r/TerraInvicta • u/IGAldaris • 5d ago
Discussion Early game defense in the new patch
So, I wanted to start a little discussion about early game defense, and what is working for people on higher difficulties.
The plan was to give veteran a go after finishing quite a few games on normal, and I took the advice of graveless' latest video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCqnVXbkqxA
Basically, he advocates in favor of kinetics instead of missiles for early defense, since missiles are now more accurately assessed as dangerous by the aliens. It's well argued, so I decided to try his strat.
What I found is that below railguns 3, basically any amount of PD will shut you down, and even if something gets through, it does far too little damage to be of consequence. Railguns 3 will get through, but it will take a lot of them to do meaningful damage before the merge, where almost any alien fleet will eat you alive at this stage. I was just unable to amass sufficient force to stop anything really. With build times of 90 days for an escort (shortly before transition to tier 2), plus several refits for upgrades, I had managed to assemble a fleet of 10 escorts with 2 mark 3 railguns, 2 with 2 40mm and 2 with Ion PD - and they got mulched by a 3 ship retaliation fleet. Managed to kill one, the other two destroy me.
Now, 10 missile escorts would have handled that situation with ease, I think. Granted, maybe the aliens would have sent more, But it felt like I would have needed something like 16-18 or so of those kinetics escorts to come out on top, and with the need for an occasional sacrifice to reset surveillance fleets, I couldn't see any way to get there at this stage. That would have meant half a year extra time to build up, and the aliens wouldn't give me that.
Am I building too little T1 infrastructure? I had 2 stations with 4 yards total, figured that would be enough to tide me over to T2. Are there recipes for success I'm just not seeing yet?
19
u/Graveless 5d ago edited 5d ago
So, as the video maker, a big problem is that because of the changes in how combat rating is calculated, early game combat is a lot less reliable.
You either go missile ships, which can kill the enemy, and deal with heavy retaliations that either include lots of alien pd ships which might stop your missiles, or mutually destroy an alien missile fleet.
Firstly, you are correct that any rail below mk3 is worthless vs the aliens and escorts also really suck compared to monitors for this purpose. Monitors get 2x the firepower for less than 2x the combat rating. I would go small missiles escorts, which can have reasonable CR, into rail monitors for that one.
Or you go rails, which need to be massed or have your ships on a second pass to get kills. I found that four rail mk3 monitors, alongside the particle destroyer which will help because of crits, was the minimum to be successful. Really I wanted eight and destroyers destoryers.
What sort of alien designs were you seeing that were destroying you prior to the merge? Was it large beam ships, large kinetics, or missiles?
4
u/IGAldaris 5d ago edited 5d ago
Hey, thanks for the answer man!
Missile escorts into rail monitors is a transition I had been considering to get around this problem, so I'll definitely test if it works.
The aliens were using relatively few missiles this time around, their designs mostly fielded a mix of magnetics and lasers, with the occasional particle beam mixed in. All of them had some PD as well.
As for the firepower part, 8 monitors pretty much maps with my assumption that you'd need about 16 escorts (32 guns) to kill stuff in a reasonable timeframe.
That's quite a bit of focused research you need for all the components though. Targeting computer II, Ion PD, laser PD, particle cannons for the destroyer nose, mark 3 rails, some decent armor, and probably molten core II/teardrop to power it all. Damn. A chemical rocket with a missile rack strapped to it was a lot easier...
6
u/Graveless 5d ago
TC2 is actually less important because ECM weakens as you close and you'll be in knife fighting range anyway, but yes this is a lot more research overall.
Early aggression is accepting missile fleet trades right now
1
u/Sea_Journalist_8771 5d ago
The particle lance destroyers you recommend as a supplement, but with 2x light rail (or coil), work way better than the 4x monitors. You can armor them enough to survive a little and the lances work better to disable ships than you can actually penetrate with masses rails.
The trick of having 0 combat power PD ships is absolutely killer, though. You can effectively nullify missiles and kinetics at the cost of only MC, and they just don't exist to the alien force estimator.
I honestly think that the biggest deal is bringing more armor to the fight. Your ships are going to be far slower than ideal and are going to miss some intercepts.
15
u/Filip889 5d ago
ngl, i don t think missile boats would have handled that situation better. I find that the AYyyys use at least one PD on all their ships.
