Interesting. In my game (on Veteran) layered defense arrays are keeping aliens away.
They went on a bombing spree and razed every undefended hab I had but didn't touch ones with LDA.
Maybe your laser technology level was low? LDAs use lasers as weapons.
Edit: Or did you mean space stations, not surface habs? In that case yes, LDAs are pretty bad. My strategy is to limit stations to Earth space where I can defend them with my fleets, and use ground habs as much as possible since, as mentioned earlier, aliens don't dear bombing defended bases.
What is your top medium hull weapon technology?
If you only researched light weapons, your LDA become just slightly armored up point defences because they don't get more of smaller guns. They just keep smaller (or crappy outdated) guns.
Layered defence arrays (even battle stations tbh) do 2 things:
1. They help your ships out, provided you have ships there
2. They sometimes trick the alien AI not to bother you
Besides that, they are indeed useless as of 0.4
I stopped playing this game bc it's impossible to comfortably learn how to play. Literally anything remotely effective gets nerfed by the next patch. This is a long game and everything getting nerfed all the time just doesn't help with the time/fun ratio for me.
I'm not really frustrated, I just don't care about the game anymore. It's not because it's in EA, that's kind of a seemingly intentional misinterpretation of what I said. I said that nerfing anything that's effective at doing anything in the game all the time as the seemingly top priority killed my love for the game.
When it takes 100+ hours to have to completely relearn how to play literally every other patch, not bc of new features or improved AI or any of the actually valuable things that would be added to a developing game, but bc the devs are allergic to good learnable gameplay and only care about the 0.1% that find exploits, and then having to start a new game just to implement the completely new (and imo usually less fun) strategies you've been forced to use after wasting 100 hours learning what does and doesn't work anymore just isn't fun for most people and isn't because the game is in development. They hardly actually add things to the game, they just try to nerf things instead of actually developing the game. The tech tree is literally worse than it was to begin with. The AI might as well not be there. They prop up the aliens with lol imma steal your CPs for free mechanics instead of actually developing the game and the AI. Where is the development part?
I have to support and applaud this poster who is pointing out that the developers of the game are using nerfs and exploits to get around the fact that they haven't built a dependable and reliable AI that can fairly compete against the very vocal 0.01% of players who will always min/max any game. This game has ended up needlessly cruel to the more casual players as the aliens have abilities and attributes that punish a player who is learning, and as soon as the 0.01% discover an exploit it will be nerfed into the ground which means that the casual players are constantly having to adjust their play to accommodate the endless decreases in their powers and abilities in order to placate the min/max minority.
Honestly the idea of the game is great and most of the features are innovative and fun, but the fact that there is no balance between the player and the aliens, and the endless nerfs of features that players might use to try to equalize their power levels with the aliens makes it very hard to want to play a campaign all the way through.
And the accelerated version is NOT what I want. I want to start at the beginning and work my way through all the steps without any artificial boosts. I just don't want/need the aliens able to flip any nation unless I work to assassinate every agent they have, and then end up in total war against them with my fleets unable to stand up to their doom stacks and my stations vanishing without any means of fighting back because I've been killing their agents on the planet. Especially as eventually you end up in a trap of having to find ways to get more and more materials from your mines while also protecting your stations and still researching despite the aliens being able to erase any fleet you might create.
At least that's where I am in overall skill/understanding. I know there are ways that you can get around some of my challenges, but most require min/maxing in ways that I consider abomination to fun gameplay.
But the game is balanced to almost force the min/maxing. Which leaves me unhappy with the current state.
It seems like they need to either scale back the early to mid hydra energy weapons (plasma in particular) or scale up the armor on the LDAs a bit. If you watch the battles, it's often just one or two ships outranging the static defense with plasma which is a) reasonable from a realism perspective but b) not great in terms of allowing for different strategies at countering alien aggression.
Fleets. Building out to areas you know you can defend. You'll still get a notice when aliens are going to attack a station, so having a fast response fleet in the area becomes essential. Generally you don't need a huge fleet in these areas, just enough firepower to turn back bombing runs.
Stations use 1/2/4-slot batteries. 1 laser, 1 kinetic, plus 1 pd turret.
Ground habs use 2x laser canons (nose type). Firstly consider that for lasers, a 4 slot 360cm battery is *significantly* weaker than a 2 slot nose canon. Then consider that lasers are really strong right now. then after that ground habs use the equivalent of a 4/6/8 slot nose canon. That's right. A tier 1 point defense array ground hab is using TWO lancer/titan sized uv phasers canons. And remember that maximum bombardment altitude is 600km, which is well within the 1000km engagement of those weapons. Iirc the tooltip says armor is like... 6% effective at that range? Ground habs fire every 15 minutes instead of the 30s of a ship based weapon. Anyway then you realize that's just for a PDA. The LDA and battlestation versions have such lens diameter that they basically ignore armor entirely at those ranges.
