A combat guide

Post your best tactics and strategies for getting the big bux in Vega Strike
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Thorsten
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A combat guide

Post by Thorsten »

I present here a guide to space combat tactics in Vega Strike. I feel qualified to do so even when I am comparatively new to the game because

* I understand the physics model underlying maneuvering (I am a theoretical physicist)
* I actually amused myself once by making a 100+ page study how actual space combat (not the Vega Strike version) would be like based on basic physics principles
* I have a real life pilot's license and understand flying
* I have long experience with air combat in Falcon 4.0, which is arguably one of the most realistic fighter jet simulations (some air force pilots known to me have confirmed this)
* I did score a lot of kills in various Vega Strike situations based on the tactics I outline.

Nevertheless, if any one has more useful suggestions and tactics, I'd appreciate comments and further discussion very much.
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Re: A combat guide

Post by Thorsten »

Basic principles

According to tactical analyses of combat, a tactical victory can be reached by three principles: displacement, disruption or destruction. They aim to hit the opponent in different places. Destruction directly targets the enemy forces and tries to remove them from the picture. Disruption aims to render the enemy battle plan ineffective and thus to make his forces inefficient. Displacement is the art to lure the enemy to apply his forces in the wrong place, thus they can't fight at all. Of all the principles, displacement is by far the most effective, as the enemy victim to it has lost even before the fight begins.

Applied to space combat or air combat, destruction would imply a victory based on material - the two opponents simply slug it out, and the one with the superior firepower to armor ratio wins. Disruption is equivalent to dog-fighting and evasive maneuvering so that the enemy can't make effective use of his firepower. Displacement finally brings the enemy into a position where he can't fight back and is in essence dead before the fight begins. In air combat, effective displacement is the use of long range missiles like the AMRAAM - effectively, all the pilot ever gets to see of the enemy is a target on the radar which vanishes after a successful hit, all the enemy ever gets is a 4 second advance warning of a missile approaching with Mach 5 - by the time he realizes what is wrong, he's usually hit already.

Thus, this is a manual of space combat, not about dogfighting. Taking enemies down via the displacement principle is not exciting or glamorous like dogfighting, it is about as boring as firing an AMRAAM from 25 km distance to take down a MiG. It requires more advance planning and equipping the right spacecraft than flying skills. But it is efficient - using a Zhuangzong fighter with the above tactics, I cut down 5 Hyenas, 4 Plowshare, 10 Progeny and 4 Thales class corvettes in a bit more than 5 minutes before going in for repairs.

Dogfighting has no purpose in space combat

In air combat, the need for dogfighting arises from two conditions: 1) the guns (or missiles) are mounted such that they fire along the main axis of the plane 2) aerodynamics is such that the direction of motion must be close to the main axis of the plane (it actually isn't usually identical - planes can fly with an AOA (angle of attack, the mismatch between airstream and plane axis) of 30 degrees and more, but eventually the plane stalls as the airstream ceases to generate lift).

Thus, flying behind an opponent (in his six o'clock position) is optimal - the pilot can use his gun, the opponent can't, and if the opponent wants to turn his plane such that he can fire, aerodynamics restricts him to do this in a wide circle, which gives the pilot ample time to react. Thus, the aim of dogfighting is to get into the opponent's six - if you are there, you control the fight and are relatively safe.

In space combat in Vega Strike, neither condition 1) nor 2) is fulfilled - consequently you can not feel save in an enemy's six, and it is not as desirable as in air combat to get there. 1) is not fulfilled because several vessels (for example the Franklin or the Goddard) have turrets - they can get you regardless of where you are. 2) is not fulfilled because there is no aerodynamics limit on the mismatch between spacecraft axis and direction of motion. If you turn a fighter 180 degrees quickly, you usually don't fly a circle, you more or less turn the fighter while your direction of motion stays whatever it was before the turn.

This can be seen as follows: A spacecraft can actually fly a circle - a circle is the motion resulting from continuous orthogonal acceleration. Suppose a fighter has 5 g of orthogonal acceleration and flies with a speed of 500 m/s. Initially, this motion is along the x-axis. For a quarter circle (90 degrees or 1.57 rad) the velocity along the x axis must be reduced to zero while the velocity along the y-axis should be increased to 500 m/s. The total change (Delta v) is thus 1000 m/s. The orthogonal acceleration can achieve a change of 5 g or 50 m/s, thus it takes 20 seconds to fly a quarter circle, corresponding to a turning speed of 0.08 rad/second. If the speed is twice as much, the turning speed drops to half thus value.