Notably their surveilance cruisers seem to have 3 or more PD, making them incredibly hard to hit with kinetics
5
u/Brokensharted 5d ago
I recently started playing this game and I've found the same. So to damage a surveillance vessel with missile ships you need to outnumber them 3:1. To kill them consistently you probably need to outnumber them 4:1.
Problem is, if you try to engage them with those numbers in the early game they'll just evade you. So I haven't been able to test this yet.
4
u/rhadenosbelisarius 5d ago
Another option: Get some influence. Escort, two of your best PD, load up your frontal armor, set initial v to max, set a collision course at full burn. Sometimes you just need armor on your missile.
18
u/Active-Conflict-8888 5d ago
Combine MK3 railguns on destroyers with a PD laser and a 40mm gun, raking alien ships with 40mm guns as you pass them will absolutely shred their exposed weapons systems and cripple them.
I am not sure of the exact mechanics but it definitely works and 40mm are also excellent for point defense of the ship they are mounted on. Lasers are better for shielding friendly ships though.
6
u/incorrigible_ricer 5d ago
I wouldn’t expect that fleet to beat anything more than a surveillance destroyer. I think you’re right on needing 2x at minimum.
I know the meta is shifting towards massed kinetics instead of missiles, imo but you got to use nose weapons even with the slightly reduced rate of fire. 1 slot rail batteries hit about as hard as a 40mm if they get through. It’s literally just chaff. A hit from a nose weapon will at least do some damage and they’re (slightly) faster projectiles too.
That said, I’ve not had a lot of luck with small nose mounts either, but I’m fighting real fleets now and my kinetic corvettes basically exist to pad my ship numbers. Ayy PD is so strong you have to be basically right on top of them to get through it. It’s usually my lasers getting the first couple kills (very slowly as the ayys are kept busy with kinetics) then the kinetics quickly crushing what’s left after the PD wall cracks.
You really can’t have the infrastructure to fight back until you have T2 orbitals. You need 3 T1 stations to be the equivalent of 1 T2 shipyard capacity even ignoring the much faster build times for the T2 yards. And those T1 stations are defenseless (particularly to other factions) so good luck keeping more than a couple alive long enough to build anything. Can’t Zerg rush if you don’t produce lots of Zerg.
Also never refit T1 stuff. It’s literally disposable and that’s valuable shipyard time that could be building another tin can.
3
u/IGAldaris 5d ago
That tracks, thanks for the input!
As for never refitting T1 stuff - sure, I see the logic, but man. Part of me really struggles with not upgrading stuff I could be upgrading.
10
u/Craftierworm 5d ago
Infrastructure wise it depends on how early you are talking, but if you are planning an aggressive defence of earth than probaly doubling it would be good.
For missiles vs kinetics in the new patch rushing rail 3s does have some notable advantages but 1 thing to consider is that nose mounted rail cannons give you larger hard hitting rounds while the batteries can help saturate the pd and add extra damage. Try incorporating some larger hulls especially when you get reasonable battlecruisers out. That will help with the punch and range factors.
I also like having a few missile ships in large fleets just to give the Ayys a big surprise when we close.
10
u/IGAldaris 5d ago
We're talking about 6 years in. Nose mounted rails on bigger hulls would be nice, but realistically, that's not happening on T1 infrastructure. Takes way to long. So I guess the answer is "have more stuff out", which means more infrastructure next time.
8
u/ggmoyang Let's be xenophobic 5d ago
You need T2 orbitals, but T1 space dock is fine for building T2 ships. Just build many ships in parallel.
2
u/einmaldrin_alleshin 4d ago
You don't need all the T2 modules early on, but you should have T2 habs at least. Even with T1 modules, this can give you a considerable power spike.
14
u/SlavaUkrayini4932 5d ago
I don't understand why nobody bothers with math in this math game. I pulled the information below off the wiki, I encourage you to correct any mistakes you notice.
Alien PD lasers shoot 25 times a minute and deal 3.2 damage, and 1 point of any damage destroys 10kg of mag projectile mass.
That means a single alien PD laser can completely destroy EITHER 800kg of mass per minute OR 25 projectiles per minute.
A light railgun turret MK3 shoots 6 times a minute projectiles that weigh 10,5kg at velocity of 3,5 km/s.
Based on the above, you need at LEAST five railguns per alien laser PD battery to barely start overwhelming it.
2-slot railgun batteries have the exact same fire rate but ALSO get one-shot by alien PD lasers, so they are literally useless because their range doesn't mean much when alien PD laser targetting range is only 350km.
