Gratuitous Space Battles Catch-all

This looks right up my alley. I always took my sweet and easy time with my battles in Homeworld to pause and observe the awesome chaos of those battles.

Lucan wrote:

How open is the game to variation of strategy?

The strategy that really worked in the Demo was to pack as much oomph as possible in a small section of space. Then use the beefier ships near the centre where they'll draw all the fire and the rabble to the top of the screen where it will sort of swing around and mop up the field. I can expand on the strategy by making my cruisers retreat easily and give them repair modules while adding additional speed and short range fire power to my frigates.

I haven't found any other working strategy though. What did you folks come up with?

The "Dense Stack of Ships" strategy breaks down when one explodes and the resulting shockwave strips off the shields of all the nearby ships. Basically, you can come up with any number of crazy tactics (the Fighter Heavy Armada, Specialized Ship Armada, Heavy Hitters, Balanced, etc..)

It's tough to look at position as a "Deeper" strategy, as it's functionally a pretty game of sci-fi tower defence with turrets slowly moving towards one another. It's in the build designs and orders as well as armada makeups that tend to get deeper.

I just realized that I have been confusing GSB with AI War: Fleet Command somewhat in my head. That said, I am still more interested in GSB.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/40...

EriktheRed wrote:

I just realized that I have been confusing GSB with AI War: Fleet Command somewhat in my head. That said, I am still more interested in GSB.

GSB > AI War, most definitely. No offense to AI War dev here in the forums..

Thats not entirely fair, both are completely different genres even if they both take place in space.

Does anyone recall this going on sale recently? I've been wanting to pick it up and I know it's not even a month old, but, you know, it's the holiday season so why would I pay full price for anything?

And did anyone who bought the game through Steam pick up the expansion pack (which isn't on Steam yet, as far as I can tell)?

garion333 wrote:

Does anyone recall this going on sale recently? I've been wanting to pick it up and I know it's not even a month old, but, you know, it's the holiday season so why would I pay full price for anything?

And did anyone who bought the game through Steam pick up the expansion pack (which isn't on Steam yet, as far as I can tell)?

The expansion pack is free unless I am very much mistaken, I am guessing that Steam would patch it in even if that's not what they call it in the store.

Yonder wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Does anyone recall this going on sale recently? I've been wanting to pick it up and I know it's not even a month old, but, you know, it's the holiday season so why would I pay full price for anything?

And did anyone who bought the game through Steam pick up the expansion pack (which isn't on Steam yet, as far as I can tell)?

The expansion pack is free unless I am very much mistaken, I am guessing that Steam would patch it in even if that's not what they call it in the store.

Expansion pack is $6 and is only available from his site at the moment.

Sinatar wrote:
Yonder wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Does anyone recall this going on sale recently? I've been wanting to pick it up and I know it's not even a month old, but, you know, it's the holiday season so why would I pay full price for anything?

And did anyone who bought the game through Steam pick up the expansion pack (which isn't on Steam yet, as far as I can tell)?

The expansion pack is free unless I am very much mistaken, I am guessing that Steam would patch it in even if that's not what they call it in the store.

Expansion pack is $6 and is only available from his site at the moment.

Aww, I hate being very much mistaken. I must be thinking of AI Wars.

I picked this game up on the steam sale and its great! After all I heard about the game I was worried it would amount to little more than a tower defence. But nothing could be far from the truth. Lots of games love to boast about "deep" systems of strategy but GSB is one of the few that live up to the promise.

When I first started out I had little to no idea what to do. I won a few games with the default ships but the game specifically mentions that you should get rid of them and start making ships of your own. My first attempts seemed cool enough. Tank frigates protect other ships using point defence and EMP missiles that disable enemy weapons. Assault frigates get in close and take down enemy shields using rapid fire cannons. Lancer frigates broadside shield-less ships with huge beam lasers. And siege frigates bombard the enemy from afar.