However, even slow turning fighters make something like 0.8 rad/s, very maneuverable fighters have values close to 1.8 rad/s - thus (dependent on details), fighters turn 5-10 times faster than they would be if they'd fly a circle. Most of the time when maneuvering, the direction of motion is not at all aligned with the axis of the ship. In other words, when flying a Lancelot with 925 m/s and turning it around by 180 degrees, its motion is still essentially what it was before - the Lancelot is flying with some 700 m/s into the old direction, i.e. opposite to where its nose is pointing when you come out of the turn. Or in yet other words, if you're in the six of a Zhuangzong, you're anything but safe, because in less than two seconds, he can turn 180 degrees and point his guns at you.

Thus, there is no point in trying to analyze and organize space combat like air combat - the conditions are different. A more meaningful concept for space combat is the Window of Opportunity (WoO). We define every timespan in which a spacecraft can point guns at an opponent and in principle score a hit a Window of Opportunity. Since (see above) denying an opponent a WoO is not feasible, the aim of good combat tactics is to maximize one's own WoO while at the same time to minimize the opponent's WoO.

The factors governing the engagement

Let us then analyze the factors governing spacecraft performance in an engagement and how they influence the window of opportunity. These fall into several groups - maneuverability (forward acceleration, orthogonal acceleration, turning speed), weapons (range, damage, tracking) and armour (shields and armour). Let us first cover maneuverability.

The main (or forward) acceleration is the factor governing engagement distance - whoever has more acceleration controls the engagement in the sense that he can choose not to engage, that he can choose to disengage and that he can choose at what distance to engage. If the difference in acceleration between the two combatants is 15 g, it is vastly easier to actually exercise this control in practice than if the difference is a mere 2 g, but in principle even 2 g acceleration make the difference between being able to disengage or not.

The orthogonal acceleration is chiefly important in evasive maneuvering. Since evasive maneuvering usually involves entering a trajectory orthogonal to the current one, forward acceleration governs the rate at which momentum into the new direction is built up and orthogonal acceleration determines how fast momentum along the old direction is reduced. Having high orthogonal acceleration confers thus a mid-term advantage in evasive maneuvering, as in this situation the sum of forward and orthogonal acceleration determines if an enemy can follow into an evasive maneuver or not.

Turning speed is in most situations not an issue as for fighters it is always sufficient to match the opponent's motion - with the exception of two situations. Turning speed matches the angular motion of the opponent (the apparent velocity with which the target moves across the screen). Only the component of motion orthogonal to the line of sight (LoS) creates apparent angular motion, motion along the sight changes distance, but keeps the target in the same position on the screen. Assuming a typical combat speeds of 500 m/s flown orthogonal to the LoS, the angular motion is larger than 0.8 rad/s (the turning speed of a slow turning fighter) only for a distance of 550 m - for any larger distance, the fighter can follow the angular motion easily. But at these distances, spacecraft don't fly circles unless they are very slow. Thus, the two situations in which turning speed matters are slow maneuvers at extremely short distance and the turning towards the enemy after a head-on pass - whoever turns faster gets the first WoO after both craft pass each other. This may create as much as a two second window of opportunity to engage without being in danger.

The maximum speed as indicated by the governor setting is never an issue. You should always be ready to go hit travel mode if you need more speed - never feel constrained by the speed setting in any way.

Weapons fall into four groups: Beam weapons, bolt weapons, projectile weapons and missiles (which are a special group). The chief advantage of beam weapons hit instantaneously on a straight line - if the target is in the crosshairs when the trigger is pulled, it is hit. This is not so for all other weapons. Bolt and projectile weapons fire objects which travel with exit velocities between 1200 m/s and 30.000 m/s towards the target - thus if the target is in the crosshairs when a shot is fired, but maneuvers while the projectile is flying, it may avoid being hit, and the chance to avoid a projectile grows with the time it needs to hit and thus increases with distance and decreases with exit velocity. Thus, a Dissonance shot at 5000 m distance leaves almost two seconds of evasion time, an Ion Burster shot at 2000 m distance on the other hand only 0.06 seconds and is practically unavoidable. For this reasons, projectile or bolt weapons with different exit velocity should not be fired at the same time as they will not hit the same location. At long distances, projectile weapons are better than beam weapons as they don't suffer from range attenuation, but on the other hand projectile weapons consume ammunition and cannot be used for sustained combat over longer times. Missiles take even longer to reach their target, however most of them have target tracking capabilities and can compensate for evasive maneuvering.

