Above The Law Open PBW Game

[Narrew]

ok, I don't know when is a good time to talk about stratgy, but I have played a while and thought I had a good handle on things and I just had a battle where I lost all my ships and only took 1 of Primitives, I didn't expect to live, but I thought to myself, WTH? I killed only 1.

I went Psysic and tried to RP the race by using just their type of weapons, I tried to use 2 types of ships, close fighting ships (with Teleknetic Projectors, 5 phased shields and alot of reg armor since the ships I am fighting have Shield Depleters) and Max distance ships (with Mental Singlitary Generator).

My strategy was set up to Has Weapons, Most Damaged, Nearest, Strongest. All ships break formation ect...

What I wanted, was the close in support ships to engage the enemy while the Max Range ships would sit back and thump them.

What happened, I was defending a Warp point, he came in, and all my ships bunched up, did not break up (couldn't move) and then just got slaughtered.

I had hoped that with my ships having many reg armor slots, it would absorb alot of damage.

Am I so messed up to try to limit myself to my races weapons AND/OR are we just pushed into the beams and that is all we can do if we want a chance?

Just a thought I wanted to discuss, sems the writing is on the wall in this game, though I have had a bLast.

[Fyron]

Armor is dismally underpowered in stock SE4.

[Paul1980au]

I would attempt to capture some planets and try to reverse the direction of the game that said perhaps emissive armour research is what you need. Plus quick reaction weapons for wormhole attacks.

[primitive]

Bang bang

Your racial setup really screws up your to-hit chances, so you will always be at a disadvantage. The fact that some of your ships didn’t have maxed sensors doesn’t help much either.

When your ships have less chance of hitting than your opponent, the ONLY way to go is: Point blank – Break formation – Nearest first. Looking at the replay, your ships just got stuck in traffic, everybody trying to get at a ship having a little damage. If such was not reachable they just wasted their shot at a random ship at max range. Not easy to win battles with a 1% to hit chance

Don’t think using regular weapons instead of racials would have made any difference. My ships are heavy with Crystalline armor and pretty hard to kill anyway. The way to go against Crystalline is Shield depleters and then the biggest gun available. Those “red globe thingies” (forgot their name) you got should be pretty good if you can get close enough to hit.

[Fyron]

Actually... shield disruptors are better against ships with heavy crystalline armor when using weapons that can not take out an entire CA component in one shot. Shield depleters and disruptors (at level V of each) do roughly the exact same amount of damage to the defensive capability of your opponent's ship, except when either heavy regeneration or heavy CA is present. Heavy regeneration is either impossible or makes the ship really weak in other areas in stock SE4, so is not an issue. With heavy CA, knocking out their shield generators instead of doing damage to their shielding levels will eliminate their ability to generate shields from damage, which can be much more useful than just sapping their shields, unless you want to place a shield depleter between each and every regular weapon, which might be wasteful. The only problem with shield disruptors is that they are short ranged, so you have to get close to the enemy, and doing so in a WP battle where your ships are all in one big glob gets rather tricky.

[Loser]

There is one very bad thing about Shield Disrupters.

Name := Shield Disrupter V
Description := Tunneling neutrino beam which burns out shield generators.
Pic Num := 48
Tonnage Space Taken := 40
Tonnage Structure := 40
Cost Minerals := 1500
Cost Organics := 0
Cost Radioactives := 1000
Vehicle Type := Ship\Base\Sat\WeapPlat\Drone
Supply Amount Used := 5
Restrictions := None
General Group := Weapons
Family := 2023
Roman Numeral := 5
Custom Group := 0
Number of Tech Req := 1
Tech Area Req 1 := Shield Damaging Weapons
Tech Level Req 1 := 10
Number of Abilities := 0
Weapon Type := Direct Fire
Weapon Target := Ships\Planets\Ftr\Sat\Drone
Weapon Damage At Rng := 60 45 30 15 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Weapon Damage Type := Only Shield Generators
Weapon Reload Rate := 3
Weapon Display Type := Beam
Weapon Display := 16
Weapon Modifier := 0
Weapon Sound := shlddisr.wav
Weapon Family := 23

In a one-round-to-live fight this might not matter, but it could hurt your effectivness if your ships live more than one round.

[Atrocities]

SHOCKED

This game is still going on?

Who is winning?

[Fyron]

Loser:

Yes, but with CA, your ships can be invincible if two conditions are met:
1) The enemy's weapons can not individually destroy an entire CA component in a single shot.
2) The total shields from damage of all your CA is 2x the damage per shot the enemy does.

All the damage done to the armor gets applied to the shields instead, added to the effect of the next shot. So if your shot drops the shields to 0 and does 30 damage to the armor, then the shields get 30 points charged. The next shot does whatever damage it has, plus 30 points from the previous partial damage value, which all applies to the shields first, with any extra going to damage the armor components. So with the conditions satisfied above, you can never harm the CA ships, unless you remove their shield generators, which is why Shield Disruptors are useful in that case.

[General Woundwort]

Originally posted by Atrocities:
SHOCKED

This game is still going on?

Who is winning?

Not me, those (P)rimitive Norwegian barbarians exterminated my Hive.