I haven't seen you doing this so here's a tip. Sorry if you already know this! You can recruit crew from random friendly ships, so I find it helpful to always check random friendly ships at stations to see if they have recruits for me. I get a good third of my recruits from other ships, not stations.
Only an issue if a) you have more fame than recruits available at all starbases in sector, and b) don't travel sectors, as each star base has their own discrete supply of crew that restocks over time.
28:26 remember that during combat, ships are in "strafe mode" meaning that they will try to maintain the intended rotation of their destination for the entire move action. this means that the fire ant, who you had set to broadside the enemy, was approaching using only its lateral thrust.
Fireant likely needs a redesign with vastly increased lateral thrust. I can see it having another 'forward' thruster set, like the Scarab. So it can maintain top speed in it's strafe targeting. I was just about to make a comment about that, lol.
Nice to hear the full jack of all trades quote for once! (6:55) The 'often better than a master of one' part complete transforms the meaning, but sadly not enough people know that.
The 'often better' part is a modern addition that's often mis-cited as being older. That said, it's very true, because "a specialist is somebody who knows more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing".
@@Daemonworks thanks for the correction. I was curious and looked this up. Looks like the phrase jack of all trades comes from the early/mid 17th century, the 'master of none' part was added in the late 18th century and 'better than a master of one' is pretty recent. I wonder what they'll add in another 200 years or so.
With your alpha strike rail fanning, I would encourage you to use the "R" hotkey to rotate the ship without having to grab the rotate handle. That will let you have the camera focused on the enemy while doing precise rotations.
One ship I am very fond of in my fleet is my tiny Fang Interceptor. It's basically an engine room with two EMP launchers in the front. Twelve crew, no armor, no shielding, just 150m/s speed once the boosters come on. Get in, launch missiles, get the hell out. Great at turning off engines and cockpits that are in the back and getting the attention of wandering pirates to lead them to my Gullwing and Warhead.
That fight with the swarm of little ships was very cool - Fire Ant just face tanking the nuke, then Scarab deleting the ship that had fired it from offscreen with her railguns… epic
I keep thinking "Insectoid Menace" when I look at the Scarab's lil icon in the lower left, because I keep seeing a face with mandables and the area where the crystals are the eyes.
I for one enjoy watching the smooth action of the Backward Utilized Target Tracking Energetic Rail system. Nothing quite like spreading around B.U.T.T.E.R for a rich and creamy resolution to all your combat needs.
Massed super shields will be a huge pain to get through if you're doing a primary rail ship. Adding some EMP launchers compliments the rail really well, especially since EMPs outrange everything besides railguns.
47:00 God that was so satisfying. Pretty sure you literally ONLY destroyed the control room and like, damaged armour. Imagine being a crewmen on that ship and out of nowhere the whole thing just completely shuts down despite you never seeing an enemy
i have to admit. i wasn't sure about the way you have the Scarab attacking. the turn around and attack thing. but after seeing this. i am liking the attacking and love the design of it. will be interesting to see how it can handle the higher levels.
a decoy to draw fire has been on my mind as well. Small ship focused on shields, point defense and disrupters. just get in close, draw fire, and let the big guys focus on dropping the hammer. could probably scale back thrusters and shields on the larger ships to focus more on weapons too, but not sure how economical it would be to repair the sacrificial lamb every battle.
It might be worth adding some capacitors to the Hercules so it doesn't take forever to load the hyperdrive with energy. While it usually doesn't need to do it fast, that is an awfully long way to carry that energy, and if it accidentally gets in a fight, you might want it to be able to charge them much faster than it currently can.
Aavak, please have a think about emp missiles, they have really good range, even if it is just one, it can dum down the stacked shielding on some of these ships and help the rail gun get in there.
Ships looking great. And everyone can make it to the bathroom. Ever think of just doing a herk ep? Or just some factory ship time? That would be very interesting to. To see that giant thing at work.
Have you thought about making small fast refueling/scavenging/repair ships? Enough to refill the fire ant with missiles and to scavenge the area. Like 2-4 large storage areas size. That way you can use the Hercules to mine more ores.
I’m not sure how much time you want to commit to salvaging, but you can make a huge amount of credits and resources from trailing your hauler behind your fighters. I’m currently in an 10-11 system with 4mill credits and a 65k space hauler fill of materials. Admittedly I do spend quite a bit of time cleaning up, but I don’t paint my ships, so I’m sure it evens out. 🤣 You can also park a “troop carrier” at a station just to contact the ships coming in and buy crew from them. Makes it so much easier to keep the expanding crew needs met! 😊
1:49 Well i choked on my milk and i spilled the milk in the cup i was holding because i was coughing so hard. Brilliant timing though, so i cant be mad.
Great video! After only getting 3 hours of sleep last night, I turned the video on. I saw there were some changes and fights, and suddenly the video was over and I felt rested. 10/10 would nap to again.
This ship design is really good, can you upload it to steam workshop? I would like to redesign your ions. You can make a subfolder in your ship designs, put your designs inside and upload the folder with a rightclick option to steam workshop.
Hey Aavak, Could you show the total cost of your ship whenever you do a redesign? I feel like comparing cost to performance is a good indicator on how well a ship is designed.
if you look towards the enemy and have your ship selected and press "R" you enter rotation mode, you can then see the line of fire for your railgun and set them to fan across. its a lot simpler to use R rotate mode than moving the ship each time
There is an option in the settings to Break Formation When Attacking. This should allow you to command ships in formation, but not have to worry about relative placement when they're engaging a target. You can also (probably) set the railgun butt fart as your default attack position, so you can travel "forwards" but automatically turn "backwards" when the Scarab is assigned an attack order.
i absolutly love doing this alpha strike strategy, in my current save i have 3 ships with 2 railguns each and the both target a diffrent ship or part of a station. its so fun to just rotate the ship and murk them
You can use the rotate button, default R key, to rotate and aim the rails precisely when zoomed in on the enemy ship. There will be a red line. You will probably figure this out pretty quick, but rails kinda suck going through very thick skin, something a lot of ships will have. You will be kiting for long times when fighting these. May i suggest adding a smaller, fast (90 m\s+) flanker ship with 1 or 2 LOoONG rails? Being able to snipe the squishy sides or rear from far away could be a good plan :)
I can confirm that the Welsh have a little more time Lord in them. I'm American but my roommate is half Welsh, and whenever we play games it feels like 5 minutes but 10 hours have passed.