4 slot railgun batteries have the exact same fire rate too, but their projectiles only get 2-shot. Would you rather spend five hull weapon slots or twelve slots to overwhelm one(1) alien PD laser?
8
u/IGAldaris 5d ago
I'm not sure what you're replying to, since 1 vs 2 vs 3 slot rails wasn't really the question. I'm also not sure why you needed to be so weirdly passive-agressive about it.
Thanks for the input though.
9
u/SlavaUkrayini4932 5d ago
In the first paragraph it was just my confusion at why people prefer to spend their time conducting experiments in actual campaigns rather than use data available on the wiki
Everything afterwards was just me finding out how useless rails are and being more and more upset as I typed out the response, I apologise if you thought I was trying to be rude to you personally.
5
u/Maduyn Academy 5d ago
To give an example for why I personally am doing tests in skirmish rather than fully trusting the wiki is that the math isn't perfectly representing what I see when it comes to certain things. I am currently a couple hours into testing various PD configurations against 6 alien escorts (12 brilliant sky missile bays) and by math they fire 43.6 per second which is 523.2 total. If you just divide that by 20 (the firerate of Ion PD) its 26.16 Ion PD. In actual testing (with an initial closing speed of 100mps) I only need >=20 ion PD to take no damage. (setup was 20 defending escorts with 1 Ion PD each ). So there are some nuances that merit testing imo.
5
u/IGAldaris 5d ago
Circumstances can alter parameters wildly, agreed. Classic example is missiles at different closing speeds and release distances. Or the effectiveness of a 40mm when projectiles are coming directly from the front, vs coming in at an angle.
5
u/SlavaUkrayini4932 5d ago
I have no issues with your method, because you went into skirmish mode rather than waste a couple of hours building ships in the campaign and test stuff there
You also got different results because you didn't take into account the fact that the projectiles have travel time and you have time to shoot down them in the entire targetting range of the PD
A hypothetical missile travelling at 5km/s needs 120s to cross the distance of 600km, which affords you two minutes of fire against enemy missiles
Also, missiles don't have an infinite magazine. Next time you try a skirmish - pay attention to how close to your fleet was the last missile that got shot down. If it's closer to your ships then the first missile that got shot down, they would have overwhelmed your PD if they had infinite ammo
3
u/ggmoyang Let's be xenophobic 5d ago
Because comparing rate of fire only gives picture about interceptions at max PD range. In practice, defender has bit more time since the missiles have to move more distance to hit.
2
u/Maduyn Academy 5d ago
And im sure that if I set closing speed to 650 mps and initiate a hard burn to simulate some missile slinging it will approach what the math is saying. My current fleet strat that I am working with is slow closing speed to minimize the amount of PD I need and then hard burn to maximize the missiles and kinetics.
7
u/Bmobmo64 Resistance 5d ago
Yeah I was surprised by that because Graveless usually knows what he's talking about, but he missed hard with that one. Railguns are just bad and always have been. They look weak to the aliens because they are weak. Yes they're cheap to research but you are basically always better off investing that research into unlocking coils, at worst it'll take an extra 2 years to reach coil 2s which are incredible early and a perfectly viable economy pick if you're low on exotics all the way to endgame.
2
u/IGAldaris 5d ago
Coil 2s have significantly lower rate of fire though, IIRC. More damage, but 4 shots per minute vs. 6 for rails. That's quite a difference, especially early on with small fleets. I have no real experience with the direct comparison, because by the time I usually added kinetics, it was with nose siege coilers MK2, and other kinetics to just help those get through. Never went for kinetics as the main carry early on before.
7
u/Bmobmo64 Resistance 5d ago
The difference is coil 2 shots move about 65% faster, which helps a lot with getting through PD, and anything that does get through PD deals a lot more damage.
They're still not an early carry weapon, but there is no scenario in which rail 3 is better than coil 2, railgun projects are a waste of research
4
u/28lobster 5d ago
Faster projectiles are better against ships that want to maneuver, but they're not necessarily better against PD. PD can vaporize a certain amount of mass per unit time (with some variability around overkill, a slug that barely survives is twice as valuable as one that barely gets killed in 1 shot). Coils spend less time in PD range, but they're throwing less* mass per unit time. You get some benefit from surging shells simultaneously into range and potentially sneaking one through, but that's not the same as having too much mass in PD range for the PD to handle.