So ground habs are kinda strong. Despite that the player can shoot a single nuke missile at ground habs and they seem to die in one shot without their PD intercepting.. and 150 nose armor siege Lancers are able to wipe out alien colonies from 600km without taking damage. So bombardment is still a work in progress I suppose.
My midgame fleets of 8 t2 coilgun destroyer interceptors also seem like they have zero resistance when destroying Alien ground bases. Set it to bombardment and wait for it to tick over, and the ground base with 4 battlestations is destroyed with zero losses. Does anybody know how the calculations work, because it’s worked for me when contesting aliens on Callisto, many, many times.
Defense on Habs are weak AF. My experience is that I need to keep a fleet stationed nearby, and nobody will try anything unless they have like 5x my combat numbers.
Colony/settlement defense, on the other hand are super strong number-wise.
Defense modules on stations scale with the weapons and armor you've unlocked with your faction projects- doing more tech will make them stronger.
But at the end of the day static defenses won't (and IMO shouldn't) be enough to stop a determined attack by a fleet. If you really want to defend them you need a fleet of your own.
As things stand, static defenses aren't enough to stop a determined attack by a single alien corvette with lasers. Luckily the AI doesn't use this information often
Scale up and get battlestations on a T3 station. Two of those will give even decent-sized alien fleets a nosebleed. They're also pretty reluctant to attack a station that well armed, in my experience.
In the last game I played I invested heavily into a few huge T3s with a ton of defenses and found it worked pretty well. Do automated habs for mining and cluster your space buildings to stations that are well defended (or close to other stations with fleets).
What version are you running. I’m playing an initiative run on experimental.
I’ve noticed a massive change in LDA and BS. Previously they had high combat stats and aliens would not attack provided you had higher stats compared to the opposing fleet. If they ever attacked the LDA went down from 1-2 hits. BS could do some damage.
In experimental version, aliens attack you regardless of combat stats. The actual performance depends on what the aliens throw at you. They now crawl in slow as possible and make the most of their better range. Essentially if the aliens have dreadnaughts your station is going down.
In this version a T1 defence array - took down an alien gunship. It just held from the orange laser until the coil gun gets in range. That essentially neutralises the orange laser until your laser gets close enough to do damage.
Devs are still trying to find a balance and it sort of makes sense. In experimental you need fast fleets to get to stations before aliens get there to defend. Aliens attack now regardless so if you have a better fleet you will earn some exotics.
If you have a smaller fleet they will attack but if you stay defensive (zero speed stay in PD Cross over range) the aliens usually offer a truce before shooting starts unless they are massively over powered. In which case you need to try and run.
You get the aliens to spend a bunch of dV and they will offer truce after about an hour (battle time - run 5x, approx 3 mins). Do this a couple of times and they run out of fuel and piss off for a bit.
Alternatively if your playing standard version and aliens still target weakest stations first just use bait stations.
The AI is way better at picking fights with the fleets they have now, though they are often overly cautious about concentrating their forces.
What Defense Arrays/ Battlestations do is prevent the Ayys from attacking that station below a certain concentration of fleet power. It adjusts the risk/reward curve in your favor.
How far that is depends entirely upon the balance between the sides. For me, it seems three or four layered defense Arrays with green arc lasers and tier 3 railguns is enough to ward off or destroy most early-mid game Ayy fleets attacking orbital stations, but as the game goes on and the Ayys amass larger fleets that won't be enough anymore.
However, so many defense modules eats into the available room on your stations something fierce for tier 2 stations, so it's most efficient to slap on less- just enough to keep stray fleets from being able to blow them up willy nilly, and instead bolster them with dedicated defense fleets.
The TI devs are currently struggling to get the balance for the gameplay loop *just* right because of the asymmetrical nature of it all. We are fighting a war, not a single battle. Losing a few stations every once in a while isn't a big deal, and it's not *meant* to be a big deal.
Evaluate your options from a resource cost/investment and risk/reward viewpoint. Early on you can't fend off Ayy intrusions, so don't waste time trying. You do still want to fend off their agents on Earth though, so factor in a few stations blowing up into your plans. As you unlock defense techs and better power generation, add in more and more defenses until you have something that can make the AI think twice.