For the Scarab: it looks like, you would do better with a similar shape as the Fireant. the Central Thruster-nacellas are kinda exposed while not necessary. You only need to place lateral thrusters there for turning and strafing, while concentrating all the other thrusters behind the thicker blunt body. The more i think about it... your ship will more and more look like an Star-Trek Intrepid class, that travels backwards to its destination :D
Would it be a good idea to get some EMP missiles to drain shields from long range to avoid the shortcomings of disruptors? Either on the Fire Ant or Scarab
That was sweet seeing those guns doing work, nice one! They don't seem to have the occasional slight delay I got when using less reactors, that's great! One idea; putting more extinguishers around factories and reactor might keep them from exploding if a rail takes a hit (the launcher part explodes and starts fires). I like the all-or-nothing approach though xD GL [edit] BTW I did a quick test to see if all those reactors would chain explode and they didn't! The reactor at the bottom didn't do too well though - that's vulnerable.
Amusing to face a nuke head on, but it makes sense. Reminds me of reading once that had the Titanic not seen the iceberg for a few more seconds, it would have not had time to try and dodge it, and would have rammed it head on, which would have caused far less damage and left it afloat.
That's a complicated little scenario. If Titanic had obliviously hit the berg at full speed, there would have likely been a lot of serious injuries, and she probably would have sunk as fast or faster. If, instead of turning when they spotted the iceberg, they put the engines into full reverse and then cut the engines after the collision, then she probably would have survived. At the very least, she would have taken significantly longer to sink, allowing for far more of her passengers and crew to survive.
@@asureaskie The sudden stop would have hurt passengers yeah, but apparently, had it rammed it head on, it would have breached the forefront compartment and flooded it, but only that one. And the Titanic had the ability to keep going even with a couple down. The side tear was just too long that it flooded one too many for the ship to handle for long.
10:00 Your crew around the shield clusters in the front are crossing back and forth in the center. A single moving walkway going inboard next to the reactor and outboard 2 tiles up would help efficiency. You could even put a fire extinguisher in between them. Or a 1x1 armour block but idk an extinguisher sounds better to me lol. Also in the last episode you took a heavy hit past the shields and were confused how it happened. You had and still have a gap in your shields facing forward (towards enemy) that they were able to skirt a shot through. It seems smaller now but it's still large enough for a cannon or railgun shot to go through comfortably. Even an ION aimed just right will go straight past all your shields just outboard from your large shield clusters. A single small shield just inboard of your main side engine cluster facing the enemy would prevent that damage.
The only problem I see is you have set it up so you have to juggle corridors if you lose crew. In my testing with 2 rail guns side by side, with conveyers along both sides, if I lost a rail do to a hit, the explosion only wiped out the single rail. The other was still fine. You could move the armor away from the rails and throw down a conveyer, just don't add doors until you want them free, or to resupply. I did have my ammo manufacturers explode though from a rail.
I tested this just now and the only part of the rail that exploded was the loader, and the accelerator crew was not harmed unless they were right inside it when it was destroyed. I think it's pretty unlikely that both crew for a section will be inside the same gun at the time it's destroyed because they only enter briefly. Was that your concern? It's an interesting idea though. About the factories, I made a quick replica to test, and it seems that if a rail goes the whole bottom section goes (reactor, sensors etc). I think he needs more extinguishers around there to put out fires in time to stop the ammo factory blowing. Also, moving the factories 1 tile to the side will give more time to put out fires in them - they took less damage when the launcher exploded when they weren't directly in line with it.
WWII study on how to armor long range bombers to ensure more of them would survive to return to base. They started recording holes made by bullets, cannon shells, and flak shrapnel. The engineers were going to armor the parts of the bombers with the most damage taken. An Airforce officer (I think, had trouble finding the references on this). Looked at the schematics of their planned armor and said something that seemed counterintuitive to many but was in fact a reality) he said "you have to armor the parts of the plain that don't have all the holes" he got the typical objections you'll find in system design. The people making the decisions don't have hands-on real world experience with flying planes under fire. The genius of this was he knew that the planes that never made it back had been shot in the areas that surviving planes had the least damage. The planes that never returned had some vital system destroyed by enemy fire and those planes never returned. Just an armor philosophy to think of when designing a craft for survivability. Take information from prior fights and rearrange your armor to the parts of the ship that when destroyed cause severe systems failure.
Side thought... could take one of those Onrush ships you only popped the cockpits off and convert it into that tractor beam ship you were talking about.
because of the AOE type explosion of nukes, distance is the best armor, by using subframe to make spacing then doing armor layers it protects nicely from nukes.
I've been finding that a lot of people deploy missile launchers "wrong". They like to stack them at the front of the ship with all the other fancy weapons and just "frontal assault" everything. I have a single giant laser crystal array that fires out the front and it's my primary means of attack. However, utilizing it (like your railguns) means I need to constantly shift position of my ship, turn it to new targets, and faster ships can get a lot of damage in (or even hit me from behind). Swarms of ships quickly become a problem, especially mid-game to late-game. I adopted missiles after seeing how they were used against me and imagining how effective I could make them. Here's the "best" way I've found to deploy missile launchers: Put them on your broadsides facing outward. Preferably behind "wings" like you have there on your ship. The missiles will fire outward (even when not directly in line of sight of an enemy... they can hit anything within range, provided nothing is in the way) and then have to "turn" inward to hit any enemies in front of you. This seems ineffecient until you take a few factors into account. 1. Very few ships in the game have "defenses on the sides" of their ships. A lot of them are built the same as most players. Front heavy, everything facing front, everything focused out the front. Your ship even suffers this issue. The armor on the sides is woefully thin and exposes quite a lot of vulnerable parts of your ship. Now, you do have point defenses, which would help you considerably, but since my ship would be taxing those pretty heavily in terms of energy usage, you'll be hard pressed to keep them online for long. Just based on your ship design in this video, your crew would have to choose between keeping the shields online or the point defenses running. So, with my missiles flying in from the sides or back of your ship, they're assaulting minimally defended locations. The missiles will curl back in to strike ships on the sides or the back with regular frequency. 2. Missiles that miss hitting the sides of your ship will land in the back of your ship. So, I'm typically guaranteed to take out engines or reactors that players like to shove back there (and the AI loves to shove back there a lot). So, here's how my ship design typically works. 1. I engage at long range with the Ion Beam. This quickly overwhelms very large ships or stations. 2. I have a team of twenty launchers (10 to a side) for missiles. 