- Joined
- Jan 1, 2015
- Messages
- 923
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- 292
Well, the server I've been busy on the last couple of days is down, so I went back to an older game (a whole two days older) that I had largely abandoned. The warship I had been building there so as to take out a pirate base which was way to close to my homebase, had a firing mishap with it's heatseekers, and obliterated my stealthy mining ship with one salvo, and that caused me to decide to restart. But with my new server down, I figured I might as well try out that ship I had been building on the old.
The ship was technically not finished, much of it was still uncovered for lack of hull. A spaghetti lacework of power conduits at it's center rear was exposed to space so as to be worked on, etc.. However it had good shields for a 50 block ship, 100K and quite decent regeneration. It's weapons and power systems as well were fully operational. Even though it was not quite the finished war machine I had originally intended it to be, I figured I really aught to at least see what it could do before I abandoned it.
So, that pirate base, my first ever, I'm a newb and had no idea what to expect. I had already decided to use it as the dive bomber it was designed to be, high speed strafing attacks to take out a turret on each strafe. Rinse and repeat. No plan however ever really survives contact with the enemy. I fired a volley of 14 1800 damage sniper missiles then came screaming in following a wave of 30 heatseekers (600 damage each).
The approach was both slow enough for me to have time to think and fast enough that I could not easily target a turret, or rather I had a hard time discerning one from amidst the decor. I also noticed that I seemed to be taking little to no fire, my shields were never below 95%. I suppose the heatseekers were keeping the fighter cover busy and my jammer was fouling any turret accuracy enough. So I resolved to actually slow down to try to find a turret.
Cut to the chase, I still could not identify my turret target. Maybe my first long range pot shot had gotten lucky and had already taken out the turret on the side of the station I found myself facing. In any case, I was still not taking serious damage, so I figured that until I did take serious damage, I would park, and just blast away. Every 15 seconds I'd launch a new wave of heatseekers which would consistently go screaming off to chase fighter cover. Meanwhile my rapid fire cannon (400 explosive / ten shots per second) and sniper missiles started the process of taking down the shields.
Long story short, ultimately after a full hour I gave up the fight because my fingers were numb from holding down fire keys. The pirate station was a hollowed out wreck, but there seemed no way for me to actually 'kill' it.
Lessons learned (?):
I was seriously wishing I had packed at least one damage pulse missile for it's 72 block blast radius. A single such slow speed missile wouldn't be of much use in a long range duel versus an opponent with point defense, but I was parked at the hole I had dug firing into the belly of the station. There "was no" point defense, just a whole lot of random blocks that despite my best efforts were proving damnably difficult to clear.
Heatseekers are a lot of fun, and they seem to keep small pirates very busy. However each individual warhead seems to do very little damage. They were frequently colliding with the station, which was fine with me as I was wanting to reduce blocks. But the damage they were doing was most often insufficient to actually destroy those blocks (though I suppose they could just as well have been hitting the shield). My thinking now is that yes, you want large numbers of heatseekers to keep pirates busy, but you also want them as big as you can make them punch.
Big powerful sniper missiles look great on paper. They probably are great in a long range duel. But in the close confines of trying to destroy the guts of that base, my 14 sniper missiles did not seem to be doing more damage than one such missile, as it seemed they were all of them wasting their explosion on the same space.
It was very apparent both that having a rapid fire weapon of some sort was very useful for keeping shields down. It was also apparent that that weapon should be designed expressly for that purpose, IE: with Ion effect instead of the explosion effect I had put on it. Explosion sounds good, but if it is exploding on shields, which it almost always was, the explosion is of no use. A partial Ion effect however would have been of 'enormous' use instead (partial so it could still kill blocks).
I found myself wishing for an effect similar to a salvage array, for a more dispersed damage effect from my cannon so I could actually clear specific blocks with some accuracy. Given that all of their damage will be applied to shield as long as shield is present to absorb damage, there is little reason to not build say, a 3x3 array out of however much cannon you allocate to your build, so as to get that dispersion. Yes, it won't be as punchy, but at least you'd be more likely to hit something useful
What have I gotten wrong from my experience? What experience might you pass along to newbies like me?.