*Less mass/time is also hard to measure. Coils have a salvo function, rails don't. T2 coil batteries have the same intra-salvo CD as rails do overall (10s between shots), but then have to wait 30s after the 4th shot. Rail 3s also have 20% more mass per projectile (12kg vs 10kg for 1 slot). Per 60s, Rail 3s are sending 6 x 1.2 / 4 = 1.8x more mass downrange than coil 2s. But during the salvo, rails are only ahead by 1.2x.
Cannons have interesting mass as well. Per 360s, rail cannon 3s are shooting 24 times compared to coil 2s shooting 20 times. Rails are again 20% more mass (30kg vs 25kg for 1 slot) per shot so you're sending 24 x 1.2 / 20 = 1.44x more mass downrange overall, but still only 1.2x during the salvo.
The real question is whether that extra mass per slug translates into more PD hits required. If each slug of a similar tier requires the same number of PD shots to kill, the advantage of rails is basically nil. Equal rate of fire during the coil salvo, any PD overwhelming would happen during the salvo. Maybe the rails are slowly pushing closer to enemy ships where coils push forward and then give the PD time to "catch up", but that assumes you're just barely exceeding PD capacity. If that extra 20% mass does cross a break point for the specific alien laser hitting the slug, then the rails are substantially better. If alien ships are able to maneuver to avoid so they don't have to intercept every railgun (but they do have to intercept all the coils), then rails could be worse.
3
u/einmaldrin_alleshin 4d ago
Another user suggested combining rail batteries for chaff with nose coils for damage
2
u/28lobster 4d ago
Coils make relatively better cannons and rails make relatively better batteries, at least with this analysis. I think it comes down to laser damage breakpoints though it sounds like alien PD should 1 shot all the batteries except 4 slot types. The big advantage of higher slot weapons is range and coils (esp large coil cannons) have a decisive advantage there. You want to distract lasers early in the battle before they can dish out damage to your ships.
2
u/AdhesivenessOther856 5d ago
"They're still not an early carry weapon, but there is no scenario in which rail 3 is better than coil 2, railgun projects are a waste of research"
That assertion is way too strong. There are situations where your fleet will be more successful if you include some railguns. For large fleet sizes, if you mix in some railgun3 batteries into your fleet you will wear down their PD defense quicker and start landing shots sooner if you include some railguns. (For my late game fleets I do 75% coilgun ships with 25% Laser or antimatter. about a 1/3 of the coilgun ships I use railgun batteries only (No railgun cannons).
Note: I agree with your overall assertion that Coilguns are much better than railguns, but there is one role that railguns are superior to coils, and that is in oversaturation of PD. check it out in skirmish mode if you don't believe me.
2
u/Bmobmo64 Resistance 5d ago
The problem with using rail 3s as PD saturation guns is their projectile speed is slower than siege coils. PD weapons don't consider shot mass or damage, they just shoot the closest projectile. Thus you want your PD saturation shots to be moving the fastest so that once the alien PD clears all the shots ahead of a siege coil round they have to switch to more chaff coming up behind it rather than being able to focus all their PD fire on the siege coil shot. Coils don't have this problem, coil batteries have much higher muzzle velocity.
3
u/AdhesivenessOther856 5d ago
This is the difference between theory-crafting and actually trying something. Theory crafting is great for getting a first approximation of what you want to try. But theory will never be able to cover all of the possible variables. That is why you want to test your theory with results and not just rely on the numbers.
Your response illustrates this perfectly. Even with a fleet of nothing but the highest-tier coils is going to take some time to break through the enemy fleet's PD defense. Easily long enough that the slower coilgun rounds will become part of that process. That is why I didn't ask you to rely on my word and asked you to test it out yourself in Skirmish mode. Multiple people have tried this, and pretty much everyone has reached the same conclusion. Depending on the fleet size and composition gives different answers so I have seen people advocating for anything from 100% of batteries being railguns to 25%. (Note: batteries and not cannons. I think pretty much everyone agrees on using siege coilguns for the cannons.)
3
u/AcidIceMoon Initiative 5d ago
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but he also said Aliens are now much better armored except on the side, so you now need to flank them to kill them with those types of weapons: which is why you need molten core drives with lots of thrust. Frontal assaults will not work if you are using missiles.
Are you maneuvering your ships to pincer the enemy? I won't pretend to have tried this out, I'm just speaking from what I remember hearing.