2 EMP per side, 2 Nuclear per side, 6 Standard per side. The launch at ABOUT the same range my Ion cannon does. They fire in very regular intervals during a fight and typically overwhelm Point Defenses on most AI controlled ships very quickly. The first 5 or 6 volleys may not get through, but I'm loaded with a bajillion missiles (okay, that's pretty much my entire cargo all over my ship, is just missiles, no room for salvage, I have other specialized ships for that) that will constantly fire. Standard missiles fire out first and often, hitting the sides or rear of any ship I'm engaging. EMP missiles typically get through after that and further shut down shielding and point defenses. This typically allows the nukes through to make short work of most ships. The missiles are also fantastic defense against "ship swarms" or even "faster ships" as they're REALLY not defended on the sides or rear and the missiles can target them no matter where they are in relation to me. 3. The launchers are never in any danger of "being destroyed" since they're on the sides of my ship and hidden behind "wings" that make them difficult for enemy ships to target. 4. I have dedicated crew to doing very specific tasks on board the ship and are stationed in "necessary" areas. I have "Weapons Officers (blue)" who's only job is to sit on my weapons. They do nothing else. Their bunks can be placed ANYWHERE on my ship as a result. They need to traverse nowhere, at any time. They man the guns and keep the guns active at all times. I have "Pilots (green)". They serve the exact same purpose as the blue guys. They only pilot my ship. They man the Bridge and the radar unit and nothing else. They go nowhere, they do nothing. Their bunks can be placed anywhere as well, since "travel time" doesn't matter to them either. I've got "Engineers (yellow)". Their job is to reload guns, haul stuff across the ship, power systems, etcetera. Most of them are placed in critical areas in very large number in order to keep everything functioning 100% with no lag time. These guys make up about 90% of my crew (my ship requires CLOSE to 300 crew to operate). Finally, I have the "Red Shirts (red)". They do a mix of every job on the ship to average priority settings. They fill in where needed, they do mining, etcetera. They "pick up the slack" anywhere it's needed. I can effectively salvage ships at the same time I am in a gunfight because of my Red Shirts. So, no matter how much incoming fire I'm taking, my ship is running at basically 100% efficiency. What kills me is better designed ships or superior strategy, and not "lack of uptime". What kills most of my enemies is "lack of uptime" since my ship is basically designed to run your energy reserves low and then kill you while all defenses are offline. There are very few ships that stand up to my current design and I've been tinkering with the idea of adding railguns to my "wings" for taking out the larger stations more quickly. My defenses stand up to most assaults (and I've really only got a bunch of plating in sensitive areas and a few shields around the thrusters at the back and in front of my ion beam channel to keep that weapon online) and my offensive options ensure I win pretty much every fight, even if they knock my ion cannon, shields, and thrusters offline. An enemy would have to destroy at least 67% of my ship to put me out of the fight at all. I've even got minor "interior thrusters" to keep the thing able to move should I suffer catastrophic damage and need to "limp to a base" (with a secondary bridge near them for the same purpose) So, anyway, a lot of people deploy "missiles" incorrectly, I've noticed. You want to sort of deploy them the same way a submarine in real life would. Starboard torpedos to cripple sides and backs of ships while they weather your frontal assault. Unless you're 100% efficient with all your point defenses, then some of them will get through and destroy those point defenses, which leaves you with no answer to the barrage. Even then, if more missiles are fired than point defenses exist, you've already lost the fight. Flak Cannons would work better in those situations, but then you need to dedicate crew to those stations and those leave larger "no defense" holes once destroyed.
Building up a bit of a dreadnought for yourself, eh? Though, I think it might be funny to build a squadron of fighter-type craft and name them after your ferrets.
you should work on the Hercules at some point to be able to take even more resources with it and being able at some point to be able to drag the most rich resources near the sun to safer space to collect it! Another episode well done!
"You won't find many hypercoils just from salvage" Of course not with the way you blow up all of the ship's important parts before actually disabling it prior to the current build (and even the current build can too)! You only get resources from what you are actually salvaging, so if all you leave behind is a husk of armor and corridors you're only getting steel plates!
@@asureaskie Far far less, if any, since most of the resources are just outright destroyed and it's usually just a trail of coils and steel plates, unless you popped a storage space in a non-explosive manner.
Disruptor and nuke fighters, I think the small swarm has proven they could work… and large Shields are the flaws of nukes while they are up, but are very vulnerable to nukes while down. Also the fire ant need close in weapons… maybe allow the point defence to fire on anything in range.
Wait until you see the nuke salvo ship..... 20 or so nukes all dropped in your lap at once. Endgame ships are real monsters, one even looks and cuts like a lightsaber. :)
You could probably put the missiles onto the scarab and move all the crew from the fireant and use a single combat ship with higher efficiency than the two.
Fire Ant's derpy movements, look at combat orientation (did you change it from broadside to claymore mine), and check on your thruster types, number, and placement. Even just a few of the smallest thrusters up on/near the bow would help.
Hi Avak, I have some advice that might help you: 1- Formations are absolutely terrible for combat. They work well for travel from point A to point B. When any one ship in the formation is adjusting its thrust, everyone will have to match it. The thrust of the slowest ships overrides all others. Meaning if your ships can go 80, and one of them is adjusting at 30, all of them will slow down to a crawl to match it. 2- Any engines connected to an engine room should have their doors removed unless you need crew to travel through them. The engine room charges them, and this will prevent fires from spreading past the engines should they ever catch on fire. 3- you are not taking advantage of your railguns' range. They can fire at 600 meters, but most of the time you're engaging at 450 meters or so, which allows the enemy missile ships to get some shots at you. When you set your attack defaults you can see the lines for the rails, and they indicate the range. I've noticed that for most opponents they are basically at the 2/3rds point of the range, you just need the tip of those lines to extend a bit past the enemy for maximum penetration. 4- This one is more of a style choice, but you can use the R key to rotate your ships. It works very well when you're using your railguns since you won't have to zoom out every time you want to rotate your ship 5- I run a fleet of ships and my combat ships always travel in a spread out formation so that when we run into a target, I can break the formation off, and click the target for them to start flanking it and hitting it from all angles. Nothing survives 20 rail guns hitting it from multiple angles.
@@KainYusanagi It's cheaper and safer to just lose the engine than risk losing the engine room with it. Doors allow fires to spread to adjacent modules, which can put even more of the crew at risk.
@@iraqiwalker1436 Most hits to engine clusters with his designs are due to stray missiles that managed to somehow weave through his defenses, not because he's in a fail state where more shots are coming through and he's boned. The loss of the engines disabling his mobility (especially when it's his primary thrust) is far greater a problem than the potential for fire spreading through the engine room.
@@KainYusanagi That's actually even more of a reason to remove the doors. Losing one engine is better than risking the rest of the cluster, and considering his engine count, one lost is not a problem.
Ok, yeah, the small reactor trick is great for optimizing reload time, but it is absolutely catastrophic should your shields go down and ANY amount of damage gets through to the rails. If those go, every reactor detonates too and boom, your entire ship is gone.