Range is the first measure to gauge the use of a weapon. Quite generically, the larger the range, the more Windows of Opportunity exist to fire the weapon. A weapon with 10.000 m range does not require elaborate maneuvering to create a WoO, a range of 2000 m however does.

Firepower should be gauged according to two measures: Burst firepower and sustained firepower. Burst firepower measures the amount of damage the weapon can deliver within a short WoO of 1-2 seconds, sustained firepower the amount of damage over a longer period of time like 10-20 seconds. Ultimately, these numbers must be gauged for a ship with given reactors and capacitors, as burst firepower can often be delivered from the capacitors even when the reactor is not strong enough to deliver the same firepower sustained. Burst firepower is the relevant quantity when another fighter is engaged, sustained firepower is relevant when engaging a hard target like a capital ship. But it also depends on the weapon usage. The basic example is the Grav Thumper, clearly a burst firepower weapon. Due to its long refire delay of 20 seconds, the average damage per second delivered and thus the sustained firepower is just 2700 MJ/s. However, the damage delivered in the first second, and thus the burst firepower, is 54.000 MJ/s - so the weapon would not be appreciated sufficiently by considering only the average sustained firepower.

However, of equal importance is the amount of damage that is actually delivered to the target. This has to do with the nature of the weapon and tracking capabilities. Without ITTS or autotracking, as a rough number one can get about 20% of projectiles into the target and 40% of a beam. ITTS doesn't help at all for beams but improves the accuracy of projectile weapons to about the value of beam weapons or 40%. Autotracking gets a beam into the target 100% of the time - there is no way to dodge a beam array on an autotracking-capable mount. Projectile accuracy is not quite as good, but probably goes up to 70% or so.

Let us now turn to defensive measures like armour and shielding. It is instructive to compare the maximum protection (shields XV and PolyDuranium armour) with a protective value of 12.400 MJ with the burst firepower of some weapons. Several military-grade projectile and bolt weapons deliver burst firepower close to 3000 MJ/s, for example the Photon Mk II (1900 MJ/s), the Hephaestus Mini (2430 MJ/s) the Dissonance (2700 MJ/s), the Razor (3240 MJ/s) or the Ktek-gun (7200 MJ/s). Beam weapons usually deliver a third of this number, such as the Disruptor (1350 MJ/s), the Light Ion Beam (1080 MJ/s) or the Heavy-Ion beam (1431 MJ/s) - with the exception of the military grade Ktek beam (3780 MJ/s). This implies that even the maximum amount of protective layers will be cut down by a twin military weapon in less than two seconds - and the protection of most spacecraft in even less time. A single WoO is thus usually sufficient to decide the engagement. There is no real protection in shields or armour.

On the other hand, some damage is unavoidable in combat given that it impossible to evade autotracking beam weapons. Thus, a fighter should carry a reasonable degree of shielding, but never rely on it.

Selecting fighter and upgrades

Let us first consider a fighter for use against other fighters. The first Window of Opportunity in each engagement arises in the initial approach (usually head-on) of the spacecraft. There are two weapons which are, when twin-mounted, quite capable of killing most enemies at long range, and any fighter outfit should be chosen around such weapons. Those are the Ktek beam (range 7515 m) and the Razor (range 9250 m). Since most factions carry weapons with a range of less than 5000 m and combined approach speed is usually 1000 km/s, the opponent has to pass through a 2-4 second WoO taking damage before he can engage - however most vessels will not survive a two second barrage by a Ktek beam or a Razor. Given this huge advantage, there is absolutely no point in fighter-to-fighter combat to equip any other short range weapon If you have more than two mountpoints available, mount both and combine the longer range of the Razor with the unlimited ammunition of the Ktek beam for an even more efficient killing range. Since these are weapons for medium mountpoints, any remaining light mountpoint may be used for the Microdriver which offers a way to soften the target up at even further range. The Dostoevsky for example can be equipped with a twin Razor and has a tremendous acceleration, although it is a bit weak in shields.

The best armour, both in terms of mass and in terms of protection, is the PolyDuranium, so equip your fighter with this. Select the strongest shield possible that doesn't interfere with firepower and acceleration.

As for mounting missiles, they are all in all useless - the kind of fighter that is impressed by missile damage never makes it through your killing range, and every fighter that comes through a 2-4 second barrage of Razor or Ktek will not be seriously affected by a missile and most likely carry ECM anyway. You may carry a few auto-homing missiles as distractions.