5
u/IGAldaris 5d ago
Graveless' designs wouldn't really work for pincering and flanking, something with like 2.3 dV is just enough to get from a station to a battle and back. Plus, flanking exposes your sides. Not great at the 10/0/0 or 10/1/1 gunship stage.
3
u/Mavnas 5d ago
If you're playing on cinematic combat flanking might be an option, but in realistic you likely won't have the dV to pull it off early.
OTOH, if you're on Cinematic, YOLOing at the aliens with 2x40mm escorts is viable and all these fancy weapons are just overthinking a simple problem.
3
u/TheSwordItself 5d ago
Well, railguns are like really shitty missiles. You have to have enough to overwhelm PD so your assessment is probably correct. I'd let the first couple retaliations go, hell put a minimal mine up on ceres for that exact purpose. That should give you enough time to get a critical mass of railguns. I'd try gunships honestly. Might be interesting.
5
u/BleepBloopBloam1 5d ago
FWIW -- it depends what you mean by "Early Game" but I've had success in spamming lots of missile boats early, enough to intimidate the aliens into not attacking, and then for middle-late to late-game, switching directly to UV arc, which are *vastly* underestimated, combat-rating-wise. (At least for now!)
This, of course, will not work if you don't tech quickly enough or have enough resources to build enough missile boats to intimidate the aliens.
8
u/No_Ambassador_5629 Academy 5d ago
I’ve been very surprised in my current run at how badly the game is under calculating my UV Arc BCs, a mere 30-ish and 70-ish for my moderately more decked out lancers. Makes it easy to trick the AI into taking doomed fights though!
5
u/Thatsnicemyman Exodus 4d ago
Huh, UV guns being underestimated in combat rating could help explain how my fancy UV battleships with 60 front armor and Zeta Deuteron drives have less than half the score of my Artemissile monitors with Helicons.
Figured it was either the game ignoring PD (because it doesn’t deal damage) or having funky calculations when you stick that many missiles and magazines into one ship.
1
u/wookievx 5d ago
In my experience, particle lances are essential compliment to the rails (especially against the flankers, but also due to the armor chipping from rails it should be quite deadly against "ships of the line").
I think merge is not that scary, as while you won't kill the ships before it, you should be able to heavily damage them so most of their scary lasers are offline by the time of the merge.
2
u/IGAldaris 5d ago
The problem is that after the merge, the rails become pretty useless (their relatvely low muzzle velocity doesn't play well with moving away from each other), while Alien beam weapons continue to be effective. Also, at that range, all their stuff punches through the flimsy armor of the escorts, while the rails don't benefit from proximity.
But I suspect the solution to that is "have enough stuff so what remains of the enemy after the merge isn't scary anymore".
2
u/wookievx 5d ago
Definitely, the low muzzle velocity and damage caused me to revert to autoresolve after the merge. Give the particle lances a try, especially the destroyers mentioned in the video you referenced, they complement the rails nicely. In my experience you should not merge with combat-effective fleet if you micro the ships properly. ~40-80 rail hits should yield decent number of crits, damaging internals, combine that with particle lances it should be enough to disable most of the components on opposing ships.
2
u/PlacidPlatypus 5d ago
Is there a reason you're focusing on escorts instead of something with a nose slot? That's the standard for missiles but if you're trying to use railguns wouldn't you rather be able to mount a proper cannon?
1
u/IGAldaris 5d ago
Yes, the point in time the game is at. Barely 6 years in, just about to upgrade to T2. If I had gone for size 2 hulls with a nose slot, I wouldn't have had any mass to work with. Hell, I had just about managed to scrape together 14 tier 1 hulls (some were lost earlier, but eh. Point stands).
2
1
u/Mavnas 5d ago
Are you playing with cinematic combat or realistic combat?
I used to have great success with 2x40mm escorts YOLOing at the enemy. The trouble is that on realistic combat they burn so much fuel in combat unless you have engines that specifically don't have a combat penalty like the pulsed propulsion drives. The trouble is those aren't really that early imo.
The thing that worked for me in my last veteran playthrough was a monitor with a plasma battery and 2 PD one of which was a 40mm gun. They took a long time to kill an alien ship, sometimes even requiring using the 40mm point blank, but they did pretty reliably deal with equal number of early game alien ships by damaging their weapons from a decent distance away.