The ship was technically not finished, much of it was still uncovered for lack of hull. A spaghetti lacework of power conduits at it's center rear was exposed to space so as to be worked on, etc.. However it had good shields for a 50 block ship, 100K and quite decent regeneration. It's weapons and power systems as well were fully operational. Even though it was not quite the finished war machine I had originally intended it to be, I figured I really aught to at least see what it could do before I abandoned it.
So, that pirate base, my first ever, I'm a newb and had no idea what to expect. I had already decided to use it as the dive bomber it was designed to be, high speed strafing attacks to take out a turret on each strafe. Rinse and repeat. No plan however ever really survives contact with the enemy. I fired a volley of 14 1800 damage sniper missiles then came screaming in following a wave of 30 heatseekers (600 damage each).
The approach was both slow enough for me to have time to think and fast enough that I could not easily target a turret, or rather I had a hard time discerning one from amidst the decor. I also noticed that I seemed to be taking little to no fire, my shields were never below 95%. I suppose the heatseekers were keeping the fighter cover busy and my jammer was fouling any turret accuracy enough. So I resolved to actually slow down to try to find a turret.
Cut to the chase, I still could not identify my turret target. Maybe my first long range pot shot had gotten lucky and had already taken out the turret on the side of the station I found myself facing. In any case, I was still not taking serious damage, so I figured that until I did take serious damage, I would park, and just blast away. Every 15 seconds I'd launch a new wave of heatseekers which would consistently go screaming off to chase fighter cover. Meanwhile my rapid fire cannon (400 explosive / ten shots per second) and sniper missiles started the process of taking down the shields.
Long story short, ultimately after a full hour I gave up the fight because my fingers were numb from holding down fire keys. The pirate station was a hollowed out wreck, but there seemed no way for me to actually 'kill' it.
Lessons learned (?):
I was seriously wishing I had packed at least one damage pulse missile for it's 72 block blast radius. A single such slow speed missile wouldn't be of much use in a long range duel versus an opponent with point defense, but I was parked at the hole I had dug firing into the belly of the station. There "was no" point defense, just a whole lot of random blocks that despite my best efforts were proving damnably difficult to clear.
Heatseekers are a lot of fun, and they seem to keep small pirates very busy. However each individual warhead seems to do very little damage. They were frequently colliding with the station, which was fine with me as I was wanting to reduce blocks. But the damage they were doing was most often insufficient to actually destroy those blocks (though I suppose they could just as well have been hitting the shield). My thinking now is that yes, you want large numbers of heatseekers to keep pirates busy, but you also want them as big as you can make them punch.
Big powerful sniper missiles look great on paper. They probably are great in a long range duel. But in the close confines of trying to destroy the guts of that base, my 14 sniper missiles did not seem to be doing more damage than one such missile, as it seemed they were all of them wasting their explosion on the same space.
It was very apparent both that having a rapid fire weapon of some sort was very useful for keeping shields down. It was also apparent that that weapon should be designed expressly for that purpose, IE: with Ion effect instead of the explosion effect I had put on it. Explosion sounds good, but if it is exploding on shields, which it almost always was, the explosion is of no use. A partial Ion effect however would have been of 'enormous' use instead (partial so it could still kill blocks).
I found myself wishing for an effect similar to a salvage array, for a more dispersed damage effect from my cannon so I could actually clear specific blocks with some accuracy. Given that all of their damage will be applied to shield as long as shield is present to absorb damage, there is little reason to not build say, a 3x3 array out of however much cannon you allocate to your build, so as to get that dispersion. Yes, it won't be as punchy, but at least you'd be more likely to hit something useful
What have I gotten wrong from my experience? What experience might you pass along to newbies like me?.
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