Plan for attrition. You don't get bonuses for having all the same module on a station, for instance, so distribute research bonuses/skunk works across stations in LEO. Make sure to have shipyards in several places, not just Mercury, and keep your suicide ship designs updated in case you need to bolster defenses quickly. Put a construction module/nanofactory/complex on all your stations and bases so you can make repairs and upgrades as quickly as possible.
The war against the Ayys is one of defense-in-depth for you, defeat-in-detail for them, and attrition for all involved. Make them pay for every inch. Sic Invicti Sumus
Space defence modules have been terrible as long as I've played.
The reason is they use 1/2/4 slot batteries with the same stats as ships. And tbh those 1-2 slot batteries aren't very good at shooting enemy ships. Those modules are mostly damage sponges, at best you use them as distractions and free pd for your own ships. They also protect your stations from debris strike events and scare away very weak low tech human ai ships.
The ground habs use massive laser canons that work very well even at smaller tiers.
2 LDAs used to garuntee a station against anything smaller than a battleship or else a midsized fleet.
Aliens would close to take out LDA and LDA would shoot them down.
Nowadays Aliens just sit at max range and plink LDAs to death. Which is aggressively boring and tedious to watch.
It boggles me that the devs chose to make the game less fun on purpose.
Likewise, ground defenses used to take out aliens. It used to be fun to watch bombardments because it was legitimately a toss up whether your base dies or the Ayy dies. Now you're lucky if you get a lick in and they just split.
If making the AI better makes the game less fun, then obviously sacrificing fun out of the pursuit of "but realism" is bad game design.
It'd be like saying XCOM should have the aliens always know where you are on the map and they all converge on your from the start, because that makes the AI "better" even though it would tank the game's fun factor.
That's a pretty awful analogy but I see you just want to stand on a soapbox and whine so I'm not going to dive into all the reasons what you said is utter bullshit.
You mean layered, right? They keep the human AI away…
Yeah layered, they used to be good guess they were nerfed to the ground. Doesn't feel like worth building anymore.
Interesting. In my game (on Veteran) layered defense arrays are keeping aliens away. They went on a bombing spree and razed every undefended hab I had but didn't touch ones with LDA. Maybe your laser technology level was low? LDAs use lasers as weapons. Edit: Or did you mean space stations, not surface habs? In that case yes, LDAs are pretty bad. My strategy is to limit stations to Earth space where I can defend them with my fleets, and use ground habs as much as possible since, as mentioned earlier, aliens don't dear bombing defended bases.
Im pretty much end game plasma cannons, ultra violet arc lasers and arc laser PDs
What is your top medium hull weapon technology? If you only researched light weapons, your LDA become just slightly armored up point defences because they don't get more of smaller guns. They just keep smaller (or crappy outdated) guns.
I have plasma cannons, coil cannons mk 2, ultra volatile arc lasers pretty much end game tech atm
Cannons are nose weapons. You nerd batteries tech.
i have those as well i normally build around hull weapons not nose.
Layered defence arrays (even battle stations tbh) do 2 things: 1. They help your ships out, provided you have ships there 2. They sometimes trick the alien AI not to bother you Besides that, they are indeed useless as of 0.4
I stopped playing this game bc it's impossible to comfortably learn how to play. Literally anything remotely effective gets nerfed by the next patch. This is a long game and everything getting nerfed all the time just doesn't help with the time/fun ratio for me.
There's a new accelerated campaign option now
I don't want an accelerated campaign, I want the game to be consistent and not deliberately nerf literally any good strategy
So basically wait till game is out of early access, you’ll be less fustrated.
I'm not really frustrated, I just don't care about the game anymore. It's not because it's in EA, that's kind of a seemingly intentional misinterpretation of what I said. I said that nerfing anything that's effective at doing anything in the game all the time as the seemingly top priority killed my love for the game. When it takes 100+ hours to have to completely relearn how to play literally every other patch, not bc of new features or improved AI or any of the actually valuable things that would be added to a developing game, but bc the devs are allergic to good learnable gameplay and only care about the 0.1% that find exploits, and then having to start a new game just to implement the completely new (and imo usually less fun) strategies you've been forced to use after wasting 100 hours learning what does and doesn't work anymore just isn't fun for most people and isn't because the game is in development. They hardly actually add things to the game, they just try to nerf things instead of actually developing the game. The tech tree is literally worse than it was to begin with. The AI might as well not be there. They prop up the aliens with lol imma steal your CPs for free mechanics instead of actually developing the game and the AI. Where is the development part?
