I built a wicked insectile alien ship shell and I was hoping you guys could give me some advise about how to system a ship with the role I want to give it.
I intend to use it as an AI-driven drone in a station defense fleet. The plan is to have a huge purple alien station with 5 or 10 units of the ship seen in the picture below attached to it... You shoot the station, decrease its shields, and a sensor signals some shoot-out rails to launch them.
The ship is about 120-130 meters long, and although this whole project will be mostly RP-or-whatever-focused, I'd still like to system it in a way that's close-enough to optimal for its purpose.
So what weapons, chambers, thrust-mass ratio and other stuff would you guys recommend for such a machine?
Looks good. It has a very Covenant/Protoss/Kryptonian look to it. Do you have a name for the race?
For RP aliens? Here what I'd add...
- Beam weapons; because bullets and missiles are soooo 21st century human technology.
- Anti-shield weapon effects; sorry to burst your bubble...
- For theatrical effect, rapid dumbfire missiles would look cool; sort of like a plasma cannon. Although, in the past, AI used to suck at aiming them at moving targets.
- Always-on radar jammer or anti-lock-on stealth chamber; Foolish human... You will only see what we allow you to see.
- Always-on sensor. Fools! You think you can hide with your primitive light refracting tricks?
- Possible armor upgrade to counter "standard" human weapons.
- Do not try to get more thrust than 1.0 rating. AI seems to be incapable to use it properly. Even if it would be taught how to do it right hoping multiple drones would be able to coordinate their attacks is a pipe dream. So consider aiming at a TWR of 1.0
- Due to the first point it is better to use weapons with better range and projectile speed. Ideally lasers. Considering that right now cannons have pretty ridiculous recoil it is not clear how good AI will be at using any cannon with high rate of fire. So lasers it is.
- It is hard to say when the AI will be able to utilise chamber and other active abilities so any non-passive effects would probably be a waste.
Since the primary function is station defense, you can probably skip on any serious thrust power (even down to 1/2 might fly) and mobility chambers are right out because they will almost never in their lives need to travel more than a few sectors.
I agree with Dr. Whammy that stealth anti-lock on is probably ideal.
I might focus on power to weapons over armor/shields, so that the DPS forces the enemy to engage them rather than ignore them and continue to exterminate the station.
Cannons mounted on the center of mass axis are accurate and deadly. Cannons that are not mounted on COM are equivalent to useless drunken hillbillies who couldn't hit the blind side of a barn with a scatter gun. So by the look of your off center barrel outputs I'd also be recommending beams. Armour up the center of the ship with a few layers of advanced and as many layers of basic and standard as you can. Chambers I'd go for a turn rate level 2 or a basic power chamber and the rest into armour and shield enhancement. Active chambers don't work on drones. Turn rate level 2 allows you to drop your thrusters even further and use the power gained on guns or alternatively the power chamber just gives more power for guns. Same effect, different avenues.
Looks good. It has a very Covenant/Protoss/Kryptonian look to it. Do you have a name for the race?
For RP aliens? Here what I'd add...
- Beam weapons; because bullets and missiles are soooo 21st century human technology.
- Anti-shield weapon effects; sorry to burst your bubble...
- For theatrical effect, rapid dumbfire missiles would look cool; sort of like a plasma cannon. Although, in the past, AI used to suck at aiming them at moving targets.
- Always-on radar jammer or anti-lock-on stealth chamber; Foolish human... You will only see what we allow you to see.
- Always-on sensor. Fools! You think you can hide with your primitive light refracting tricks?
- Possible armor upgrade to counter "standard" human weapons.
Dr. Whammy - Thank you for the nicely styled set of tips, much appreciated! I originally wanted to name the station of this alien faction as "The Hive", but I'll try to come up with a name for their race, and name the station "The [insert species name] Hive".
I recall beam weapons having a drastic effect on shields by default, so I kinda hesitate to add an anti-shield tertiary to the one or two big beam weapons I could build into this ship. I'm noobish about weapons, but wouldn't that only decrease its preferable block-damage power? Anyways, I noted everything else, thanks
- Do not try to get more thrust than 1.0 rating. AI seems to be incapable to use it properly. Even if it would be taught how to do it right hoping multiple drones would be able to coordinate their attacks is a pipe dream. So consider aiming at a TWR of 1.0
- Due to the first point it is better to use weapons with better range and projectile speed. Ideally lasers. Considering that right now cannons have pretty ridiculous recoil it is not clear how good AI will be at using any cannon with high rate of fire. So lasers it is.
