StarDestroyer.Net BBS

xammer99 wrote:What is the "Advanced" drive for humans and the other races? Hiver's get the Farcaster which kicks all sorts of ass, but what about the others?

Hivers get Double Gate Capacity (for DD Sized Gates) then the incredible Farcasters.

Liir get Improved Stutter drive which nullifies some of their gravity well penalty, thus simultaneously increasing strategic speed, and tactical maneuverability. Then, they get Flickerdrive, which causes some enemy shots to pass right through the ship while you're maneuvering. It's handy.

Tarkas get IIRC some kind of warp speed improvement, then a tactical warp drive that lets them get a lot more maneuver in.

Humans get Node-Focusing, and Node-Pathing, two upgrades which dramatically increase FTL speed and max range. Node-Pathing Antimatter can cross a 15 LY node in a single turn, I think.

got it on order

damn californication and their new electronic waste act (can't get it mailed to me, must have it FED exed to me)

Nephtys wrote:

xammer99 wrote:What is the "Advanced" drive for humans and the other races? Hiver's get the Farcaster which kicks all sorts of ass, but what about the others?

Hivers get Double Gate Capacity (for DD Sized Gates) then the incredible Farcasters.

Liir get Improved Stutter drive which nullifies some of their gravity well penalty, thus simultaneously increasing strategic speed, and tactical maneuverability. Then, they get Flickerdrive, which causes some enemy shots to pass right through the ship while you're maneuvering. It's handy.

Tarkas get IIRC some kind of warp speed improvement, then a tactical warp drive that lets them get a lot more maneuver in.

Humans get Node-Focusing, and Node-Pathing, two upgrades which dramatically increase FTL speed and max range. Node-Pathing Antimatter can cross a 15 LY node in a single turn, I think.

Damn. Now I'm gonna have to go back and play the others!

Another question,

Is there anyway to do automatic fleet routing? i.e. when something new is contructed have it automatically head towards a system?

xammer99 wrote:Another question,

Is there anyway to do automatic fleet routing? i.e. when something new is contructed have it automatically head towards a system?

I have not seen any form of waypointing OR rallypointing, unfortunately.

--

I've got a question for any of the other SOTS players who've had experience with Hivers: how do I effectively protect my gates? In multiplayer things are painful in general, but even against the AI it is very troublesome. I send forces to a gate to defend it, human fleet rolls in, and the pathetically small group of ships manages to do nothing other than plink my gateship and escape. A victory militarily, but strategically I've just gotten my fleet stranded on a dead world with no gate, and my Armada needs to walk to the nearest gate before it's able to do anything.

This is only an issue with Neutral Worlds, as yet. Those cannot make their own gateships, and the entry location for the enemy is directly adjacent me, making them appear within missle-range of my gate. Should I just abandon the idea of defending neutral worlds? In my most recent game (where I was delivered the crushing blow of never getting Point Defenses, those really should be Core...), the humans would regularly attack my gate network and make a beeline directly for my immobile gateship and blow it to smithereens. I had to keep 2 gateships with every fleet just to avoid getting stranded, and in a small galaxy I do not have a real abundance of gate room anyway.

I'm just having an inordinate amount of trouble trying to set up gates and keep gates from getting blasted into shrapnel by the enemy. This doesn't seem like the way it should be played. Hiver forces move so incredibly slow, even with Antimatter, that any time I save assembling my forces before launching an attack is lost due to the excruciating travel times. Are Hivers really nothing but a defensive brick until they get Farcasters? I don't mind playing defensively at times, but waiting until I get farcasters before striding out seems like a very risky idea and a very boring strategy. Any advice? If worse comes to worse, I may need to start playing Tarka more, but I like the fact that Hiver players are fairly rare in multiplayer.

that annoys me two along with the infamous kill the colony you just started that turn, attacks. AI sending a meteor shower right after the Von Neumanns took out my home defense fleet in early game. etc. I am still trying to figure out how the AI can afford to keep sending 30-60 ship fleets at my forces. nothing like wiping out 75% of a 60 ship trash fleet (not any more because of time limitations,) with say a fleet half that size, and getting another fleet just as big if not bigger the very next turn. (it would be understandable if this was the fuckin Hiver's doing this, but when it's HUMANS or Tarka)

Destroyers are, more or less, popcorn. A reasonably developed world with only low-end industrial tech can squat and shit out half a dozen in a turn...the world I'd pumped up via mining to the point of building a dreadnought in one turn was unmentionable. As to protecting gate ships...if you don't have PD, try to get emitters. If you don't have that, try to tech to PD Phasers, they're a separate tech. If you don't have that, try to get shielding and use cruiser gates. If you have no PD-like weaponry, at least use lasers in the small mounts, they can act as ghetto PD. Also, for your defense fleets, shoot for Wild Weasel destroyers. Sure, they're suicide-rides if you don't have PD, but they'll suck entire battlegroup missile salvos down onto themselves, and away from your gate.