The demands for an anti-capital ship mission are a bit different. You need heavy weapons - either torpedos, or a strong sustained firepower or a pair of Grav Thumpers. A good ship to attack a capital ship is not necessarily a good ship to attack fighters. However, a fighter equipped with twin Grav Thumpers and twin Ktek beams (the Taizong or the Zhuangzong can do this for example) can fill a reasonable dual role, as high maneuverability is needed to get close enough to employ the Grav Thumper with a range of 925 m. A twin Grav Thumper can knock down sub-capital ships such as the Mule, the Gleaner or the Thales with a single hit. The Goddard is a good ship to mount high sustained firepower, although it is not a good fighter, as it lacks acceleration and turning speed - it has to either overwhelm the capital ship's defences with torpedos (this seems to be rather difficult due to efficient point-defences mounted by most capital ships) or to approach to close range, endure some punishment and fire with an array of Hephaestus-mini guns (which have a high phase damage).

Offensive maneuvering

Offensive maneuvering is used to engage a target. It is thus always flown with the gun pointed towards the target. While you have a WoO, just make use of autotracking and fire, otherwise accelerate and get into firing range, that's all maneuvering needed. About the only non-trivial situation is to approach withing firing distance if the opponent has long range weapons. The most suitable maneuver for this purpose is the barrel-roll. It is flown by dragging the nose in a wide circle around the point on the screen where you want to go, and as a ship flying a barrel-roll is continuously accelerating and altering heading, it makes predicting where to aim projectile weapons difficult. Thus, the maneuver will offer some amount of protection from projectiles, although it will do nothing against a beam weapon with autotracking. Since the barrel roll is flown mainly by orthogonal acceleration, it is much more efficient in a Dostoevsky than in a Hyena. As soon as you reach firing range, end the barrel roll, point the gun towards the opponent and start firing.

Defensive maneuvering

Defensive maneuvering is used to safely disengage from a target. Here, one needs to distinguish three phases. In the first phase, the distance between the fighters is small (if it is large, there is no need to disengage) and the aim of maneuvering is to present a WoO as small as possible, because given the turning speeds, it is impossible to completely deny the opponent a shot. In the second phase, the aim is to increase distance on a velocity vector which is difficult to match. The third phase consists of straight acceleration out from the engagement into SPEC.

Defensive maneuvering is always flown with full acceleration, i.e. with the controls in 'travel' mode. The best point to disengage is right after a head-on pass. While the opponent starts turning for a new WoO, put him 'on the beam', i.e. fly orthogonal to the line of sight (this is accomplished by putting his symbol on the radar at the edge of the screen). Move the ship randomy in the second orthogonal direction up and down. In this way, when coming around, he faces a target with large apparend angular velocity and a flightpath that is difficult to predict. This does not offer any protection against an autotracking beam weapon, but it will be effective against projectile and bolt weapons. In the mid-term, the opponent will have to compensate both for the combined velocity of a head-on pass and the acceleration you've flown orthogonal to this, so for some time the sum of forward and orthogonal acceleration matters to decrease distance. Unless your acceleration is very bad, the maneuver will bring you out of range. Keep accelerating to 2000 m/s or so before going into SPEC to avoid getting hit with the shields down.

Combat plans

Make sure you understand the control when maneuvering: The control is set such as to accelerate in a way to set the chosen speed into the direction the nose is pointing. Whenever you turn the nose, acceleration will kick in because the vector of motion must be adjusted to the new direction of the nose. In combat, this is a mixed blessing. On the bright side, any acceleration makes it more difficult to hit a spacecraft, so the control ensures that you follow a compelx flight path without putting any effort into it. On the down side however, it makes some maneuvers simply impossible which would be very useful. All rlaan fighters for example have equal forward and orthogonal acceleration. In principle they are capable of full evasive maneuvering while keeping the gun pointed on the opponent at all times. However, the control setting which doesn't allow to fire orthogonal thrusters directly makes such maneuvers impossible.

To take down another fighter, use a properly equipped fighter. Try to select and lock on a target early on. The radar screen is completely useless to understand the tactical situation and there is no padlock view so that you could be sure to have a visual on him at all times, so watch the image of the opponent in the lower right, watch the distance and gauge his velocity from the change of distance. Approach with a slow governor setting in maneuver, something like 200 m/s - this will maximize the WoO for your long-range weapons. Fly a wide barrel-roll until you reach weapons range, acquire the target and start firing. Most fighters will never make it past 5000 m, but if one does, you need to pass head-on, so go to travel mode, hit overdrive and go back to barrel-roll to minimize damage while passing the other craft. This is a good time to launch a missile, as it will distract attention from you. After the head-on pass, fly a standard evasion and re-engage from long distance to make use of your superior weapons range.