- It is hard to say when the AI will be able to utilise chamber and other active abilities so any non-passive effects would probably be a waste.
Since the primary function is station defense, you can probably skip on any serious thrust power (even down to 1/2 might fly) and mobility chambers are right out because they will almost never in their lives need to travel more than a few sectors.
I agree with Dr. Whammy that stealth anti-lock on is probably ideal.
I might focus on power to weapons over armor/shields, so that the DPS forces the enemy to engage them rather than ignore them and continue to exterminate the station.
MacThule - Thank you very much, I'm happy to hear that you find it good-looking, I tried my best. Also grateful for the tactical advise, makes sense. I too intended to focus mostly on offense; let them be kinda slow and poorly defended, so that when substantial decrease of station shielding will result in all of them attacking the enemy at once, he'll still have a chance to take them out.
Also, I probably should've mentioned that I wish to make these defense drones, probably 15 in total in the end, launch in three waves at specified station shield percentages (something like 90%, 50% and 10%). So the attacker can choose to take them out in sets of five, by leaving the station to recharge after each launch, until the fifth of each set if killed.
Cannons mounted on the center of mass axis are accurate and deadly. Cannons that are not mounted on COM are equivalent to useless drunken hillbillies who couldn't hit the blind side of a barn with a scatter gun. So by the look of your off center barrel outputs I'd also be recommending beams. Armour up the center of the ship with a few layers of advanced and as many layers of basic and standard as you can. Chambers I'd go for a turn rate level 2 or a basic power chamber and the rest into armour and shield enhancement. Active chambers don't work on drones. Turn rate level 2 allows you to drop your thrusters even further and use the power gained on guns or alternatively the power chamber just gives more power for guns. Same effect, different avenues.
MrGrey1 - Thanks for the tips! But why heavily armor the middle section? Lock-ons aim there or is it that I should put the reactor there with stabs at back and front? I'm clueless, because I was careless about these stuff until now. And I'll probably be too lazy to do any modifications on the already built hull besides mass-replacing armor blocks to higher-tier ones :D
Armour is still not very good, but it could stop at least some attacks. And it is much more effective if you build it in one big lump. Ideally one thick block of armour should protect most of your systems.
For example to beat a 5 layers thick advanced armour plate I needed 2 shots from a cannon in the same place. On the other hand to beat through a 10 layer plate I needed 7-8 shots on average and never less than 6. As you can see the thicker the plate the more effective it is.
Basic Armour (The one that was Hull before) is the most mass effective. Advanced Armour is the most volume effective. Considering that your ship is already built you are probably will be better off with filling your nose with advanced armour. But if you were building the ship from the ground up thick hull blobs would be better - they are almost two times more effective than other armour.
Armour is still not very good, but it could stop at least some attacks. And it is much more effective if you build it in one big lump. Ideally one thick block of armour should protect most of your systems.
For example to beat a 5 layers thick advanced armour plate I needed 2 shots from a cannon in the same place. On the other hand to beat through a 10 layer plate I needed 7-8 shots on average and never less than 6. As you can see the thicker the plate the more effective it is.
Basic Armour (The one that was Hull before) is the most mass effective. Advanced Armour is the most volume effective. Considering that your ship is already built you are probably will be better off with filling your nose with advanced armour. But if you were building the ship from the ground up thick hull blobs would be better - they are almost two times more effective than other armour.
Interesting... I appreciate you sharing this info, and I would have a few additional questions about armor, but I guess gathering further wisdom about combat ship engineering could wait for a while for me.
Since I guess AI ships will try to point their nose on the opponent just like players do, I'll go with your advise and fill some of its head with adv. armor, and if I screw up everything else... well, people will have somewhat more relaxed fun while conquering the station that the fleet protects, something I actually wouldn't want to make super difficult in this project.
Yah what Zoolimar said. The damage patterns will likely be focused in the front middle of your ship, at least the damage from other AI will be. I highly recommend getting a creative world for some testing, you sound like me with lots of time in building and not so much in fighting.