Getting 60 destroyers'll take 8 turns for any industrialized world. DDs are really great deals for garrisons or suicide raids. They cost 1/10th as much as a Cruiser in maintenance, and 1/3rd as much in build cost.

Mine would be much more useful if the Powers That Be who rolled the dice on my randoized tech tree had deigned to give me any variety of torpedo. Alas, I am not one of the fortunate there. Which brings me to my next question--

I've asked Neph about this before, but is there any sort of listing where they tell you what races have what chances at what techs? I like the stripped-down efficency of Hivers, but they seem to have no signature technologies that I can see. I almost always get Leap Mines and Polysilicate Armor (never reflective!) but beyond that I can't see what technologies they are most likely to get. Going down the beam weapon tree only to hit a dead end is really frustrating, and forces me to swing around and backtrack a great deal. It'd be nice to know what I'm always going to get.

And, similarly, how much of my budget should be ships? I do play Hivers because I like the look and feel of their vessels, and also largely because they are odd and many don't enjoy playing as them in Multiplayer, but I'm never quite sure how many ships is too much. I usually don't build enough, and then get rolled by a Human cruiser/dd force of 50+ ships, which my gate network is incapable of deploying in a single turn. So it makes me think that I really need to play not dissimilarly from the Tarka and heavily garrison my borders, keep an extra battlefleet of around maximum gate capacity for use of stacking on-top of those defensive fleets... and then mass everything else into giant clumps for launching beach-head offensives with gates.

And that's my problem often, I need to assemble truly massive fleets in order to secure a gate around an enemy planet, but with fleet that big I'm rarely able to also keep adequate defenses across my borders. It seems like a fourth or a third of my budget being in ship maintaince is what I really need to do, but that's just so crippling for my research, since I also need to green-shift my budget just to buy the things. Feedback?

You'll find that it's far cheaper to station lone Deep Scan destroyers over your worlds. Untl the very late game, you'll have at least two, usually three or four turns warning before an attack force can cross your Deep Scan range, unless an enemy world is hysterically close to yours, and that gives you time to pump multiple turns worth of gate transit through to defend. Also, are you spewing gates all over the place as quickly as poaaible, and researching the second-level gate technology? That helps immensely.

White Haven wrote:You'll find that it's far cheaper to station lone Deep Scan destroyers over your worlds. Untl the very late game, you'll have at least two, usually three or four turns warning before an attack force can cross your Deep Scan range, unless an enemy world is hysterically close to yours, and that gives you time to pump multiple turns worth of gate transit through to defend. Also, are you spewing gates all over the place as quickly as poaaible, and researching the second-level gate technology? That helps immensely.

Even in mid-late game, a human Antimatter ship with the common Node Focusing can cross 10 LY in one turn. There's very often no warning for such an attack.

Nephtys wrote:Even in mid-late game, a human Antimatter ship with the common Node Focusing can cross 10 LY in one turn. There's very often no warning for such an attack.

Sadly true. What I really need, I think, are Deepscan destroyers that can sit out in deep space a bit further from my planets and provide a sort of early warning system that extends farther outwards. I almost never get warning of fleets inbound, but I can tell from where they are moving ships to if a force is approaching me. I usually saw ships headed to a border world, and then next turn they'd gone from being halfway to it to being in combat with my defense teams. Hilariously close, perhaps, but engine technology is perhaps the most important research item in the game, and I need to assume my opponents will avail themselves of it.