In case you are jumped from behind or from the side, turn into the other fighter, force a head-on pass, accelerate hard, fly a standard evasion and re-engage from long distance. Always control the fight, never let yourself be drawn into a turning fight at short distance where you can't see what the opponent is doing and where the superior long range weapons are not useful. Prolonged turning fights are a sizeable tactical mistake.

In a one vs. many engagement, you don't have any suitable way of understanding the tactical situation, the radar is completely useless, there are just too many dots. Thus, always control the fight, Fly evasions, accelerate hard and SPEC away, turn and engage the first fighter coming after you after he comes out of SPEC (you may even get him with shields down). Don't bother for the rest to arrive, fly a standard evasion, disengage and SPEC again. Use travel mode frequently, do not let yourself get caught trying to get into SPEC in a gravity well with shields down. Engage and destroy one by one in head-on encounters, if you keep moving even 20 opponents are no cause to worry, as they never manage to arrive in a coordinated way.

To take out a sub-capship with Grav Thumpers, lock target and approach flying a barrel-roll. You will take some damage from turrets. Minimize it by approaching fast, use travel setting and keep accelerating to at least 1000 m/s. Aim at a point slightly away from the target. In the last moment, at 1500 m or so, turn into the target and fire a twin Grav Thumper. Usually your momentum vector will carry you slightly clear of the explosion, but if you have high orthogonal acceleration, you actually go right through the blast (do not use this tactic on capital ships which can absorb a twin Grav Thumper hit - you'll just hit the hull and be dead). Unlike frying other fighters at long distance, this is a very memorable experience. Expect some damage from debris when doing so.

If you're attacked in a bad situation, say in a Llama with a full cargo hold, there's actually not much you can do. In essence, you have no acceleration, and the only thing you can do is turn towards the opponent, hope that he makes a mistake and fire when he is in range. There's no amount of maneuvering to save you in a bad situation when the opponent does not make mistakes. Basically, try to fight only when you control the situation and have superior equipment. Otherwise, try to run, to drop cargo or to eject, even if you win the first encounter, the faction system will just put more opponents on your tail.
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Re: A combat guide

Post by loki1950 »

Again a nice analysis there are a couple of key binding that help in the furball situation :wink:

Code: Select all

<bind key="r" modifier="none" command="NearestHostileTargetKey"/>
	<bind key="R" modifier="none" command="NearestDangerousHostileKey"
The "R" one will usually select the bad boy who is actually shooting at you but sometimes it's the cap ship off in the distance as only a few seconds of one of it's beams turns you to vapor while you could slug it out with the escorts without breaking a seam in your armor.
For those of a mathematical bent try to find "Practical Astronomy with your calculator" i have the second edition been at the side of various workstations since i got it low these many years ago the ISBN numbers for both the hard cover and paper back follow the paper back is spiral bound so it lays flat :D
ISBN 0 521 24059 X hard cover
ISBN 0 521 28411 2 paper back
Was available from amazon last time i checked now at the third edition the numbers have changed but amazon will highlight the latest version

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Re: A combat guide

Post by MC707 »

Nice analysis! I think you should add a Capital Ship flying and combat section or something like that, though.
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Re: A combat guide

Post by Jno »

Excellent! This is an analysis on a par with military doctrine in Real Life (TM).
The radar screen is completely useless to understand the tactical situation
This is true. I have fond memories of the radar display in the original Elite game (which I played on a Commodore 64), and which conveyed more information per pixel than almost any display I have seen before or since. It differentiated hostile and benign targets, and allowed one to set up the head-on attack, and the evasion manoeuvre. I was pleased to see that such a display was an option for the radar in the Vegastrike config file, and disappointed to find that it didn't work. Does anybody know if it can be repaired? I'll even get my C++ book out, if I have to!

