Astro Galaxy - a realistic space exploration game

Alrighty, then.  I've been suckin' up all the info I can from the Forum.  I've picked, prodded and purloined all the intel I can about how a newb-o-saur can get his feet under him.  And then I ran into my 1st COM mission.

What the hell??

As background, I'm former military -- a couple of times -- and used to teach folks about how to conduct combat.  One of the pearls of wisdom I used to preach is "Don't attack with less than 3:1 odds."  There's lots that goes into that 3:1, it ain't just numbers, but it's a handy rule of thumb.

Have gotten my tail kicked twice on COM ops with 5:1 odds to win and had to re-attack in order to fulfill the contract.

So, t'would appear the devs and I don't share the same book.

What can some of you Monsters of the Cosmos share that will help us clueless li'l critters be more effective when it comes to Combat?

Make sure your shield strength is no less than half of the total enemy power. And max out the combat tech research trees :)

Good stuff, Rostin.  Was my shields that kept me from really ridiculous embarrassment (And, my heartfelt thanks to the Empire of Sargas for those.  It ain't a bad thing to tie up with a Corp that is able to help ya.)  Been puttin' RPs into Combat since escaping SEA school.

What else, y'all?  Purely from an economic standpoint, satisfyin' a COM contract in one shot is a gooood thing.

How do newbs position/outfit themselves the best to achieve that?

Just use marines and shields. Do not use other weapons and do not worry about combat speed (marines always attack last)

Hmm, what's so OP about marines?? :P

They never miss and they can attack every target :)

multiple times also

More solid intel...cool.  The MAU/SHG loadout being a sensible call has been noted in a number of other Forum posts.  Can't argue with success.

Got another question or two, though.  Is there no role for the other weapons systems?  Are the other weapons simply end-game, hey-look-what-I've-got, clutter?

And, just out of curiousity, what attack settings for the MAU (Standard, Find  Weakness...etc.) are more effective?   Make any difference at all or is it hey-diddlediddle-straight-up-the-middle?

Always go standard with MAUs unless you are desperate to end a stalemate with a ship with shields.

Other weapons are useful in PvP, as they attack before marines and can do bonus damage in the case of lasers vs shields and railguns vs armor.

Of course you can always use regular weapons in COM missions if you want :) they just aren't as efficient

Basically all of that. I'm far from a vet in terms of this games combat but having learned a fair bit from my experiences as well as from folks like Raphel, Dadds and Jam I have learned enough to do pretty well for myself.

If you are just starting out then like Rostin said, you just want to use Marines and Shields on your ships, for the reasons previously stated they can attack multiple targets multiple times and they do not miss. Normal weapons such as Vipers, Lasers and Railguns aren't that effective for COM missions because #1 they can and often do miss #2 because most of the time your ship is out numbered and you only have so many shots with those weapons and #3 because the Marine/Shield combo is also pretty much a tank build as the Marines are not only offensive but provide defensive HP as well.

Like Jam I prefer to have some weapons on my COM ships just in case I need to use it for something else and it cuts down time when you want to shift gears from COM's to PvP.

As far as the odds are concerned, whether you win or lose is often determined by a few things. The obvious is how many opponents you have to fight and how strong they are compared to your ship. The not so obvious is what kind of ratios you have on your ships as far as how much of your total power is made up of shields and weapons and then how much of your weapon power is made up of Marines and Firing type weapons. A fairly standard ship build that a lot of folks know is making sure that half of your total ship power is made up of your shields. That results in almost any COM mission that ship could pick up having less total power than your ship has shields most of the time as Rostin mentioned earlier.

You will have to play around with some different setups to figure out what works in which situation. As far as Marines and COM's are concerned I have this advice for you. You should split up your Marine power between 8-16 different Marine Modules. The reason for that is two fold #1 You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket and just put one super powered module in there as Marines now fatigue after each attack so their power will go down with every attack against any enemy ship/station/planetary force. #2 You don't want to spread out your Marine power too much otherwise you require too many attacks with your Marines to take out the enemy and they may get through your shields and start depleting your Marines which might seem cheap to replace at first but when you start needing to replace tens of thousands of them after every battle it quickly gets expensive.

