Caltrops - Master of Orion 1-2-3





	[quote name="Mischief Maker"][quote name="fabio"]So I went with the dolphins, thinking that their inertia-free combat movement would allow me to pack long range weapons to circle strafe enemies to death. Wrong: despite being an entire engine tech ahead of every other race, my ships had no chance of outrunning any enemy ship in combat. Dolphin ships are only fast in deep space? Where combat is 1000% less likely to happen?[/quote] Research Deep Scan. Build deep scan ships & Satellites to extend your sensor range. Ambush enemy ships moving between planets. [quote]Since my research rate was much faster than anyone else, I tried cycling around to different techs and designs: torpedoes, shields, missiles, drones, battle pods, lasers. In every instance my fleet would be wiped out by similar sized enemy fleets without inflicting a scratch. Apparently anything that can be shot down by point defense is completely useless if the enemy has even the tiniest amount of PD?[/quote] Are you building ships with only one type of weapon at a time? Missiles and torpedoes and drones are susceptible to Point Defense to balance against their ridiculous range. If you were going overkill on long range weapons, the AI probably was upping the amount of PD ships in its fleet to counter. This is why you need balanced fleets. [quote]So I switched to cannons/heavy beams/turreted beams and immediately switched around to wiping out enemy fleets without a scratch. No feedback whatsoever why this was infinitely more effective.[/quote] No mystery here. Once you switched to fixed mount heavy beams and engaged at close range, the point-defense-heavy enemy ships crumpled. [quote]You cannot examine enemy ships at all during battle (only getting vague technology reports after) and despite the guide telling me visual feedback took the place of health bars there was no visible difference between intact ships and ones about to blow up.[/quote] If you see enemy ships shooting down all your missiles before they hit, or if you see mass weapons bouncing off their hull (with a corresponding special sound effect), or if you see weapons hitting their shields and making no impact against their ship, chances are they're building ships with tech to counter your current weapon loadout. [quote]What to do after I wiped out the fleet? Sit in orbit around the enemy planet apparently.[/quote] See that bomb shaped button that appears in the upper-left? That gives your ships the go-ahead to open fire on the planet. [quote]Did I need to launch bio missiles or assault shuttles during battle?[/quote] If you're playing the space dolphins, bio missiles are one of your best options for planetary attacks. They have a high chance of getting bioweapons and cloaking in their tech trees and their faster research speed lets them put bioweapons to good use long before slower-researching races develop the vaccine. Wipe out the population with a plague that their fleets can spread, hit a key forge world with a beast bomb to knock its production out, or just use assimilation virus to make the population willingly surrender. Since there's practically no diplomacy in the game, you can WMD with bio bombs and mass drivers to your heart's content. The only risk with bio weapons is every round you're researching them, there's a risk the disease could have an outbreak on one of your own worlds, but the vaccine won't take you long to research. Failing the bio-weapon route, a Dreadnought is still a Dreadnought, and you can brute-force tech rush the enemy with superior ships as the dolphins (sounds like what you ended up doing with the heavy beams). If you dawdle too long and let slower tech species with tougher ships like the Tarkas or the Hivers catch up, you'll pay dearly for that mistake. [quote]What exactly do assault shuttles do?[/quote] Fly into the atmosphere and strafe. [quote]I can also build freighters that instantly disappear once built (to no visible change)[/quote] Here's a whole <A HREF="http://sots.rorschach.net/Trade">guide</A> to trade and how it works. Essentially trade is a way for planets far from the front to exchange their ship-building abilities for money. Build a trade route in a sector, build 5 freighters/q-ships to ply the trade route. Watch out for raiders, they not only annoy you, they get their empire a cash bonus for every one of your freighters they destroy. Raid enemy trade routes for fun and profit. [quote]or build different kinds of stations around uninhabited planets without telling me what each kind does.[/quote] Now you're just being intentionally obtuse to find new things to bitch about. Should be pretty obvious what a "Science" station or a "Repair" station do. Command stations act as a stationary strikeforce CnC for any ships or fleets in orbit. <A HREF="http://sots.rorschach.net/Category:Orbital_Stations">Here</A>'s a complete guide to orbital stations. [quote]Screw it. This game is Gratuitous Space Battles with a strategic portion.[/quote] A Gratuitous Space battles where you have control over your ships, weapons have fixed turreted firing arcs that can be exploited, weapon accuracy is rendered as moving object polygon collisions instead of abstract RNG to-hit rolls? A big Risk-like game of galactic conquest generating battles and putting everything into context and possibly setting up scenerios where you get caught off-guard and have to make do with the ships you have available? That sounds pretty awesome! The shitty manual and the awkward 3D strategic map are the main dings against the game. Surmount those hurdles with <A HREF="http://sots.rorschach.net/Main_Page">Strategy Guides</A> and a combination of galactic axes and planetary post-it-notes and you'll have the best fleet combat strategy game out there. Want something easier and breezier to get into at the price of dull lackluster combat you'll likely eschew for auto-compute? Sounds like Armada 2526 is your game.[/quote]