SEV Tactical Combat Impressions

[Suicide Junkie]

arthurtuxedo said:
...The missile dancing, the "first shot wins" of warp points, the fact that an entire fleet of hundreds of ships can unload full salvos into their helpless enemies without a single shot of return fire, the way that ships could dance into range and then dance out after firing to be virtually immune to stationary targets, the list goes on.

All those problems have been fixed in Carrier Battles mod.

I made missiles SE3-style (launch from range 20, infinite travel distance)
Weapon/Defense balance is adjusted to prevent instafrags.
No tactical combat, plus using missiles on your stationary platforms neuters the dancing issue.
Leaky shields and armor, so every hit does *something*. Even an overwhelming force can get a bloody nose in combat.

Plus, there is the fact that all the guns in the game are useful. 4 guns x 5 mount sizes + 6 missile types, and they all get used to varying degrees in a competitive PBW game.


I once attacked a defending force of 400 with only 300 ships; they got the first shot from close range. However, I still won. It took two game turns and about 5 combats, and in the end it came down to 20 operational ships from each side strafing each other. I only actually lost 20 ships in the battle and 50 more a couple turns later when the enemy cleaned out my immobilized ships. The rest made their way home for repairs.

Superior strategies (better spread fire for more crippling and less overkill),
A pincer attack tactic(attacking from below and the right let my ships spread out and partly surround the enemy),
And the fortunate inclusion of a good number of plasma-cannon battleships which require no ammo to fire (just lots of rads) were what turned that battle.
The inclusion of spare fighters in transports to restock the carriers for the second month of combat helped significantly, too.

Mods are where the serious SE game starts

[arthurtuxedo]

Preaching to the choir, buddy. Got a copy of Carrier Battles on my hard drive. Excellent mod, by the way. Kudos. Can't wait to see how you bring it to SE5.

[Suicide Junkie]

You can see some screenshots of GGmod here:
http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/MM/SE5/Screenshots/

There are a number of SE4 mechanics I really miss... the turn based move&shoot made my leaky point defense work so very well.
There are plenty of new things to do though. The manageability of a GritEcon style economy looks quite promising.

[tmcc]

I discovered the 90 degree turn last night using the simulator. It works quite well to execute the turn when the range rings touch. Using this tactic one frigate with 3 missiles could easily damage or destroy 3 gun armed destroyers with no damage to the frigate. Brings up an issue with AI not using PD on their ships. Hopefully a TDM like mod will come out for SEV.

Another observation, it would be nice to have some type of reload time info attached to ships on the combat screen. It is a pain to go through multiple menus to get this info.

Finally a stupid question. What are the hot keys to zoom in and out in combat? I normally play on a laptop with no extermal mouse so I don't have the wheel function available

[Phoenix-D]

Shift - and +, I think. You can check (and change them) in the Controls part of the main menu.

EDIT: its numberpad + and - actually. I'd recommend changing them since you probably don't have a numberpad.

[tmcc]

Thanks, that helps.

[Puke]

dont have a number pad? how do you play nethack? or any serious roguelike, for that mater? you can get external usb numberpads, you know. cant be having a computer without nethack on it.

[Kamog]

Some laptops have an integrated numberpad with the keys mapped to a 4x4 area on the keyboard. To use the number pad for games, you need to toggle the keyboard mode by pressing SHIFT-NUMLOCK or whatever. It's usable but not convenient because you have to keep switching back to the regular mode when you need to type any of the letters that it uses.