This hasn’t been my experience, defense installations seem to be much more effective than ships. Two defense arrays seems to make a station or base invulnerable to alien attacks of any size. Even a single basic point defense can kill their bombers while trading a few destroyed modules.
Like you said, though, this might be a tech issue. These things upgrade themselves but the game doesn’t tell you which techs are used, and I’ve heard of some of the upgrades being way less effective than others.
Yeah, I’ve found defense arrays to be quite effective, even with basic lasers and cannons.
My whole fleet doctrine is disposable missile monitors. Just a basic unarmored engine with 4 viper missiles and extra magazines.and hardly.any delta-v. 8 of those can beat back anything they’ve thrown at me so far. Biggest assault so far was a mothership and two dreadnaughts against my main shipyard. They blow up all my ships and then the missile swarm hits. This happened twice and for now they’re leaving it alone. They blow up some asteroid mines in retaliation and I just rebuild behind them.
Just to confirm, this is defence arrays on habs on planets/asteroids, right?
I’ve looked at the data files and nothing looks obviously out of place. My understanding is planetary bases always use the best laser tech. Maybe there’s some number there that works backwards or something.
It’s hard to tell exactly how effective the ground-based ones are because there’s no combat round. I can say that several of my asteroid habs seem to have been protected by them. By this, I mean that an alien ship would come into orbit about the asteroid, and then would leave and not bombard the base.
They provide a combat strength, which seems to be the main number that the AI uses to determine whether to attack or not. I have similarly had attacks by alien fleets refuse to engage my space assets.
Quite, which is why a bug here would surprise me not at all.
But I routinely saw corvettes blowing up bases with 2 or 3 layered defence arrays.
Elaborated by edit on my previous post.
As far as the weapons used by defense arrays, it seems to use your best laser and your best projectile techs. At least that’s what I’ve seen in space battles. I wish they had missile launchers, but maybe that’s a later module. When I upgraded to green lasers, they suddenly changed color and my combat strength went up.
I was talking about these too, yeah. Battles are really underwhelming and take place entirely in the notifications tab, but fights with a corvette against the cheapest defense look like this:
9:30AM - Alien fleet Victor-17 has entered lower Mercury orbit
9:40AM - Alien fleet Victor-17 is bombarding Halsey Base
10:05AM - Farm destroyed on Halsey Base
10:20AM - Alien fleet Victor-17 has been destroyed in lower Mercury orbit
I haven’t seen an alien actually win a fight with a base that has at least one defense.
I have never seen a message like the bolded one.
When you say you are using the cheapest defence are you using the tier 1 point defence module?
There is a “mirror radius” stat in the datafiles which is extremely large for the ground defence lasers and for T2 and above it is larger than for any ship based weapon, so I could certainly imagine the T2 and above being outside the tested range.
I will try it out anyway.
Here is a new video that covers how to deal with the alien threat level. The first 8 minutes are mostly spoiler free and then he gets into the details of how it all works:
An interesting looking game.
How close is this to a final release? Are they talking about big changes yet?
How much of the player’s attention must focus on space battles? (I’m always looking for quality grand strategy, but find that I am a bit worn out on space combat.)
I see all this praise here and on the web and I’m tempted to give it a try again. It seems it’s advanced quite a bit from that really limited demo in June?
The roadmap talks of a new scenario where you start in the year 2070 with a small space presence already. The rest looks like AI and feature/balance passes. It wouldn’t have disappointed me if this was the full release.
The game isn’t really space on space battles focused from what I can tell. You can also join starting factions that make this more or less important. Some strategies are space fleet heavy while others employee more static defense.
There are no major gameplay changes coming, the gameplay is feature complete. The remaining changes are all Balance tweaks, UI improvements, and polish (voice acting, art, translations) and also alternative starting scenarios (Cold War, Starting in 2070, etc). Oh and better modding support. The worst UI in the game is probably the spaceship battle UI. It seems okay once you master it but it’s super confusing.
You could play the game for 20 hours and not realize there are spaceship battles in it. But you eventually have to get out there. This is both an autoresolve-battle and autobuild-spaceship-design for spaceship stuff, but I think you will still have to have a rough idea how the tech works so you can properly allocate research and resources to spaceships. In early access autoresolve battles seem to be perfectly fine and fair, but autobuild is a little wonky.
You might be able to play the game and mostly build space stations/bases with orbital defense platforms, and never have space battles. These basically autobattle alien ships. They are actually brokenly OP in the current build, but getting balanced soon.
It’s not so much that it advanced by leaps and bounds, but that the demo was very limited. It was just a slice of the game (single faction, tech tree mostly missing, only 7 years) and EA has the whole thing.
The game encourages you to delay getting into space battles for as long as possible. Imagine an XCom game where you don’t reach the tactical level for potentially tens of hours.
Even after you get there, I’ve found it’s usually better to just let the AI take over. A big part of battles is dodging unpredictably and I’d rather the AI plot all those moves.
It’s still a game with an impressive amount of features and you can explore more of them and save your progress. But the UI is still mostly the same, meaning it takes 20-30 clicks to do something that should take 3 or 4.
The space battles can be very spectacular, but do kind of defy human control. It’s actually pretty cool to see how your ship design impacts the battle.
I found that around 2040 all the AIs basically ground to a halt and stopped being any kind of challenge (including the aliens), I’m assuming due to a combination of bugs and hitting economic death spirals in their own management.
Because the aliens start out with such large advantages tech-wise the balancing needs to be super clever and careful and I’m not sure they are quite there yet.
The UI has serious issue and while I think they will fix the worst ones this will always be a bit of a click fest.
By the way, it turns out effectiveness of ground defenses depends on your game speed. High speed favors the attacker, low speed favors the defender.
Giving this a try, though I may wait til 1.0 to do a full playthrough.
One thing mystifying me in the early game is repeated messages that the aliens are becoming more popular in country X… yet I see no way to look into that. I use the investigate order, but nothing ever comes of it, not even a failure message. So I suspect that that is the wrong action to take. Or maybe I am not supposed to do anything at all about it?
Otherwise, the game interface contains several annoyances, but nothing fatal. The world map balks at certain levels of zoom. And the steps required towards your goals can be tough to keep track of. But nothing awful, and the overall idea strikes me as very interesting.
Investigate is the right action, but you cannot detect aliens without a specific technology. Also they tend to have high espionage, so you need high investigation. It’s really just a heads up that “the aliens are up to stuff” at this point. Later on it is much more useful.
I would just fight it with publicity campaigns for now.
I think you havent tried intercepting an enemy fleet yet :). The process of intercepting a fleet, autoresolving, returning your fleets to base, repairing and resupplying them is probably about 50 clicks and multiple unpauses, focus changes, etc.
I do think the geopolitics and space combat paradigm have a lot of promise though. Less sure about the space strategic layer. They got too excited about realistic astrogation and forgot to make a game there.
Yeah, nowhere near that far yet, and I will not be happy with the situation you describe.