I tested the layout he's using, and the reactors didn't chain explode if one blew up, but there was another issue. The launcher explosion started fires in the factories which weren't always put out in time causing a chain explosion into that reactor down there which is pretty bad. I think some extra extinguishers near the factories and reactor would help a lot, and also moving the factories 1 tile to the side either way so they're not directly in line with the rails will reduce the damage they take from launcher explosion and give his guys more time to put out fire in them. I kind of like the risk though xD
Ah, 8472. The borg...honestly? This feels more like good Ole Creeper world. This feels almost like the space version of Creeper world, particularly fleet I think it was called
My first and main attack ship is a 4 engine drone shaped armed with 14 accelerator Railgun A Speed demon with a penchant for sniping and assassination Not a lot of battle endurance tho
Amazing Vid again. I would love to copy this design, any chance you have a video, maybe the after dark channel on how you allocate crew and bunks etc. Cheers.
You know considering what we saw before with the smaller ships I really do wish there was some proper support in the game for carrier type ships. I realize you can sort of just build a mother ship and have all of it's fleet surround it but it would be cool to have resupply arms and docking stations. Not very useful in your current run, but it'd be a great challenge to see just how compact you could build functional fighters in this game in order to really surround and attack your target from all angles.
hopefully they add docking clamps or something eventually so you can live out your multi vector assault dreams without relying on the enemy detonating your railguns with the scarab it may be worth considering swapping its ions out for more railguns, make it your mid range rail fanner entirely and having another ship inherit its ions for a purely close range brawling role. Or vice versa, returning the scarab to its previous brawler role and transfering the rails to a dedicated 30 long beast. I say this mainly because at the moment it is very much a one or the other, you only really bring the ions into play if you encounter shielding the 2 rails can't penetrate and once that happens its mostly ions doing any work (or actually most encounters this has happened the fireant has been the one to get the kill in the end)
I actually really want docking to be a thing. I hate having to manually transfer munitions to my non-storage ships. If the fighters could dock into my mothership, automatically resupply and then detach! Chef's kiss. Or as you've mentioned, voltron my ships or unvoltron them without explosives
"onrush is not a good counter for the scarab" To be fair. there isn't much at this level that can stand up to a proper rail boat. Even the pokemon evolution of the onrush, the onslaught. Isn't alot more durable.
Is it just me, or are two point defense guns in the Scarab's 'wings' not accessible due to a shield emitter being in their way? Also, I know it doesnt matter, but since the Scarab flipped its 'front' why not likewise turn the bridges around to face properly? :P
Forgive me if this has already been discussed and I just missed it. If you do an angled ship, can you produce a longer pipe for your rail guns? Hypotenuse of a right triangle and all that.
Theoretically maybe, and I think there's one of the pirate designs that basically does this. But it sacrifices a lot of defensive power on whichever side has the rails and there's little reason not to finish the rectangle and put the rails down the middle.
One of the issuse with the fireant is your trying to position it in realation with the enemy ship but forgetting that the enemy ship is moveing resulting on most of the time the fireants salvos missing most of the time the enemys already dead in tge water by the time the fireants in position
You could start dabbling with the factions. Basically you'll have one of them as an enemy then, from what I've seen. So more to kill and AFAIK more chances for additional crew ?
Is it just me or did the whole reversal of the main guns and forwards thrusters turn the Scarab from an attack cruiser to a defensive sniper? It kills just fine, but it has trouble keeping up with an enemy that runs away. And as a first strike vessel the fact it has to turn around, setting up ambushes, that does seem to me to waste a lot of time. And with the massive range of the railguns the former main guns comes into play less often. Could it be an idea to split up the main weapon platforms into two more focused ships? A heavily armoured frontline ion beam cruiser and a long range sniper frigate? Like Scarab sniper frigate and Mantis ion cruiser?
This is what I ended up doing. I have two dedicated 3x rail ships and one super heavily shielded laser/deck cannon brawler. I love the rails, but the brawler is by far the most fun, and challenging 😁
So, railguns are SO Overpowered when flanking an enemy.... Could you make a nimble ship (...or PAIR of ships) designed to flank an enemy and fire rail guns into it's sides? What if the ship(s) had railguns at either 45deg or 90deg angle, compared to it's strongest direction of motion. ....so.... literally built like a wooden ship-of-the-line vessel =D Might that be as epic as I'm imagining?? ^.^ You could call the class of vessel "The Flanking Hotdog" since it might actually be wider than it is long ^.^ But don't forget to consider building the direction of travel at a 45deg angle from the rail guns. But your intuition would be better for judging that possibility. ....!!!!!!!!! O.O IDEA! Set the rail guns on a "backward" 45deg angle, so that you fly past something and just bop it in the rear as you go by! Oh, and with any of these, you can specify a particular target and it'll be sure to get a shot! =) It seems like this would be best as support craft. Or as twins. In any case, best if these enemies that have 1 strongest facing defensive direction have to choose to focus on something else and thus be forced to give the opportunity to be flanked!
I haven't seen you doing this so here's a tip. Sorry if you already know this! You can recruit crew from random friendly ships, so I find it helpful to always check random friendly ships at stations to see if they have recruits for me. I get a good third of my recruits from other ships, not stations.
Dint know thank you i had problem getting 300 recruits
Only an issue if a) you have more fame than recruits available at all starbases in sector, and b) don't travel sectors, as each star base has their own discrete supply of crew that restocks over time.
@@KainYusanagi Right, but he has been consistently voicing problems acquiring enough crew.
So helpful thanks
@@heirofcarnage1782 Yes, because of fame limits- not crew availability.
28:26 remember that during combat, ships are in "strafe mode" meaning that they will try to maintain the intended rotation of their destination for the entire move action. this means that the fire ant, who you had set to broadside the enemy, was approaching using only its lateral thrust.
Fireant likely needs a redesign with vastly increased lateral thrust. I can see it having another 'forward' thruster set, like the Scarab. So it can maintain top speed in it's strafe targeting. I was just about to make a comment about that, lol.
Hell yeah on the Fluidic Space theory. +1 from me!
Nice to hear the full jack of all trades quote for once! (6:55)
The 'often better than a master of one' part complete transforms the meaning, but sadly not enough people know that.
Aye, quite a few old sayings like that!
The 'often better' part is a modern addition that's often mis-cited as being older.
That said, it's very true, because "a specialist is somebody who knows more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing".
@@Daemonworks thanks for the correction.
I was curious and looked this up. Looks like the phrase jack of all trades comes from the early/mid 17th century, the 'master of none' part was added in the late 18th century and 'better than a master of one' is pretty recent.
I wonder what they'll add in another 200 years or so.
With your alpha strike rail fanning, I would encourage you to use the "R" hotkey to rotate the ship without having to grab the rotate handle. That will let you have the camera focused on the enemy while doing precise rotations.
One ship I am very fond of in my fleet is my tiny Fang Interceptor. It's basically an engine room with two EMP launchers in the front. Twelve crew, no armor, no shielding, just 150m/s speed once the boosters come on. Get in, launch missiles, get the hell out. Great at turning off engines and cockpits that are in the back and getting the attention of wandering pirates to lead them to my Gullwing and Warhead.