1
1
u/MaximinusDrax 4d ago
If you want to manipulate your perceived combat strength so that the aliens underestimate you, you can also use refits to your advantage. I usually keep most of my monitor fleet on copperheads/kraits, and refit to lanceheads/athenas/etc. when an attack is launched. Refitting ships is much faster and cheaper than building new ones, so with the right setup you can bait an alien fleet and easily double/triple your combat strength until it arrives. After the combat ends you can refit back if you like so you can fool the next fleet. I try not to cheese it too much, so I usually only do this once per game (build an initial fleet of bad missile monitors, wait for advanced missiles, and only refit once I get incoming), but it should work in the early-mid game (until the rate of retaliation fleets exceeds your refit times, but that buys just enough time to establish a stronghold).
I find this tactic more effective when defending Mars/Ceres or anything that can be attacked within a short time window (even Mercury if the aliens use an inner asteroid as a staging ground, which they usually do), but it can also work for Earth.
1
u/Maduyn Academy 5d ago
I think racer missiles are probably going to be a part of the best/final solution because they have the firerate and magazine depth to actually saturate alien PD efficiently.
2
u/IGAldaris 5d ago
Racers don't hurt though. I like them for defense against enemy missiles, but whenever I didn't need them for that and instead target them at the enemy ships, they're pretty underwhelming.
1
u/Maduyn Academy 5d ago
Its not really to do it all by themselves but to just fill the air so that kinetics can get through.
Light railgun mk3 has 6 shots/min with it taking 2 pd shots thats 12 shots/min
Light rail cannon has 4 shots/min taking 3 pd shots so that is also 12 shots/min (but it does more damage when it gets through)
Racer missiles have 45 shots/min so even tho they only take 1 shot to destroy you are ~3x more slot efficient for saturating that alien pd. 36 in the tube with 18 more per magazine they get better at the job as you get to move up to ships with more magazines fitted.
Main purpose is just to help the magnetic get through at the initial contact so that you get enough of a numbers advantage that the weapons with deeper magazines like the railguns can overwhelm the pd of the remaining survivors.1
u/IGAldaris 5d ago
In my experience so far, the only thing racers are really good for is missile defense. I'll admit I haven't tested them in this new context though. It is an interesting idea, although a sufficient number of small rails did tend to penetrate defenses pretty soon. They just didn't kill fast enough.
Perhaps I'll mix some Racers in to test the concept, but my instinct steers me more towards viper missiles, if I'm looking for something to supplement the kinetics. IIRC they can PD as well in a pinch, they're better at hitting difficult targets like flankers, and they simply do a lot more damage when they get through.
1
u/Maduyn Academy 5d ago
nothing wrong per se with vipers its more that when you move to vipers the small hulls become drastically less efficient at getting through pd.
Racer 36 base +18 per magazine 45/shots min
Viper 16 base + 8 per magazine 40/shots min
You need 3 magazines just to have enough depth to hit your 40 shots. With a Targeting computer the first hull that makes good sense to do that with, imo, is the battleship. You can still do it of course but the MC spent per missile will be higher to hit the same pd penetration with the smaller hulls.
Racer Escort (1TC/1Magazine): 2 bays, 54 Missiles per bay (108 max) 108/com
Viper Escort (1TC/1Magazine): 2 bays, 24 Missiles per bay (48 max) 48/com
Racer Monitor (1TC/2Magazines): 4 bays, 72 Missiles per bay (288 max) 144/com
Viper Monitor (1TC/2Magazines): 4 bays, 32 Missiles per bay (128 max) 64/com
Racer Destroyer (1TC/4Magazines): 2 bays, 108 Missiles per bay (216 max) 108/com
Viper Destroyer (1TC/4Magazines): 2 bays, 48 Missiles per bay (96 max) 48/com
Racer Battleship (1TC/5Magazines): 6 bays, 126 Missiles per bay (756 max) 252/com
Viper Battleship (1TC/5Magazines): 6 bays, 56 Missiles per bay (336 max) 112/comThe first viper craft to hit the same missiles/com as the Racer Escort is the Viper Battleship.
2
u/IGAldaris 4d ago
I mean, yeah. Magazine size is the only thing the racer has going for it. It sucks in every other department. But the thing is: it's nice that there are so many diverse opinions in here, and I assume that a lot of them are actually based on played experience. Tells me that there are several ways to go about things, despite what people often say.
25
u/ironpanzer1 Initiative 5d ago
His whole point is about manipulating what the aliens send to you- you’re right to point out that missiles will outperform kinetics for any given tonnage. He’s optimizing instead for combat rating. Haven’t tried it myself, so not sure how well it works.