Gratuitous Space Battles Catch-all

I was replaying a few missions on hard and ended up with an awesome fight ending in a minutes long 1 on 1 cruiser slugfest. I say awesome, but actually it was nerve-wracking. My cruiser was rocket heavy and there's nothing more disappointing than seeing a full spread fly right through the enemy while their heavy blaster just takes consistent chunks out of your armor. So I said screw it and adjusted attack ranges for my cruisers to be the range of the target painter... exact same battle won with all but one cruiser intact. O.O
Then I got cocky and tried Expert. Utterly destroyed after denting a couple of their frigates.

I wish it was a little more clear how stacked orders affect attack decisions, especially with type priorities.
If I set my AA Cruiser to prioritize Fighters but also set a Protect order on my Rocket Cruiser, how does that shake out when a frigate attacks my Rocket Cruiser?
Really makes me wish you could 'see' targeting decisions for your ships. (I am getting a horrible sense of deja-vu from this sentence for some reason.)
IE -
*blip* Destroy All Humans is now attacking Gaze Upon My Tentacles because: Target Priority + Proximity + Imminent Threat.
*blip* Destroy All Humans is now attacking Big Boppa because: Attacking Escort Target + Proximity

Instead it's : Wheeee! Flashing lights and stuff! What do mean I'm being flanked? Dude! FLASHING LIGHTS!

Have you guys gotten a lot of use out of the Cruiser Invisibility shield (or whatever it's called)? It seems pretty Female Doggoin and I hate it when the other guys use it.

The cloak generator? Yeah that thing is irritating. I'm not much into cruisers yet but I'll give them a spin.

I haven't noticed any great benefit from the cloak. It seems like my ships will go through the entire fight without using it once, then just before they explode they hit the cloak in an attempt to repair and then die in a fiery ball while invisible.

Also, has anyone had any luck on the Swarm missions? I think it's second or third to last scenario in the list. This and the no-cruiser mission are the only ones that I've had to run several times.

I just discovered the power of proton beams. All cruiser beam weapons will rip through armour and hull like you wouldn't believe. But protons are special because they can take down shields too. Unless the enemy goes for reflective shields, which are expensive and specialized. This makes protons beams something of an anti-everything gun.

They come at a cost however. They cost less than normal beam lasers but use twice the crew.

Tamren wrote:

They cost less than normal beam lasers but use twice the crew.

Cheapest way to get spare protons, my friend!

Soylent Protons are people!!!

Having beaten all the levels on Federation (normal), I don't feel a lot of motivation to play them with the other races. Or even much on higher difficulties. I've also unlocked every module.

Normal difficulty isn't that spectacular. Kick it up to expert and things get really frantic.

have you tried the expansion races yet? The first 4 races are all about the same +/- some %, but the new ones have a specific identity. The swarm is all about masses of cheap ships. The tribe has huge hull points and antiarmour mass drivers. I haven't quite figured out the order yet however.

The Order has cool-looking ships and apparently they get nukes.

Has anyone found a nice step-by-step tutorial? I still can't figure out how to set orders.

I've played many of the missions on Hard and Expert as well, yeah. And I've been playing around with the Swarm ships.

LobsterMobster wrote:

Has anyone found a nice step-by-step tutorial? I still can't figure out how to set orders.

Click on a ship (or rubber-band select a group of ships or select multiples by control-clicking on them) and the orders will be show in the upper left. Each class will have some orders set by default and you can click on each order to adjust the settings (if there are any) and there's a button to add a new order. I add "Cooperative" to all my frigates and cruisers because concentrating fire is vital in taking down shields before they recharge.

Setting the range on ship-type attacks is very important because long-range missile ships should not be moving in to engage, but also if you set your range too far your ship might park himself far enough away from an enemy that it can't even attack and it'll get shot to pieces while doing nothing to defend itself.

Right-clicking any ship will allow you to save its orders as the "default" for that ship build.

For those of you who are wondering: yes, with the release of the Mac version they're planning to make this a Steam Play title so that your one license will give you access to both platforms. When? As of August 8th, this was the word from one of the developers on their forums: "The mac version is brand spanking new. The minute we are sure it's bug free, I'll talk to steam."

I'm looking forward to it!

I bought this game kind of sight unseen during the super sale and was disappointed by the mechanics. From the title, I expected something more...controllable. But I won't fault a game for being something it's not, I just should have done my research.

Oh well, glad to support a cool developer, and one less game to play.