Recommend
Find a sector in empty space. I like 100,100,100 as it's nice and easy to type quickly.
Lock the sector so your ships can't go walkabout, `/sector_chmod 100 100 100 noexit`
Make a 'bike' ie a core with a faction block, reactor and thruster, set it to mothership of a fleet. Use the catalog and spawn in 10 of your ships and put them in the fleet. Set them to defend 100,100,100.
Make yourself invisible, `/invisibility_mode player_name true` so you don't interfere with the fight or get shot.
Fly to the other side of the sector and use the mass spawn admin tool in the catalog to drop in 10 more of the ships but set them to -1 for faction so they spawn hostile... Sit back and watch the light show.
When the dust has settled, set your fleet to idle in formation and either use the admin tool in the catalog to despawn what's left of the pirates or alternatively use /stop_ship_ai on them so you can have a look at how they fared. (Don't forget about F1-F8 for core hoping.)
I've been doing this with all the ships I'm 'finishing' since the weapons update. It's really very informative and fun to do. Especially if you get the procedure down pat, you can setup and have a fight in a couple of minutes and be back to building with all your new found practical knowledge in no time. I found my designs have shifted and improved dramatically as a result. I now run regular survival of the fittest tests on all 'finished' ships. If you get quick at swapping out weapons you can set them against each other and see the real world results in moments. Nothing like practical tests to show up all the holes in your theory crafting.
Cannons mounted on the center of mass axis are accurate and deadly. Cannons that are not mounted on COM are equivalent to useless drunken hillbillies who couldn't hit the blind side of a barn with a scatter gun. So by the look of your off center barrel outputs I'd also be recommending beams. Armour up the center of the ship with a few layers of advanced and as many layers of basic and standard as you can. Chambers I'd go for a turn rate level 2 or a basic power chamber and the rest into armour and shield enhancement. Active chambers don't work on drones. Turn rate level 2 allows you to drop your thrusters even further and use the power gained on guns or alternatively the power chamber just gives more power for guns. Same effect, different avenues.
It's funny that you mention this problem and it is a good share, because I hadn't realized that within the poorness that is current missile-PD relationship. Turrets should probably function similarly regardless of position relative to a ship's center of mass.
Thank you for sharing!
It's funny because I was reporting on a nasty bug during pre-release involving huge chunks missing from entities both saved and prototype. It was very persistent and reproducible, but... interestingly enough it was only reproducible when the ships Center of Mass was offset from its core.
The bug was fixed before release, BTW.
But it remains an interesting commonality that both of these issues rooted back to the Center of Mass function.
For those who haven't noticed, there is a new function in the code that re-sets your ship's Center of Mass (where the HUD icon appears relative to your ship's structure) to its actual calculated center of mass. Which is cool. It used to stay in the core, which sucked in so many ways - general misrepresentation, bridge drilling, and even a sort of exploitation (in one of my old tourny ships I deliberately set the ship's core way off to the right of its vitals and weapons, by like 50% of the ship's size, and it had a hull and cockpit and all, but was calculated as a gimmick to trick the aim of my opponents. And it worked; along with a shield drain secondary it was probably the main factor in winning a 1v1 duel and a 10-player FFA melee. That ship was last standing.).
I think that the new CoM function is a fantastic idea. I am hoping it doesn't become the source of a whole slew of gameplay problems like this, because if so it might not be worth the trouble. Probably something Schine should keep an eye out for in the near future.
Find a sector in empty space. I like 100,100,100 as it's nice and easy to type quickly.
Lock the sector so your ships can't go walkabout, `/sector_chmod 100 100 100 noexit`
Make a 'bike' ie a core with a faction block, reactor and thruster, set it to mothership of a fleet. Use the catalog and spawn in 10 of your ships and put them in the fleet. Set them to defend 100,100,100.
Make yourself invisible, `/invisibility_mode player_name true` so you don't interfere with the fight or get shot.
Fly to the other side of the sector and use the mass spawn admin tool in the catalog to drop in 10 more of the ships but set them to -1 for faction so they spawn hostile... Sit back and watch the light show.
When the dust has settled, set your fleet to idle in formation and either use the admin tool in the catalog to despawn what's left of the pirates or alternatively use /stop_ship_ai on them so you can have a look at how they fared. (Don't forget about F1-F8 for core hoping.)