Sounds like a cool balanced fleet of frigates right? I then sent them into battle, and..... Disaster. The assault frigates got shredded, the tank frigates were ignored, the lancer frigates couldn't penetrate the enemy shields and the siege frigates kept missing. There were so many lessons I had to learn. The biggest one was Speed=Survival, in fact the to-hit formula is mostly based on the tracking speed of your weapons versus the speed of your target.

In addition my weapon selection sucked. My siege frigates were loaded with slow firing plasma cannons that were useless against moving enemies. My lancer frigates sacrificed a lot to max out their expensive and power hungry beam lasers, leaving them vulnerable to simple torpedoes. My assault frigates were too slow to dodge enemy fire up close. And my tank frigates didn't mount any direct damage weaponry and didn't appear to be much of a threat.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. The most recent lesson is that putting armour on my fighter craft is pointless. My last battle had 32 separate fighters in it. According to the after battle stats the % of shots deflected by armour was a grand total of 2%. Useless. By ditching the armour the fighters gained an almost 20% speed boost and saved a lot from my credit allowance.

So if you like space battles and pew pew laser guns this is a great game for you. Better grab it while the sale is on. 10$ is a steal.

EDIT: Bonus: No loading screens!

Tamren, I'm with you. On a whim (and I guess your post) I picked it up from the Steam sale and here I am at 12:30am plugging away. Awesome game. Smart.

And here I am at 12:40, damn this thing sucks down the hours. However things go a lot quicker if you up the speed to 4X once its apparent you will win.

I didn't know you could speed it up, that's handy. And the feedback from the end screens is important, but consider also positioning and how that affected a ship's ability to engage.

I like this because it's a thinking game. Not only does ship config matter, but placement is important as well. I found that ships that could not win when spread out to deal with all enemy groups actually won when bunched together so that the enemy came to them. Also, the whole "rock paper scissors" aspect is important. If your enemy counts on shields, you must have lots of shield-breaking weapons, or you simply won't do enough damage to matter. That *seems* simple, but setting up ships to particular purposes is harder than it looks.

And that's not even considering the orders you can give.

Oddly, I'm about to pay more for "The Tribe" than I paid for the base game.

I love fighters and how they swarm.

That is all.

Oh, the fighters are great. I need to tweak mine so they wipe out the opposing fighters and then annoy the enemy cruisers.

So far my mixed fleet has been working well.

Assault frigates are speedy and rip down enemy cruiser shields, they also do pretty well against fighters if they have nothing else to fire on since the cannons have fast tracking. My tank frigates now carry disruptor torpedoes to disable shields as well as the EMP torpedoes to disable weapons. I found that they acted kind of stupid without any real weapons, so I gave them a single cannon. They now act just like assault frigates. My lancer frigates are what I call "frigate smashers". I set them to all focus fire on the same target and if that target is a frigate they just go away. Beam lasers have the biggest hull damage of all the frigate weapons so once the assault frigs take down the cruiser shields the lancers move in and pick them apart.

Siege frigates were the hardest to figure out. If you give frigates missiles and use them at max range to keep the frigate safe, all those missiles tend to get shot down. Frigate missiles don't include decoys and they come in rather piecemeal unless you have a lot of them. So what I did was swap all those missiles for the plasma cannons again only this time they target cruisers first. Since they hang so far behind the front line I left them with minimal armor and a tiny shield just in case fighters come along. But the bonus is that siege frigates are very cheap and generally stay safe. So by the time the enemy starts to attack them directly they are usually on the ropes, with the siege frigates having been bombarding them the entire time.

So far this balanced mix has won me many battles. I'm only just starting to get into cruisers. And there is an ungodly amount of tactics I have yet to try. "Turret" ships with huge armour and no engines. Formation fighting. Letting the enemy come to me instead of rushing him.