GSB is getting a campaign. Here's the interesting part:

The GSB campaign is a singleplayer 'conquer-the-galaxy' style game, where you build up vast space fleets and kick interstellar ass. Rather than set, pre-determined fleets to battle against, the game utilises the fleets designed by other GSB players to provide an endless variety of opponent, so you will be pitted against real carbon-based intelligence on every step of your path to galactic dominance.

Bad news is it's going to be an expansion. But a 4x lite expansion, so I'm excited.

Sooo... I could roleplay this as the final stage of Spore?

Doesn't GSB kind of have a campaign already? You make ships, they go PEW PEW PEW! If they want to make a story out of it, they could release a text file.

The "player-designed fleets" idea is nice, except that I'm sure every player out there is better than I am and that all this means is the enemy will always have the PERFECT fleet. It doesn't make things more interesting, only harder.

Rezzy wrote:

Sooo... I could roleplay this as the final stage of Spore?

What you do in the privacy of your own home with your good lady wife is none of my business, my friend.

LobsterMobster wrote:

Doesn't GSB kind of have a campaign already? You make ships, they go PEW PEW PEW! If they want to make a story out of it, they could release a text file.

The "player-designed fleets" idea is nice, except that I'm sure every player out there is better than I am and that all this means is the enemy will always have the PERFECT fleet. It doesn't make things more interesting, only harder.

The GSB campaign is not a full 4X game, but a contextual 'wrapper' for GSB that introduces new strategic concerns such as crew and cash shortages, repairing ships between battles, the need for construction and repair facilities, and the ability to issue a retreat order mid-battle.

It doesn't seem like there's really any story, just a 4x mode.

Meh. I've barely got the "PEW PEW PEW" part down.

Sounds awesome. I haven't even picked a favourite race yet much less constructed my best ships. The only problem I have with the game right now is that fighting AI ships will get boring because the designs never change. So even though I haven't found barely half of the AI designs they will eventually run out.

This expansion solves all that. Its basically taking the PVP challenge system and making it into a 4x campaign.

Cannot wait for this expansion, also anyone who owns the current race specific expansions will be able to face off with them in the campaign :D.

Played the Order some to build ships with nuke launchers. All of their hull aesthetics are so similar though that I can't tell my cruisers apart at all, nor my frigates, nor fighters. Each hull looks nearly identical to others of that class to me.

You can tell fighters apart? o_O

I find I only have that problem with enemy races I haven't played myself yet. But it doesn't help that I only use 1 or 2 types of cruiser and frigate hull when I design my ships. In fact I have no idea why anyone would do otherwise. Some hulls are basically identical. But one has an extra slot and costs another 20 credits. Why would you ever pick the one with less slots?

There are only two reasons I can think of. Hull bonuses apply to every module on the ship. So I can see +10% hull points being handy, because it applies to every module. But what about + to shields? Or +% speed? Wouldn't those only apply to shields and engines?

The other point is that armour gets divided among the total modules on the ship. Less modules = thicker armour per module. But if I had an extra slot, I could just take more armour anyway...

Okay, no, I can't tell fighters apart.

I still can't help wishing this game was far more than it was intended to be. And I don't even mean just a campaign or 4X stuff.

Homeworld 2(d)?

I'm with Lobster. It's an awesome idea to use human-designed fleets as opponents, but I play single-player because I suspect I'm much worse than the average player out there. I'll probably lose like a, a big losing thing...

Anyone find a use for rockets yet? They look kind of neat I guess and the description said they make enemies panic, which is kind of cool, except that I've yet to see an enemy actually act any differently after having a barrage of rockets head their way. So far they seem like low-damage, low-accuracy missiles.

Robear wrote:

I'm with Lobster. It's an awesome idea to use human-designed fleets as opponents, but I play single-player because I suspect I'm much worse than the average player out there. I'll probably lose like a, a big losing thing... :-)

That is a great metaphor, Robear.

LobsterMobster wrote:

The "player-designed fleets" idea is nice, except that I'm sure every player out there is better than I am and that all this means is the enemy will always have the PERFECT fleet. It doesn't make things more interesting, only harder.

Well, if (like Spore) everything anyone designs gets uploaded, then there'll be some number of fleets designed by people who haven't figured everything out yet.

But in the long term, hm. It could basically import the biggest problem of multi-player gaming, into a single-player game.

All I know is that I'm going to start paying more attention to fleet placement. A cluster here, a defensive line there... voila! The Republic of Dong is about to unleash the fury! (rocket frigates in the tip, for that initial visual)

Tamren wrote:

Homeworld 2(d)?

MoO4