That fight with the swarm of little ships was very cool - Fire Ant just face tanking the nuke, then Scarab deleting the ship that had fired it from offscreen with her railguns… epic
I keep thinking "Insectoid Menace" when I look at the Scarab's lil icon in the lower left, because I keep seeing a face with mandables and the area where the crystals are the eyes.
Really enjoy seeing more action now :) Feels like a real payoff after all this designing.
I for one enjoy watching the smooth action of the Backward Utilized Target Tracking Energetic Rail system. Nothing quite like spreading around B.U.T.T.E.R for a rich and creamy resolution to all your combat needs.
Massed super shields will be a huge pain to get through if you're doing a primary rail ship. Adding some EMP launchers compliments the rail really well, especially since EMPs outrange everything besides railguns.
This game is really giving me some From The Depths nostalgia
Ooooh yes, I love that game
Ah yes, crew puzzles I.S.O cram puzzles
47:00 God that was so satisfying. Pretty sure you literally ONLY destroyed the control room and like, damaged armour. Imagine being a crewmen on that ship and out of nowhere the whole thing just completely shuts down despite you never seeing an enemy
i have to admit. i wasn't sure about the way you have the Scarab attacking. the turn around and attack thing. but after seeing this. i am liking the attacking and love the design of it. will be interesting to see how it can handle the higher levels.
8:00 *insert Captain America understanding the reference*
I feel like you should get another ship (or two) - something that just screams "come here, I´m going to punch in the face at two meter range!"
Super shields and deck cannons is ,what I was thinking a floating shield of sorts😅🤣
@@michaelhofmeyr6568 Yeah, so many shields you cannot take them all down and so many heavy weapons you won´t have the time to anyway
a decoy to draw fire has been on my mind as well. Small ship focused on shields, point defense and disrupters. just get in close, draw fire, and let the big guys focus on dropping the hammer. could probably scale back thrusters and shields on the larger ships to focus more on weapons too, but not sure how economical it would be to repair the sacrificial lamb every battle.
It might be worth adding some capacitors to the Hercules so it doesn't take forever to load the hyperdrive with energy. While it usually doesn't need to do it fast, that is an awfully long way to carry that energy, and if it accidentally gets in a fight, you might want it to be able to charge them much faster than it currently can.
Aavak, please have a think about emp missiles, they have really good range, even if it is just one, it can dum down the stacked shielding on some of these ships and help the rail gun get in there.
Ships looking great. And everyone can make it to the bathroom. Ever think of just doing a herk ep? Or just some factory ship time? That would be very interesting to. To see that giant thing at work.
What I learned today: The Fireant can take nukes to the chin like a champion.
Have you thought about making small fast refueling/scavenging/repair ships? Enough to refill the fire ant with missiles and to scavenge the area. Like 2-4 large storage areas size. That way you can use the Hercules to mine more ores.
I’m not sure how much time you want to commit to salvaging, but you can make a huge amount of credits and resources from trailing your hauler behind your fighters. I’m currently in an 10-11 system with 4mill credits and a 65k space hauler fill of materials. Admittedly I do spend quite a bit of time cleaning up, but I don’t paint my ships, so I’m sure it evens out. 🤣
You can also park a “troop carrier” at a station just to contact the ships coming in and buy crew from them. Makes it so much easier to keep the expanding crew needs met! 😊
1:49 Well i choked on my milk and i spilled the milk in the cup i was holding because i was coughing so hard. Brilliant timing though, so i cant be mad.
Great video! After only getting 3 hours of sleep last night, I turned the video on. I saw there were some changes and fights, and suddenly the video was over and I felt rested. 10/10 would nap to again.
This ship design is really good, can you upload it to steam workshop? I would like to redesign your ions. You can make a subfolder in your ship designs, put your designs inside and upload the folder with a rightclick option to steam workshop.
Hey Aavak, Could you show the total cost of your ship whenever you do a redesign? I feel like comparing cost to performance is a good indicator on how well a ship is designed.
Scarab is looking like quite a fine ship sir, love this iteration over your others by a large margain. the double railgun and quad shields look great
if you look towards the enemy and have your ship selected and press "R" you enter rotation mode, you can then see the line of fire for your railgun and set them to fan across. its a lot simpler to use R rotate mode than moving the ship each time
There is an option in the settings to Break Formation When Attacking.
This should allow you to command ships in formation, but not have to worry about relative placement when they're engaging a target.
You can also (probably) set the railgun butt fart as your default attack position, so you can travel "forwards" but automatically turn "backwards" when the Scarab is assigned an attack order.
I hope I wasn't the only one to get excited when you mentioned the possibility of mining those sun asteroids....
i absolutly love doing this alpha strike strategy, in my current save i have 3 ships with 2 railguns each and the both target a diffrent ship or part of a station. its so fun to just rotate the ship and murk them
Thankfully, I remembered my jelly babies. And my sonic screwdriver.
You can use the rotate button, default R key, to rotate and aim the rails precisely when zoomed in on the enemy ship. There will be a red line.
You will probably figure this out pretty quick, but rails kinda suck going through very thick skin, something a lot of ships will have. You will be kiting for long times when fighting these. May i suggest adding a smaller, fast (90 m\s+) flanker ship with 1 or 2 LOoONG rails? Being able to snipe the squishy sides or rear from far away could be a good plan :)
Enjoy your series. Great Job as usual 🙂Thanks Aavak!
I like the new Scarab a lot. Though I feel like more ions would be nice.
I can confirm that the Welsh have a little more time Lord in them. I'm American but my roommate is half Welsh, and whenever we play games it feels like 5 minutes but 10 hours have passed.
For the Scarab: it looks like, you would do better with a similar shape as the Fireant. the Central Thruster-nacellas are kinda exposed while not necessary.
You only need to place lateral thrusters there for turning and strafing, while concentrating all the other thrusters behind the thicker blunt body.
The more i think about it... your ship will more and more look like an Star-Trek Intrepid class, that travels backwards to its destination :D
Would it be a good idea to get some EMP missiles to drain shields from long range to avoid the shortcomings of disruptors? Either on the Fire Ant or Scarab
Yeah, for example that Stalwart would have been way easier if you broke down the big shields with some EMPs.
The Scarad needs more turning trusters onestly it is fast but some turning boosters wood help
32:00 I suspect what saved the Fire Ant was all that scaffolding, acting like spaced armor on a tank.
Ask lathland for a collab :
Duel of fleets, the insects vs the dark gods.
That would be a showdown I would pay to watch.
As A Scot I would like to point out we also have quite the Inner-Time Lord, after all, all the best Doctors have been Scottish
Nobody:
Absolutely Nobody:
Fireant: DEATHBLOSSOM MOTHERTREKKERS YEEEET
That was sweet seeing those guns doing work, nice one! They don't seem to have the occasional slight delay I got when using less reactors, that's great!