---
So far I only have one annoyance. The targetting priority system is rather confusing and based on percentages. You can set them to target fighters, frigates and cruisers. So what happens if I set cruisers to 80% and frigates to 40%? Ideally what I want is for my ships to make a beeline for cruisers and only attack frigates in passing. But getting the behaviour right is tricky.

Also it seems ships can only have one target at a time. So if a cruiser is beside another cruiser it will use all of its weapons at once. But if it mounts point defence lasers you want them to shoot down fighters, not pick uselessly at the enemy cruiser.

The Tribe?! Sheee-it, more money for games!

So after buying the DLC, do I have to reinstall to get it?

No idea. Steam has a specific menu for DLC so you probably integrate it from there.

There's only a $2 difference between Steam and the official website now. So you might just get it there to avoid any Steam issues.

I just lost 2 hours of my life to the demo. Hilarious, glorious hours.

It reminds me of the best times I had with an old game called Ascendancy. It simplified aspects of other, more complicated MOO-type games, and had great combat and ship assembly.

I just spent 2 hours tuning the performance of my fighter craft...

And I'm not done! But its all fun, I just unlocked the last few upgrades, so now I have the whole set of fighter parts.

Fun game, but it's hard to get used to the scoring. You get the most "honor" for defeating the enemy fleet while using the fewest resources, not for trouncing them with as little casualties as possible. That part isn't clear at first, even from the manual.

Yup its an all or nothing deal. I like that system because it becomes important for every single ship to pull its weight.

Theres just one annoying thing about it, it doesn't tell you how much honour there is "left" in a given scenario that you can still score. Like if I beat it using 50% resources I get 50% of the total possible honour in the level. But then if I try again it makes no mention of this and I have to guess.

Been doing more work with fighters, mostly trying to figure out speeds.

Fighters MUST have at least .80-1.00 speed or else they are sitting ducks to everything. Fighters with a speed of around 2.50 start to dodge laser fire from other fighters. And if you can get the speed up to 3.70 they start dodging point defence lasers and outrunning antifighter missiles. The only thing that will catch them is tractor beams. I found that making fighters without weapons or armour makes them very zippy. Speeds of 5+. You can't mount any equipment on them other than weapons but they seem to make effective decoys.

To give you some perspective an "average" frigate speed is .40 and my cruisers rarely top .15

The most important part of designing ships is giving them enough speed to evade certain "brackets" of weapons. Hit/miss ratio is calculated using speed of target and tracking speed of weapon. Not accounting for lucky hits having even a .05 speed advantage means they will rarely hit.

Tamren wrote:

Yup its an all or nothing deal. I like that system because it becomes important for every single ship to pull its weight.

Theres just one annoying thing about it, it doesn't tell you how much honour there is "left" in a given scenario that you can still score. Like if I beat it using 50% resources I get 50% of the total possible honour in the level. But then if I try again it makes no mention of this and I have to guess.

The manual mentions that you only get the highest score for a difficulty level. So if you beat it with 5,000 honor to spare, you get 5,000 that first time. If you remove a ship and play it again for 4,700, you only receive the extra 300 difference. At least that's how I perceive it (I'm pretty sure it does tell you when you're fiddling around though.)

I try and get an "ideal" fleet that crushes them. Then I slowly remove ships, make cheaper versions, or raise the difficulty until I'm getting my ass kicked. So far I'm really bad at having multiple ship types, I keep editing the half of dozen models I've come to like as the situation requires.

Good tips on the fighters, I had no idea motion played such a role, and I wasn't quite sure why tractor beams were useful. I've basically turned my fleet into a deathstar.

My favorite combo right now is ships with mega-tough shields and EMP weapons, with some hull busters to back them up. But that's why every one of my battles is a slugfest. Pewpew! BOOSH!

I'm almost done with the included maps playing as the Federation. Is playing "challenge" maps self-explanatory? The manual isn't entirely clear on whether or not I have to specifically challenge someone, or whether I can play fleets people have issued as a general challenge.