Do keep in mind that is my general load out which also includes 8-14 Vipers depending on what lvl modules I'm working with to hit my power ratios for my ship layout. If you go with full Marine research and load out for your offense then you may require more or less depending on the levels of your tech.

However with my standard load out I have won a battle with 7:16 odds in the enemies favor (which only happened because somebody dropped a COM mission on top of mine, otherwise getting odds like that is pretty much impossible unless you lay down multiple COM's at the same time in the same place of the same type). Others have won battles with far worse odds using things like the Death Rays and other hard to acquire tech.

Anywho that is just my two cents, take it for what you will. You might not want to use my setup but I hope it can at least give you some ideas as to what you may or may not want to do.

Fenix: I do battles with odds like 7:16 all the times without using death rays and it is not multiple missions at the same time like you suggest. Why do you think I power down my ships all the time?

Well I wasn't really thinking about altering the odds after the timer has started but yea that is also another way to get odds like that I suppose lol. My missions on my personal COM ships aren't large enough to really warrant powering down my ships, I do that now and then with the corp ship I have but I don't bother half the time since I'm often away for 3+ days anyway it really won't matter if the timer is 38 hours or 72 hours. I don't imagine a lot of people use death rays seeing as how they are a pain to get, I think Rostin and Raph and maybe some other folks in SPQNR are the only people I can think of that seriously put in effort to get them.

That's precisely why I don't use deathrays. The only deathray I have is a mk X that I built when that update first released. I just don't have the time to hunt for them!

But a lot of people in New Rome use them.

Yes guys, death rays are not really worth to search for them. Don't waste your time  :)) B-)

I'm ignoring PvP in this post and limiting it to COMS.

Fights in games are always much better when you can win with the odds not always being in your favor. Typically in games this means exploiting the dumb AI, but that's at least better than nothing. Learning how the AI fails is part of winning. In fact, the essence of any fight in any game is to find your enemy's weakness. THAT makes it fun. I'd say the worst fights in any game are the ones where you do not find weaknesses and instead win almost solely based on your level vs their's. Yet even games where you search for weaknesses can become boring if the enemies always have teh same weaknesses.

My impression of the COM's so far is the tactical/strategic depth is shallow; boring; tedious.

So how do you win when the odds are less than 3 to 1?

I note Rostin said to use the weapon settings which lower accuracy and increase damage only when you need to desperately win a fight and are willing to lose some to win it. Could someone elaborate on how that works?

And what of hangars? Hangars seem to me to be a way to fit lots of weapons in one module slot. Basically a ship is hidden behind the hangar slot. You unhide it and BAM you have access to multiple module slots which can be used in an attack. Only problem is it's a whole other ship which needs a license and lots of solars invested to build it.

Are hangars useful in COMs?

Somewhat related topic, that's confusing me ...

A pirate ship I'm squaring off against has a total of 204,225 power. But he's got 297,000 in shields alone (almost no weapons or manpower).

Weapons    Shield    Armor    Manpower
13890    297000    0            9890

Total power: 204,255 (W+S+A/2+M+50*Cs)

.... that doesn't compute to me. What am I missing ... are there parentheses missing from the equation, or ... ?

Oh ... sucker has Improved Shields Mark X. That's gotta be it, right? [Edit: that's definitely it. 297,000 reduced by a factor of 1.65 = 180,000, which makes the math work. But STILL] ... why doesn't that improve power rating?? lol

Be happy it doesn't, because that'd increase the timer!

Math looks right to me. Make sure you bring plenty of extra weapons because sometimes their shields are on roids.

Does anyone know if shields regenerate between waves? The first wave is viper/laser and the second is boarding.