[Puke]

its all in the ballance. i always thought the temporal thing that did 4x to shields was cool.. it did a fair ammount of damage, and you didnt have to worry about buying shield depleters AND regular weapons, and then ordering them properly, and being screwed up when you change targets..

ppbs are fine early on, but as soon as phased shields come into play, or if there are organic races out there, they dont help much. so you will have to switch to another kind of weapon if you want to cause any hurting, which means reasearching another tree. so you are paying the research cost of the ppbs PLUS that of whatever you are going to switch to. as opposed to the guy that started out researching towards WMGs or fighters or something.

you have 4 basic kinds of attacks as far as im concerned, thats not counting long range / short range and movement tactics. you can go for the high damage early on, and bLast with a slow recharging WMG or psychic singularity or something. or you can go for smaller dammage that pays off over time, compensating with numbers of ships or higher protection values. Third, you can go for saturation attacks where you load up huge ammounts of missiles and fighters, and stand off at your max range and hope to overwhelm their PD.

Lastly, you can blow up their sun and/or planet

but i find a balance is best, having capital ships with heavy hitting weapons. also having lighter ships or fighters that can move in and inflict damage every turn while the big guns recharge.

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"...the green, sticky spawn of the stars"
(with apologies to H.P.L.)