One idea; putting more extinguishers around factories and reactor might keep them from exploding if a rail takes a hit (the launcher part explodes and starts fires). I like the all-or-nothing approach though xD GL
[edit] BTW I did a quick test to see if all those reactors would chain explode and they didn't! The reactor at the bottom didn't do too well though - that's vulnerable.
Amusing to face a nuke head on, but it makes sense.
Reminds me of reading once that had the Titanic not seen the iceberg for a few more seconds, it would have not had time to try and dodge it, and would have rammed it head on, which would have caused far less damage and left it afloat.
That's a complicated little scenario. If Titanic had obliviously hit the berg at full speed, there would have likely been a lot of serious injuries, and she probably would have sunk as fast or faster. If, instead of turning when they spotted the iceberg, they put the engines into full reverse and then cut the engines after the collision, then she probably would have survived. At the very least, she would have taken significantly longer to sink, allowing for far more of her passengers and crew to survive.
@@asureaskie The sudden stop would have hurt passengers yeah, but apparently, had it rammed it head on, it would have breached the forefront compartment and flooded it, but only that one. And the Titanic had the ability to keep going even with a couple down.
The side tear was just too long that it flooded one too many for the ship to handle for long.
10:00 Your crew around the shield clusters in the front are crossing back and forth in the center. A single moving walkway going inboard next to the reactor and outboard 2 tiles up would help efficiency. You could even put a fire extinguisher in between them. Or a 1x1 armour block but idk an extinguisher sounds better to me lol.
Also in the last episode you took a heavy hit past the shields and were confused how it happened. You had and still have a gap in your shields facing forward (towards enemy) that they were able to skirt a shot through. It seems smaller now but it's still large enough for a cannon or railgun shot to go through comfortably. Even an ION aimed just right will go straight past all your shields just outboard from your large shield clusters.
A single small shield just inboard of your main side engine cluster facing the enemy would prevent that damage.
A rail cannon!
Beware thinly armoured ships! 😎
The only problem I see is you have set it up so you have to juggle corridors if you lose crew. In my testing with 2 rail guns side by side, with conveyers along both sides, if I lost a rail do to a hit, the explosion only wiped out the single rail. The other was still fine. You could move the armor away from the rails and throw down a conveyer, just don't add doors until you want them free, or to resupply.
I did have my ammo manufacturers explode though from a rail.
I tested this just now and the only part of the rail that exploded was the loader, and the accelerator crew was not harmed unless they were right inside it when it was destroyed.
I think it's pretty unlikely that both crew for a section will be inside the same gun at the time it's destroyed because they only enter briefly. Was that your concern?
It's an interesting idea though.
About the factories, I made a quick replica to test, and it seems that if a rail goes the whole bottom section goes (reactor, sensors etc).
I think he needs more extinguishers around there to put out fires in time to stop the ammo factory blowing.
Also, moving the factories 1 tile to the side will give more time to put out fires in them - they took less damage when the launcher exploded when they weren't directly in line with it.
@@nommy8599 Yah. I just added a single armor block between the loader and ammo factory. increased ammo reload time but not significantly.
i would like to feed the algorithm and also let you know that i'm still loving this series very much!
WWII study on how to armor long range bombers to ensure more of them would survive to return to base.
They started recording holes made by bullets, cannon shells, and flak shrapnel. The engineers were going to armor the parts of the bombers with the most damage taken. An Airforce officer (I think, had trouble finding the references on this). Looked at the schematics of their planned armor and said something that seemed counterintuitive to many but was in fact a reality) he said "you have to armor the parts of the plain that don't have all the holes" he got the typical objections you'll find in system design. The people making the decisions don't have hands-on real world experience with flying planes under fire.
The genius of this was he knew that the planes that never made it back had been shot in the areas that surviving planes had the least damage. The planes that never returned had some vital system destroyed by enemy fire and those planes never returned.
Just an armor philosophy to think of when designing a craft for survivability. Take information from prior fights and rearrange your armor to the parts of the ship that when destroyed cause severe systems failure.
cosmoteer also taking place in the dune universe. hyper fuel is blue. so is spice. ergo: hyperfuel = spice. it must flow.
lol, love this idea.
You can just hit your assigned rotate button to aim more accurate with your railguns during combat.
36:40 - You just hit one ship through the other ship xD
Two thumbs up! Great video. Thanks!
34:10 hiiaaaaaa baby nukeeerrr! so cuteee! lol
Side thought... could take one of those Onrush ships you only popped the cockpits off and convert it into that tractor beam ship you were talking about.
because of the AOE type explosion of nukes, distance is the best armor, by using subframe to make spacing then doing armor layers it protects nicely from nukes.
I've been finding that a lot of people deploy missile launchers "wrong". They like to stack them at the front of the ship with all the other fancy weapons and just "frontal assault" everything. I have a single giant laser crystal array that fires out the front and it's my primary means of attack. However, utilizing it (like your railguns) means I need to constantly shift position of my ship, turn it to new targets, and faster ships can get a lot of damage in (or even hit me from behind). Swarms of ships quickly become a problem, especially mid-game to late-game.
I adopted missiles after seeing how they were used against me and imagining how effective I could make them.
Here's the "best" way I've found to deploy missile launchers:
Put them on your broadsides facing outward. Preferably behind "wings" like you have there on your ship. The missiles will fire outward (even when not directly in line of sight of an enemy... they can hit anything within range, provided nothing is in the way) and then have to "turn" inward to hit any enemies in front of you. This seems ineffecient until you take a few factors into account.
1. Very few ships in the game have "defenses on the sides" of their ships. A lot of them are built the same as most players. Front heavy, everything facing front, everything focused out the front. Your ship even suffers this issue. The armor on the sides is woefully thin and exposes quite a lot of vulnerable parts of your ship. Now, you do have point defenses, which would help you considerably, but since my ship would be taxing those pretty heavily in terms of energy usage, you'll be hard pressed to keep them online for long. Just based on your ship design in this video, your crew would have to choose between keeping the shields online or the point defenses running. So, with my missiles flying in from the sides or back of your ship, they're assaulting minimally defended locations. The missiles will curl back in to strike ships on the sides or the back with regular frequency.
2. Missiles that miss hitting the sides of your ship will land in the back of your ship. So, I'm typically guaranteed to take out engines or reactors that players like to shove back there (and the AI loves to shove back there a lot).
So, here's how my ship design typically works.