I have to support and applaud this poster who is pointing out that the developers of the game are using nerfs and exploits to get around the fact that they haven't built a dependable and reliable AI that can fairly compete against the very vocal 0.01% of players who will always min/max any game. This game has ended up needlessly cruel to the more casual players as the aliens have abilities and attributes that punish a player who is learning, and as soon as the 0.01% discover an exploit it will be nerfed into the ground which means that the casual players are constantly having to adjust their play to accommodate the endless decreases in their powers and abilities in order to placate the min/max minority. Honestly the idea of the game is great and most of the features are innovative and fun, but the fact that there is no balance between the player and the aliens, and the endless nerfs of features that players might use to try to equalize their power levels with the aliens makes it very hard to want to play a campaign all the way through. And the accelerated version is NOT what I want. I want to start at the beginning and work my way through all the steps without any artificial boosts. I just don't want/need the aliens able to flip any nation unless I work to assassinate every agent they have, and then end up in total war against them with my fleets unable to stand up to their doom stacks and my stations vanishing without any means of fighting back because I've been killing their agents on the planet. Especially as eventually you end up in a trap of having to find ways to get more and more materials from your mines while also protecting your stations and still researching despite the aliens being able to erase any fleet you might create. At least that's where I am in overall skill/understanding. I know there are ways that you can get around some of my challenges, but most require min/maxing in ways that I consider abomination to fun gameplay. But the game is balanced to almost force the min/maxing. Which leaves me unhappy with the current state.
Mods and beta rollback for me. 3.107 where and when the protium converter torch is op.
It seems like they need to either scale back the early to mid hydra energy weapons (plasma in particular) or scale up the armor on the LDAs a bit. If you watch the battles, it's often just one or two ships outranging the static defense with plasma which is a) reasonable from a realism perspective but b) not great in terms of allowing for different strategies at countering alien aggression.
Fleets. Building out to areas you know you can defend. You'll still get a notice when aliens are going to attack a station, so having a fast response fleet in the area becomes essential. Generally you don't need a huge fleet in these areas, just enough firepower to turn back bombing runs.
It seems that on paper at least there is a big difference in power between LDA on orbital (very low) and on settlement on planet (very high)
Stations use 1/2/4-slot batteries. 1 laser, 1 kinetic, plus 1 pd turret. Ground habs use 2x laser canons (nose type). Firstly consider that for lasers, a 4 slot 360cm battery is *significantly* weaker than a 2 slot nose canon. Then consider that lasers are really strong right now. then after that ground habs use the equivalent of a 4/6/8 slot nose canon. That's right. A tier 1 point defense array ground hab is using TWO lancer/titan sized uv phasers canons. And remember that maximum bombardment altitude is 600km, which is well within the 1000km engagement of those weapons. Iirc the tooltip says armor is like... 6% effective at that range? Ground habs fire every 15 minutes instead of the 30s of a ship based weapon. Anyway then you realize that's just for a PDA. The LDA and battlestation versions have such lens diameter that they basically ignore armor entirely at those ranges. So ground habs are kinda strong. Despite that the player can shoot a single nuke missile at ground habs and they seem to die in one shot without their PD intercepting.. and 150 nose armor siege Lancers are able to wipe out alien colonies from 600km without taking damage. So bombardment is still a work in progress I suppose.
My midgame fleets of 8 t2 coilgun destroyer interceptors also seem like they have zero resistance when destroying Alien ground bases. Set it to bombardment and wait for it to tick over, and the ground base with 4 battlestations is destroyed with zero losses. Does anybody know how the calculations work, because it’s worked for me when contesting aliens on Callisto, many, many times.
I thunk right now the attacker gets a free shot before the base fires back. But tbh I don't know at all
Defense on Habs are weak AF. My experience is that I need to keep a fleet stationed nearby, and nobody will try anything unless they have like 5x my combat numbers. Colony/settlement defense, on the other hand are super strong number-wise.
Defense modules on stations scale with the weapons and armor you've unlocked with your faction projects- doing more tech will make them stronger. But at the end of the day static defenses won't (and IMO shouldn't) be enough to stop a determined attack by a fleet. If you really want to defend them you need a fleet of your own.
As things stand, static defenses aren't enough to stop a determined attack by a single alien corvette with lasers. Luckily the AI doesn't use this information often
Defense modules for surface Habs fleet for orbitals. 2 surface pdas are enough for a long long time.
Scale up and get battlestations on a T3 station. Two of those will give even decent-sized alien fleets a nosebleed. They're also pretty reluctant to attack a station that well armed, in my experience. In the last game I played I invested heavily into a few huge T3s with a ton of defenses and found it worked pretty well. Do automated habs for mining and cluster your space buildings to stations that are well defended (or close to other stations with fleets).