I picked this up in the Steam holiday sale. I loved the demo, and I'm really looking forward to playing it.

adam.greenbrier wrote:

I picked this up in the Steam holiday sale. I loved the demo, and I'm really looking forward to playing it.

I started my first game via the demo when I got home from work last night. Next thing I know I've forked over my credit card number and I'm plugging away at aliens in the 2 of the a.m.

I'm inches away from buying the expansion pack, but I think I'll play through with the other two races first.

I really don't get how shields work, especially when they're stacked. Even after reading the manual and doing some Googling.

Trial and error it is!

Grabbed Tribes. Still fiddling with Rebel ships and nothing but missiles and more missiles. Why is this game not getting more press? It's awesome.

Okay I take back saying super slow fighters are useless. Fighters meant for escorting bigger ships don't have to move anywhere. So you can sacrifice speed for extra weapon power. The benefit of mounting 2 weapons versus one is that you can use half the fighters in smaller squadrons.

One thing I still haven't found is making fighter torpedoes effective. The first salvo from a full squadron is devastating. But then the fighters scatter and dive in all directions and much of the "spike" effect is lost.

The way shields work is pretty simple. Every damaging hit on the shields is divided among all of the surviving shield modules. This damage can hit up to 4 times. So it can hit 4 separate shields, or one shield 3 times and once on another. So its worth having multiple tough generators instead of many weak ones.

unntrlaffinity wrote:

I really don't get how shields work, especially when they're stacked. Even after reading the manual and doing some Googling.

Trial and error it is!

As I understand it:

Shields have a strength, a reflection rating, and a recharge rate. If the damage is under the reflection rating (mostly fighter attacks) the shield will ignore it - it "bounces off". Otherwise, the shield strength goes down when hit. Recharge rate is what you would expect, it's how fast the shield strength goes up. Damage to the shield generators reduces recharge rate (and possibly strength, I'm not sure on that). If the shield strength ever goes to zero, then your shield is gone for good, even if the shield generator is still functioning.

With multiple shield generators, the hits are spread out across all of them (sometimes unevenly). However, an individual shield generator can still fail if it goes to zero, permanently reducing your total shield strength (you'll see ships recharge their shield to 75% and then stop, for example, when a generator is out). Shield generators can also be destroyed independently, reducing shield strength (by fighters inside the shield, for example). Also, shield reflection rating does not go up with more generators, but rather remains the same.

scrub wrote:

Grabbed Tribes. Still fiddling with Rebel ships and nothing but missiles and more missiles. Why is this game not getting more press? It's awesome.

The best fleet I've been able to design so far has been extremely missile heavy. I have a couple of shield tank cruisers that have good point defense to take out incoming missiles, and laser designators to mark enemy ships (I experimented with fighters for marking, but they die too easily). Behind those ships I have a rank of anti-fighter frigates (one tractor beam and a bunch of anti-fighter missiles each). Behind them, I have a swarm (usually 10-16) of missile frigates firing a combination of torpedoes and fast missiles. I also usually have a couple squadrons of ultra-fast fighters (3.0+) armed with one or two rockets leashed to the shield tanks.

Basically, the way it works is the cruisers generally designate the closest target, and all the frigates more or less unload their missiles at once on the same target (cooperative mode). It puts in really high shock damage, overloading shields before they get a chance to recharge and just stripping away armor. Target goes boom, move on to the next one. With the designators, none of the missiles, torpedoes, or rockets miss, so the applied firepower is somewhat extreme. Even the anti-fighter frigates will get into it when there are no more fighters to shoot at, and they benefit from the designator as well.

The downside are that it can be inefficient - enemy frigates tend to get immediately vaporized, and all missiles targeted at that ship then poof without doing damage so many are wasted. Also, missiles are very slow, and if the fire of the swarm gets split, things tend to degrade (although they are still quite effective).

Also, if you weight the board by putting your ships at the top or the bottom, you can usually deal with the closer enemies before the further enemies get into range.