There are screenshots at http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/elite/screenshots for unfortunates who were born too late to have enjoyed a universe loaded entirely into 64 kilobytes of memory and processed by a 1 MHz 8-bit microprocessor 8)
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Re: A combat guide

Post by loki1950 »

There is an Elite mod of VS based on the 0.4.3 binary i wonder if it's still on Halleck's server that radar option was his code IIRC and may have been dependent on 0.4.3's behavior and broken in the current version due to Python code changes or the fact that python for that version was 2.4 while with 2.5 there where some things that where not backward compatible and i gather the latest Python 2.6 adds further backward compatibility issues as they are preparing for version 3.0 with will introduce more all to make google apps run faster :wink:

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Re: A combat guide

Post by Jno »

I don't want to hijack Thorsten's excellent combat guide thread with the radar question, so I'll take it to Bug Triage.

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Re: A combat guide

Post by TBeholder »

Thorsten wrote:Basic principles
Firepower should be gauged according to two measures: Burst firepower and sustained firepower. Burst firepower measures the amount of damage the weapon can deliver within a short WoO of 1-2 seconds, sustained firepower the amount of damage over a longer period of time like 10-20 seconds. Ultimately, these numbers must be gauged for a ship with given reactors and capacitors, as burst firepower can often be delivered from the capacitors even when the reactor is not strong enough to deliver the same firepower sustained. Burst firepower is the relevant quantity when another fighter is engaged, sustained firepower is relevant when engaging a hard target like a capital ship. But it also depends on the weapon usage. The basic example is the Grav Thumper, clearly a burst firepower weapon. Due to its long refire delay of 20 seconds, the average damage per second delivered and thus the sustained firepower is just 2700 MJ/s. However, the damage delivered in the first second, and thus the burst firepower, is 54.000 MJ/s - so the weapon would not be appreciated sufficiently by considering only the average sustained firepower.
[...]
Several military-grade projectile and bolt weapons deliver burst firepower close to 3000 MJ/s, for example the Photon Mk II (1900 MJ/s), the Hephaestus Mini (2430 MJ/s) the Dissonance (2700 MJ/s), the Razor (3240 MJ/s) or the Ktek-gun (7200 MJ/s). Beam weapons usually deliver a third of this number, such as the Disruptor (1350 MJ/s), the Light Ion Beam (1080 MJ/s) or the Heavy-Ion beam (1431 MJ/s) - with the exception of the military grade Ktek beam (3780 MJ/s). This implies that even the maximum amount of protective layers will be cut down by a twin military weapon in less than two seconds - and the protection of most spacecraft in even less time. A single WoO is thus usually sufficient to decide the engagement. There is no real protection in shields or armour.
However, it's useful to remember that peak power which is given in game and burst firepower in the sense "before caps go dry" are different things too, thanks to various duty cycles. You considered it for Grav Thumper and dropped later, but for less powerful (and exotic) weapons it's more significant factor.
Thorsten wrote:However, of equal importance is the amount of damage that is actually delivered to the target. This has to do with the nature of the weapon and tracking capabilities.
Also, there's "range attenuation factor" (derived from longrange property).
Thorsten wrote:As for mounting missiles, they are all in all useless - the kind of fighter that is impressed by missile damage never makes it through your killing range, and every fighter that comes through a 2-4 second barrage of Razor or Ktek will not be seriously affected by a missile and most likely carry ECM anyway. You may carry a few auto-homing missiles as distractions.
Heavy ones are good. Even though Cluster is non-guided and torpedo may try to hit something at the other end of system, with which ye want to make peace to begin with (that's when SwitchControl key becomes really useful).

Also, turrets can be targetted, so shooting them off one by one may be the best way to defeat capital ship with fighter: enemy is too heavy to aim its main weapon well at fast target and when few turrets are removed, it's easier to deal with the rest. And their armor is weak. Autotracking helps a lot.

Maneuvering:
Terran ships' dynamics favors fly-by engagement, yes. But this means that phase damage can be more important than normal damage, especially for low-powered weapons (Medium slots) or strong opponents: normal damage is absorbed by shield and most (or all, if shield is too strong) will be replenished before your next pass. Phase damage can even damage shield system before shield would be drained normally.
Rlaan ships have much better side acceleration and bad forward acceleration (and no overdrive), so this case boils down to strafing around: dodging series of slow bolts while keeping target within autotracking cone most of the time. side thrust keys binding helps. If target is a capship, very close range has advantage: enemy can't point its big guns at you if you don't allow it to, so you'll face only one or two turrets at once. Target subunit - dodge - fire - dodge, target next one.
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Re: A combat guide

Post by loki1950 »

Or find a cloak device target turret while cloaked,uncloak blast the turret cloak move your position target the next turret rinse and repeat till it's a floating target start your torpedo run cloaked uncloak at the last possible moment and fire that torpedo and hope that you can get away from any escorts.

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