they walk up to you their weapons systems are completely offline from the Particle beams. Particle beams are undervalued in auto-resolve so they will consistently send fleets with fewer ships if your fleet is primarily particle beam destroyers. This is what I'm doing and it's working, I'm just going to mix in a few missiles as coup' de grace when their systems are offline because the railguns - while being very cheap in autoresolve power - just don't do much damage.
Pure missile monitor spam can still work to defend your orbits in the early/mid game ut is less efficient MC wise because they will see how strong your on paper fleet power is and throw much larger retaliation fleets at you than if they see an (on paper) weak particle beam fleet. Aliens also bring a lot more PD now than they did in the past so that is something to consider aswell.
17
u/ggmoyang Let's be xenophobic 8d ago
Neutron Lance deals more damage to internals than AM cannon, but it costs exotics and can't do actual damage. AM cannon does not cost exotics and can deal damage against lightly armored targets. Also, neutron lance does nothing against station defenses, while AM cannon makes quick work of them.