1. I engage at long range with the Ion Beam. This quickly overwhelms very large ships or stations.
2. I have a team of twenty launchers (10 to a side) for missiles. 2 EMP per side, 2 Nuclear per side, 6 Standard per side. The launch at ABOUT the same range my Ion cannon does. They fire in very regular intervals during a fight and typically overwhelm Point Defenses on most AI controlled ships very quickly. The first 5 or 6 volleys may not get through, but I'm loaded with a bajillion missiles (okay, that's pretty much my entire cargo all over my ship, is just missiles, no room for salvage, I have other specialized ships for that) that will constantly fire. Standard missiles fire out first and often, hitting the sides or rear of any ship I'm engaging. EMP missiles typically get through after that and further shut down shielding and point defenses. This typically allows the nukes through to make short work of most ships. The missiles are also fantastic defense against "ship swarms" or even "faster ships" as they're REALLY not defended on the sides or rear and the missiles can target them no matter where they are in relation to me.
3. The launchers are never in any danger of "being destroyed" since they're on the sides of my ship and hidden behind "wings" that make them difficult for enemy ships to target.
4. I have dedicated crew to doing very specific tasks on board the ship and are stationed in "necessary" areas. I have "Weapons Officers (blue)" who's only job is to sit on my weapons. They do nothing else. Their bunks can be placed ANYWHERE on my ship as a result. They need to traverse nowhere, at any time. They man the guns and keep the guns active at all times. I have "Pilots (green)". They serve the exact same purpose as the blue guys. They only pilot my ship. They man the Bridge and the radar unit and nothing else. They go nowhere, they do nothing. Their bunks can be placed anywhere as well, since "travel time" doesn't matter to them either. I've got "Engineers (yellow)". Their job is to reload guns, haul stuff across the ship, power systems, etcetera. Most of them are placed in critical areas in very large number in order to keep everything functioning 100% with no lag time. These guys make up about 90% of my crew (my ship requires CLOSE to 300 crew to operate). Finally, I have the "Red Shirts (red)". They do a mix of every job on the ship to average priority settings. They fill in where needed, they do mining, etcetera. They "pick up the slack" anywhere it's needed. I can effectively salvage ships at the same time I am in a gunfight because of my Red Shirts. So, no matter how much incoming fire I'm taking, my ship is running at basically 100% efficiency. What kills me is better designed ships or superior strategy, and not "lack of uptime". What kills most of my enemies is "lack of uptime" since my ship is basically designed to run your energy reserves low and then kill you while all defenses are offline.
There are very few ships that stand up to my current design and I've been tinkering with the idea of adding railguns to my "wings" for taking out the larger stations more quickly. My defenses stand up to most assaults (and I've really only got a bunch of plating in sensitive areas and a few shields around the thrusters at the back and in front of my ion beam channel to keep that weapon online) and my offensive options ensure I win pretty much every fight, even if they knock my ion cannon, shields, and thrusters offline. An enemy would have to destroy at least 67% of my ship to put me out of the fight at all. I've even got minor "interior thrusters" to keep the thing able to move should I suffer catastrophic damage and need to "limp to a base" (with a secondary bridge near them for the same purpose)
So, anyway, a lot of people deploy "missiles" incorrectly, I've noticed. You want to sort of deploy them the same way a submarine in real life would. Starboard torpedos to cripple sides and backs of ships while they weather your frontal assault. Unless you're 100% efficient with all your point defenses, then some of them will get through and destroy those point defenses, which leaves you with no answer to the barrage. Even then, if more missiles are fired than point defenses exist, you've already lost the fight. Flak Cannons would work better in those situations, but then you need to dedicate crew to those stations and those leave larger "no defense" holes once destroyed.
Great episode as always Aavak!
Building up a bit of a dreadnought for yourself, eh?
Though, I think it might be funny to build a squadron of fighter-type craft and name them after your ferrets.
Very nice pace! I support your decisions!
you should work on the Hercules at some point to be able to take even more resources with it and being able at some point to be able to drag the most rich resources near the sun to safer space to collect it! Another episode well done!
The Scarab's somewhat _insane._ I wait for a decent fight with interest!
Next phase: How to make your ship beautiful and efficient
Use a tractor beam to throw friendly stations or ships into the sun and grab the scrap without fear of negative reputation
"You won't find many hypercoils just from salvage" Of course not with the way you blow up all of the ship's important parts before actually disabling it prior to the current build (and even the current build can too)! You only get resources from what you are actually salvaging, so if all you leave behind is a husk of armor and corridors you're only getting steel plates!
You'll still get some of the more important resources. They're just scattered down the debris trail, instead of a neat pile.
@@asureaskie Far far less, if any, since most of the resources are just outright destroyed and it's usually just a trail of coils and steel plates, unless you popped a storage space in a non-explosive manner.
Disruptor and nuke fighters, I think the small swarm has proven they could work… and large Shields are the flaws of nukes while they are up, but are very vulnerable to nukes while down.
Also the fire ant need close in weapons… maybe allow the point defence to fire on anything in range.
Wait until you see the nuke salvo ship..... 20 or so nukes all dropped in your lap at once. Endgame ships are real monsters, one even looks and cuts like a lightsaber. :)
You could probably put the missiles onto the scarab and move all the crew from the fireant and use a single combat ship with higher efficiency than the two.
Very smooth timey, wimey thing.
That pairing is scary good!
Fire Ant's derpy movements, look at combat orientation (did you change it from broadside to claymore mine), and check on your thruster types, number, and placement. Even just a few of the smallest thrusters up on/near the bow would help.
Hi Avak, I have some advice that might help you:
1- Formations are absolutely terrible for combat. They work well for travel from point A to point B. When any one ship in the formation is adjusting its thrust, everyone will have to match it. The thrust of the slowest ships overrides all others. Meaning if your ships can go 80, and one of them is adjusting at 30, all of them will slow down to a crawl to match it.
2- Any engines connected to an engine room should have their doors removed unless you need crew to travel through them. The engine room charges them, and this will prevent fires from spreading past the engines should they ever catch on fire.
3- you are not taking advantage of your railguns' range. They can fire at 600 meters, but most of the time you're engaging at 450 meters or so, which allows the enemy missile ships to get some shots at you. When you set your attack defaults you can see the lines for the rails, and they indicate the range. I've noticed that for most opponents they are basically at the 2/3rds point of the range, you just need the tip of those lines to extend a bit past the enemy for maximum penetration.
4- This one is more of a style choice, but you can use the R key to rotate your ships. It works very well when you're using your railguns since you won't have to zoom out every time you want to rotate your ship
5- I run a fleet of ships and my combat ships always travel in a spread out formation so that when we run into a target, I can break the formation off, and click the target for them to start flanking it and hitting it from all angles. Nothing survives 20 rail guns hitting it from multiple angles.
Re: 2, doors to the engines allows crew to bring extinguishers in and put out the fires.
@@KainYusanagi It's cheaper and safer to just lose the engine than risk losing the engine room with it. Doors allow fires to spread to adjacent modules, which can put even more of the crew at risk.