I did like the Deepscan ship idea though. I've got gates all over and plenty of gate tech, I'm just having problems advancing my gate network. I wish gates were much harder to take down and put up, they'd be more like... highways rather than your sole transportation function. Set up a gate here, a gate there... know what I mean? Low FTL speeds with a few ultraexpensive gates, and treat the gates as hardened nodeline generators instead of wafer-thin wormholes. Ugh. It just makes me angry that whenever they take a gate down, everything that was there when it got whacked is stranded for at least one turn, and that's only if I have a backup gate. Farcasters aren't just a hiver toy, they really should be available at the beginning of the game in some weaker format, like a 3 LY leap, just to make it less ridiculous to set up a gate network.

I know of no other Empire who can be defeated so easily without ever needing to engage and destroy their forces. Most of what I'm going through is lack of practice, but man, I'm looking for the silver lining! For every advantage the gates give me, I see several exploitable problems.

And any word about Hiver specialty techs? What should I be using as the core of my research?

Casters really ought to fling you 10 LY even if your target destination is 15 LY too. Leave you in deep space, but at least it cuts off several turns of the transit, so your end-game long distance transit is about as fast as a midgame Liir.

For hivers, you've got a great chance at mines and advanced Kinetic stuff (like Neutronium). Hrm, perhaps torps could be good too if you get em.

Picked this up last weekend and am loving it. Has anyone else run into the System Killer yet?

I lost 3 systems (two 8's and a 7) before I could mass enough firepower to take it out. It also blew away two worthless planets that were quite handy as shortcut node points (I'm human, go SolForce!).

I'm really digging the random encounters and some of the unexpected research twists. Theres a certain human research path that can lead to some interesting and costly events later.

I should have re-read the thread before posting, I just saw Nephtys' hint about stopping that monster. Although I dont think I could get anything near that close to it. It was one and two shotting my cruisers with its planet missles. Even my DN's were cut to pieces in moments if they got too close to it.

Sidious wrote:I should have re-read the thread before posting, I just saw Nephtys' hint about stopping that monster. Although I dont think I could get anything near that close to it. It was one and two shotting my cruisers with its planet missles. Even my DN's were cut to pieces in moments if they got too close to it.

The developers hinted that one way to destroy that involves putting some kind of "small expensive explosive device" in its mouth ala the Doomsday device.

Graeme Dice wrote:

Sidious wrote:I should have re-read the thread before posting, I just saw Nephtys' hint about stopping that monster. Although I dont think I could get anything near that close to it. It was one and two shotting my cruisers with its planet missles. Even my DN's were cut to pieces in moments if they got too close to it.

The developers hinted that one way to destroy that involves putting some kind of "small expensive explosive device" in its mouth ala the Doomsday device.

Ooh. I know one thing I suddenly want to try. But only one race can do it...

Okay, I know this is a little bit of Thread Necromancy, bringing this aged casket up from the loamy underfoot of G&C, but I wanted to make a post here rather than start a new one.

I've been modding SOTS quite a bit, and it's made quite a splash on the SOTS boards. I'm hesistant to link, since I don't want a board invasion, but I think it's a huge improvement. Neph helps me test it, and if anyone else still plays this interesting little game, I'd encourage you to check it out.

I'm especially interested in SDN'ers sense of science getting involved. I tried to make a lot of realism changes, like how lase beams now shoot beams instead of pellets, and how particle beams can be reflected by polarized hulls and em fields that now replace the 'reflective hull coatings' nonsense. And a multitude of other changes, it's basically all new weapons and a whole different feel to the game. No more homing discrete plasmoids either. Torpedoes are real torps.

Anyway, check it out HERE. Don't flame anyone plz, theirs is an illogical board, but I like developer feedback and want not to be banished.

cool


Nephtys is a goddess.

It's really a great mod. Makes stuff 10 times better.

Nephtys wrote:It's really a great mod. Makes stuff 10 times better.

Here's Neph and I battling it out in multi. My poor Hivers!

Beam lasers, flak, and battlestar-style ballistics oh my!

Oh yeah, and missiles swerve around now.

That looks so cool! Especially the planet, it looks like you're lighting up a whole continent with your warships.

Ah, too bad my laptop's stuck with integrated graphics or I'd give that a whirl. That and pesky time constraints. I need to win the lottery so I can spend all day playing 4x games .

Brian

niiiiiice

The Yosemite Bear wrote:niiiiiice

Thanks. Those are my graphics, the ones that come with the game are pretty bleh. I'd like to think of them as an improvement, but if I say so on their home boards, the lead dev gets all snippy at me.

Yeah, the devs are a pack of retards. I think the improvement you've made to the game is fantastic. I might even play again.