That truly sound very fun and useful! - Will definitely try it with this latest ship of mine as soon as time permits.
I actually did try a more quick-and-dirty version of this testing procedure before, on a single occasion, and that was the time when my wish to create a swarm of drones has born.
I'll system this thing today, and release it in the following days... Until then, here are two additional shots from my shipyard thread:
Given that this ship is supposed to protect a station, couldn't I have certain forces exerted upon the enemy by chambers built within the station itself instead of the drones?
Like the recon chambers recommended above? If the influence of the station's devices un-jam, un-cloak, etc the enemy, wouldn't this effect be the same from the AI drones' perspective? They'd see the enemy as if they themselves would've recon-ed them, right?
What other chambers could be placed inside the station to spare room for other ones within the ships (besides jump inhibition)?
Hey, does the anti-lock-on chamber even count as a passive, AI-usable chamber?
What confuses me is that you can get it only by building three chambers (Stealth Drive Base --> Stealth Strength 1 --> Stealth Anti Lockon), of which the root chamber is an active one that puts a stealth-drive on your hotbar, which you must trigger manually and is active only temporarily.
So if you have jamming and cloaking functionality in it, and it ain't perma, you can only get those effects temporarily by means unavailable for the AI.
So is the anti-lock-on effect temporary / non-passive / AI-unusable?
Just did some tests. Fleet commands for jamming and cloaking are not working. No surprise there. Last time I checked if you exited a ship it's chambers stayed active but I just tried that with a perma cloak and it turns off when you exit the core now, that's new afaik as last time I tried that trick I lost a ship... so yeah, it appears cloaked drones are a non starter at the moment. That leaves Mobility, Power lv1 and Defense chambers.
EDIT: woops. Jump the gun again. You can perma Jam and it stays on if you exit. Just the cloaking that turns off by the look.
EDIT2: Extra side note, I tried saving the ships BP while it's jammer was on and then spawning it. The ship spawned with its jammer already on... so that would work nicely for your drones.
EDIT2: Extra side note, I tried saving the ships BP while it's jammer was on and then spawning it. The ship spawned with its jammer already on... so that would work nicely for your drones.
But you know, the thing that confused me stems for an ambiguity they left open. When we want to build a stealth chamber tree, we start with the stealth root chamber, which creates a new item, the stealth-drive, in the weapons menu or hotbar. We can enable or disable that with a right click, and while it's on, we get a notice saying "STEALTH: Jam: true/false; Cloak: true/false".
If we have neither a jammer nor a cloaker chamber on the tree, it will be "false/false" while on (and will protect the ship elsehow), but it says nothing about the anti-lock-on effect even if you have the chamber for it.
So I don't know, this may be interpreted like you always have the anti-lock-on effect if you have the chamber, regardless if the stealth-drive base from which it stems is inactive on the hotbar... which would make it a passive effect? I guess this has to be settled through tests.
The reason I care about this particular point is that I don't think it would worth it to make it perma in this ship and blueprint it with the stealth-drive turned on... that'd be four chambers and like 60% RC just to counter lock-ons. So if it too is an active effect, I might be better off with no stealth at all
I ended up not taking risks this time, and went with good old tried-and-true defense chambers, instead of anything experimental that might turn out to be unusable by the AI.
I ended up not taking risks this time, and went with good old tried-and-true defense chambers, instead of anything experimental that might turn out to be unusable by the AI.
Just did some tests. Fleet commands for jamming and cloaking are not working. No surprise there. Last time I checked if you exited a ship it's chambers stayed active but I just tried that with a perma cloak and it turns off when you exit the core now, that's new afaik as last time I tried that trick I lost a ship... so yeah, it appears cloaked drones are a non starter at the moment. That leaves Mobility, Power lv1 and Defense chambers.
EDIT: woops. Jump the gun again. You can perma Jam and it stays on if you exit. Just the cloaking that turns off by the look.
EDIT2: Extra side note, I tried saving the ships BP while it's jammer was on and then spawning it. The ship spawned with its jammer already on... so that would work nicely for your drones.
- No fleet jamming/cloaking yet.
- Jammer stays on when you exit the ship (Scanner and most other "always-on" chambers do as well)
- Ships saved to BP with chamber systems turned on will spawn with these systems turned on.
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