It’s a neat little game, but I’m wondering what to do about the “supply limit” missions. They’re a complete pain in the ass to set up for, because you have limits on literally every module in the game. If you click on the button, it tells you what the limits are, but then what? Do you write all that shit down, and then go design your ships especially for that mission? If so, wow. How incredibly poorly designed and cumbersome. I note that on the deployment screen, it only tells you that you have too many of some modules, not what they are.
On supply limit battles, I would typically design one ship for each weapon type, name them something like “3 Plasma Cannons,” and get good weapon grouping by mixing ship types rather than making a single good utility design.
I just got it about a month ago. It’s OK for a distraction, but it’s not quite the game I was hoping for.
I wish you could set up custom battles between user-definable ships.
I design ships with a specific purpose (AAA, missile cruiser, beam cruiser, etc) and create battle groups. This seems to be the best way than to create a multi-role ship.
I agree with your brief review. The game is good, but hardly as engrossing as I’d like it to be. Plug it into a 4X game, and you’d have something I couldn’t put down.
I disagree with your battle fleet strategy for most missions. I find that once I lose a specialized defense ship, the rest seem to go down very quickly to whatever that ship was supposed to counter. For example, if my anti-missile ship was destroyed, the rest of my fleet would be torn to shreds by missiles. I found I could go from a sizable lead to losing very quickly when that happened. The only exception I found was my anti fighter ships, which would typically chew through enemy fighters in the first moments of contact then become useless. As a consequence, I tend to put them out front where the quickly encounter fighters, thew them up, and start drawing the fire of the enemy cruisers while my cruisers on the back line remain safe and pummel the enemy.
A tip when designing ships - check the ranges of your weapons to make sure that they overlap, unless you are specifically looking for two different roles. Also check your fire control settings to make sure that the ship stays at the right distance.
Setting the ship AI correctly makes a big difference; I find that cooperative fire is a really good idea.
Don’t forget to put anti-fighter fighter groups in an Escort role in your main battle groups.
Formations are your friend - you may not want to specialize too heavily, but be aware of the ranges at which your ships work best and position them accordingly. Remember that ships in formation will try to stay in formation, so the lead ship determines the distance at which everyone will fight.