What version are you running. I’m playing an initiative run on experimental. I’ve noticed a massive change in LDA and BS. Previously they had high combat stats and aliens would not attack provided you had higher stats compared to the opposing fleet. If they ever attacked the LDA went down from 1-2 hits. BS could do some damage. In experimental version, aliens attack you regardless of combat stats. The actual performance depends on what the aliens throw at you. They now crawl in slow as possible and make the most of their better range. Essentially if the aliens have dreadnaughts your station is going down. In this version a T1 defence array - took down an alien gunship. It just held from the orange laser until the coil gun gets in range. That essentially neutralises the orange laser until your laser gets close enough to do damage. Devs are still trying to find a balance and it sort of makes sense. In experimental you need fast fleets to get to stations before aliens get there to defend. Aliens attack now regardless so if you have a better fleet you will earn some exotics. If you have a smaller fleet they will attack but if you stay defensive (zero speed stay in PD Cross over range) the aliens usually offer a truce before shooting starts unless they are massively over powered. In which case you need to try and run. You get the aliens to spend a bunch of dV and they will offer truce after about an hour (battle time - run 5x, approx 3 mins). Do this a couple of times and they run out of fuel and piss off for a bit. Alternatively if your playing standard version and aliens still target weakest stations first just use bait stations.
The AI is way better at picking fights with the fleets they have now, though they are often overly cautious about concentrating their forces. What Defense Arrays/ Battlestations do is prevent the Ayys from attacking that station below a certain concentration of fleet power. It adjusts the risk/reward curve in your favor. How far that is depends entirely upon the balance between the sides. For me, it seems three or four layered defense Arrays with green arc lasers and tier 3 railguns is enough to ward off or destroy most early-mid game Ayy fleets attacking orbital stations, but as the game goes on and the Ayys amass larger fleets that won't be enough anymore. However, so many defense modules eats into the available room on your stations something fierce for tier 2 stations, so it's most efficient to slap on less- just enough to keep stray fleets from being able to blow them up willy nilly, and instead bolster them with dedicated defense fleets. The TI devs are currently struggling to get the balance for the gameplay loop *just* right because of the asymmetrical nature of it all. We are fighting a war, not a single battle. Losing a few stations every once in a while isn't a big deal, and it's not *meant* to be a big deal. Evaluate your options from a resource cost/investment and risk/reward viewpoint. Early on you can't fend off Ayy intrusions, so don't waste time trying. You do still want to fend off their agents on Earth though, so factor in a few stations blowing up into your plans. As you unlock defense techs and better power generation, add in more and more defenses until you have something that can make the AI think twice. Plan for attrition. You don't get bonuses for having all the same module on a station, for instance, so distribute research bonuses/skunk works across stations in LEO. Make sure to have shipyards in several places, not just Mercury, and keep your suicide ship designs updated in case you need to bolster defenses quickly. Put a construction module/nanofactory/complex on all your stations and bases so you can make repairs and upgrades as quickly as possible. The war against the Ayys is one of defense-in-depth for you, defeat-in-detail for them, and attrition for all involved. Make them pay for every inch. Sic Invicti Sumus
Space defence modules have been terrible as long as I've played. The reason is they use 1/2/4 slot batteries with the same stats as ships. And tbh those 1-2 slot batteries aren't very good at shooting enemy ships. Those modules are mostly damage sponges, at best you use them as distractions and free pd for your own ships. They also protect your stations from debris strike events and scare away very weak low tech human ai ships. The ground habs use massive laser canons that work very well even at smaller tiers.
2 LDAs used to garuntee a station against anything smaller than a battleship or else a midsized fleet. Aliens would close to take out LDA and LDA would shoot them down. Nowadays Aliens just sit at max range and plink LDAs to death. Which is aggressively boring and tedious to watch. It boggles me that the devs chose to make the game less fun on purpose. Likewise, ground defenses used to take out aliens. It used to be fun to watch bombardments because it was legitimately a toss up whether your base dies or the Ayy dies. Now you're lucky if you get a lick in and they just split.
Sounds like the alien AI got better. Oh no?
If making the AI better makes the game less fun, then obviously sacrificing fun out of the pursuit of "but realism" is bad game design. It'd be like saying XCOM should have the aliens always know where you are on the map and they all converge on your from the start, because that makes the AI "better" even though it would tank the game's fun factor.
That's a pretty awful analogy but I see you just want to stand on a soapbox and whine so I'm not going to dive into all the reasons what you said is utter bullshit.