Newbie Question...Weapon Platforms ?

[Nyx]

They also tend to be unable to stop plage ships. I like making escorts with plague bombs and sure the enemy will kill it, but it only has to fire once.

But I tend to get very good results from my WPs against the AI, and I usually play with strategic combat only. Against a human, I'd prefer a combined defense, or larger platforms. Smalls are still wonderful in the early game and useful in many cases in the mid game.

As for them taking time, I find that I have so many worlds with 1-5 facilities that I can stick them on emergency build and get everything done plenty fast, then they just sit around doing nothing. Why not tack on one more item and build some maintenance-free defence before pumping fighters and/or sats? Gotta be careful on the smaller worlds though becuase they might make it unable to fit any sats.

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[God Emperor]

NWEAVER, I agree entirely. I assault planets with mixed missile/beam weapons regularly in Tactical mode and wipe out WP's with hardly a scratch. I usually do it with around four ships which allows me to keep zipping in and out. This limitation with WP's is not purely a function of AI players, human defenders will have the same problem too....

As I said before, I only build them to back up ships if I'm hard pressed early on....

[God Emperor]

One other trick I get up to is to use my Explorer class ships to move into missile range of enemy planets and deploy missile satellites. Early on, no planetary based weapons can target the satellites at range 8+ so the ten satellites I deploy, just bomb the crap out of the planet unopposed. Try it and see what I mean. Its a little tedious but very effective.....and will work against human players who fail to defend their planets with ships...