@@iraqiwalker1436 Most hits to engine clusters with his designs are due to stray missiles that managed to somehow weave through his defenses, not because he's in a fail state where more shots are coming through and he's boned. The loss of the engines disabling his mobility (especially when it's his primary thrust) is far greater a problem than the potential for fire spreading through the engine room.
@@KainYusanagi That's actually even more of a reason to remove the doors. Losing one engine is better than risking the rest of the cluster, and considering his engine count, one lost is not a problem.
got to love the drive by nuking the one ship attempted
Does St. Algorithmus know you have a Tardis???
Ok, yeah, the small reactor trick is great for optimizing reload time, but it is absolutely catastrophic should your shields go down and ANY amount of damage gets through to the rails.
If those go, every reactor detonates too and boom, your entire ship is gone.
I tested the layout he's using, and the reactors didn't chain explode if one blew up, but there was another issue.
The launcher explosion started fires in the factories which weren't always put out in time causing a chain explosion into that reactor down there which is pretty bad.
I think some extra extinguishers near the factories and reactor would help a lot, and also moving the factories 1 tile to the side either way so they're not directly in line with the rails will reduce the damage they take from launcher explosion and give his guys more time to put out fire in them. I kind of like the risk though xD
EMP missiles and raiguns, EMP missile have a much longer range that HE missiles and can take a super shield down with one hit.
Emp spam boat! Naptime stick
@31:42 insert curb your enthusiasm theme
Ah, 8472. The borg...honestly? This feels more like good Ole Creeper world. This feels almost like the space version of Creeper world, particularly fleet I think it was called
Should've kept the frontal supershields for the nuke protection.
My first and main attack ship is a 4 engine drone shaped armed with 14 accelerator Railgun
A Speed demon with a penchant for sniping and assassination
Not a lot of battle endurance tho
Amazing Vid again. I would love to copy this design, any chance you have a video, maybe the after dark channel on how you allocate crew and bunks etc. Cheers.
You know considering what we saw before with the smaller ships I really do wish there was some proper support in the game for carrier type ships. I realize you can sort of just build a mother ship and have all of it's fleet surround it but it would be cool to have resupply arms and docking stations. Not very useful in your current run, but it'd be a great challenge to see just how compact you could build functional fighters in this game in order to really surround and attack your target from all angles.
Docking system are not in the game yet, but are in the works
hopefully they add docking clamps or something eventually so you can live out your multi vector assault dreams without relying on the enemy detonating your railguns
with the scarab it may be worth considering swapping its ions out for more railguns, make it your mid range rail fanner entirely and having another ship inherit its ions for a purely close range brawling role. Or vice versa, returning the scarab to its previous brawler role and transfering the rails to a dedicated 30 long beast.
I say this mainly because at the moment it is very much a one or the other, you only really bring the ions into play if you encounter shielding the 2 rails can't penetrate and once that happens its mostly ions doing any work (or actually most encounters this has happened the fireant has been the one to get the kill in the end)
I actually really want docking to be a thing. I hate having to manually transfer munitions to my non-storage ships. If the fighters could dock into my mothership, automatically resupply and then detach! Chef's kiss.
Or as you've mentioned, voltron my ships or unvoltron them without explosives
TFW you're writing a comment about the Fire Ant's attack default and Mr. Aavak fixes it as you're typing lol
8:15 I knew he was a Star Trek geek.
"onrush is not a good counter for the scarab" To be fair. there isn't much at this level that can stand up to a proper rail boat. Even the pokemon evolution of the onrush, the onslaught. Isn't alot more durable.
Is it just me, or are two point defense guns in the Scarab's 'wings' not accessible due to a shield emitter being in their way?
Also, I know it doesnt matter, but since the Scarab flipped its 'front' why not likewise turn the bridges around to face properly? :P
Forgive me if this has already been discussed and I just missed it. If you do an angled ship, can you produce a longer pipe for your rail guns? Hypotenuse of a right triangle and all that.
Theoretically maybe, and I think there's one of the pirate designs that basically does this. But it sacrifices a lot of defensive power on whichever side has the rails and there's little reason not to finish the rectangle and put the rails down the middle.
One of the issuse with the fireant is your trying to position it in realation with the enemy ship but forgetting that the enemy ship is moveing resulting on most of the time the fireants salvos missing most of the time the enemys already dead in tge water by the time the fireants in position
Millions of voices screaming in terror, then they fell silent.
You could start dabbling with the factions. Basically you'll have one of them as an enemy then, from what I've seen. So more to kill and AFAIK more chances for additional crew ?
Is it just me or did the whole reversal of the main guns and forwards thrusters turn the Scarab from an attack cruiser to a defensive sniper?
It kills just fine, but it has trouble keeping up with an enemy that runs away.
And as a first strike vessel the fact it has to turn around, setting up ambushes, that does seem to me to waste a lot of time.
And with the massive range of the railguns the former main guns comes into play less often.
Could it be an idea to split up the main weapon platforms into two more focused ships? A heavily armoured frontline ion beam cruiser and a long range sniper frigate? Like Scarab sniper frigate and Mantis ion cruiser?
Yeah, splitting ship roles would seem to make a lot of sense.
This is what I ended up doing. I have two dedicated 3x rail ships and one super heavily shielded laser/deck cannon brawler.
I love the rails, but the brawler is by far the most fun, and challenging 😁
40:00. Was I the only one who wanted him to just slice that ship in half?
yey! fighting episode!
Is it just me or does the scarabs silluete remind anyone else of the blue sea dragon? Without the tail obviously
create a fleet of small ships to defend the 2 motherships.
Why don’t I have any of those controls on my hot bar? Like weapon firing or I’m even missing ‘controlling’ my tractor beam to push and pull
So, railguns are SO Overpowered when flanking an enemy.... Could you make a nimble ship (...or PAIR of ships) designed to flank an enemy and fire rail guns into it's sides?
What if the ship(s) had railguns at either 45deg or 90deg angle, compared to it's strongest direction of motion. ....so.... literally built like a wooden ship-of-the-line vessel =D
Might that be as epic as I'm imagining?? ^.^
You could call the class of vessel "The Flanking Hotdog" since it might actually be wider than it is long ^.^
But don't forget to consider building the direction of travel at a 45deg angle from the rail guns. But your intuition would be better for judging that possibility.
....!!!!!!!!! O.O IDEA! Set the rail guns on a "backward" 45deg angle, so that you fly past something and just bop it in the rear as you go by!
Oh, and with any of these, you can specify a particular target and it'll be sure to get a shot! =)
It seems like this would be best as support craft. Or as twins. In any case, best if these enemies that have 1 strongest facing defensive direction have to choose to focus on something else and thus be forced to give the opportunity to be flanked!