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[LoSboccacc]

I've had the same inpression with missiles, useful as damage disher mid game until you get better power system, but too slow in the late game, even if they still aid in large engagements (7 cruisers or more)

I usually swap them out with point defences.

Also late game requires the shield systems as they come with numbers and focus fire on your first ship; this generally limits the usefulness of the light cruiser.

Now in mid late game I have two design running most of my fleet:

A heavy cruiser, shielded and with two medium fusion, 8 blasters and the rest as point defence
A destroyer, shielded, very fast, closes in in two turns and unleashes a missile salvo on top of the enemy (trololo)


I find x-rays aren't worth the upgrade. Now I'll go and try other beams as well, I haven't explored the particle beam tree yet.

[Hanzoku]

I quit the game as already 'won' (and due to colony costs tanking my research) before I got to the battlecruiser hull, which is the first one I think that can effectively mount the Xray lasers. I tried with a heavy cruiser but couldn't manage it in a way I was satisfied with.

[Cironian]

Hi everyone! I'm the guy making Solar War and I always like to read what people are thinking about the game.

Here's some thoughts on the weapon and ship balance:

First off, yeah, lasers are supposed to be difficult to handle heat-wise. To some degree, the ship limits are set in such a way that it's hard to make maximum use of a ship with just a single weapon type (energy, projectile gun, missiles etc). For Destroyers, try mixing in mass drivers, proton beams or missile launchers to make the best use of your resources.

Later on, you have more options to juggle with for your heat management. Mixing in cold fusion power helps a lot with laser builds at that point, and keep in mind that you can have different types of reactors on a single ship. Currently, cold fusion doesn't come until TL8 (battlecruiser level), which might be a little late. I'll think about moving it down to the heavy cruiser level so you can play with more options earlier on.

On the topic of lasers, the upcoming version 0.31 will also see a new shield modification that doubles the shield effectiveness vs lasers but halves it against everything else. That should allow for some interesting choices.

As for missiles in the late game, they are supposed to vary in usefulness throughout the game, but maybe not this much. Once the AI gets its act together and starts gathering bigger fleets, flight time might become less of a factor simply because fights would last longer. I'd rather wait with any rebalancing there until I've optimized the AI a little more.

And indeed some weapons become available before you can reasonably build them into your ships. Most of those are because I simply haven't hooked them up to their proper point in the tech tree yet. There's also a few other modules that will still move to a later point in the tech tree, when I get around to it.

Old ship classes getting obsoleted: Kind of, sort of intended, at least in a main combatant role. I'm hoping that players can find some use for any old ship of Frigate and later class throughout most of the game: Frigates make cheap disposable point defense units, Destroyers can fill out your attack power somewhat (in part by grinding down enemy shields and point defenses by lots of small pinpricks), Light Cruisers have the biggest Warp capacity (this slowly goes down for each larger class).

Oh, and in the current Alpha, if you have driven the Aliens back to Eris, you can consider yourself as having won. At least until I add the real endgame or other sources of fun.

Anyway, I'm happy to see you talk about this as it helps me figure out where I might have to look into balancing. Thanks a lot!

[LoSboccacc]

Cheers!

It is a very interesting game indeed.

I love how the time of travel calculation between planets work, btw.

[Drakale]

Are you planning on making the smaller ships stackable in some way? The only thing that prevent me from using them is the fact that I don't want to individually command them in the battlefield, it would take far too much time. Maybe a tech line one or two hull size bigger than the ship to be stacked could contain a squadron/fleet tech that let you build and use the ships as a group. i.e. Build 20 frigates ,and they are used as one unit.

[LoSboccacc]

Double click on the fleet, or right click I can't remember, and you can set ship behavior

[Cironian]

It's the Details button on the fleet. There you can put ships under AI control. It's still a bit basic. I hope to expand it later, but there are more important things left to do first.

[Hanzoku]

Hey, glad to see the author of the game around.

Two things that I would love to see:

1 - The ability to refit ships. This might extend the lifespan of older ships, and there's quite a change from my Phoenix Mk I destroyer and the Phoenix Mk III-a with afterburners, a cold-fusion core, medium fusion laser and anti-missile turrets.

2 - The ability to retire ships. All those fighters at the beginning, once I'm starting to produce frigates really should be retired. My general method around it is to send them to guard the Moon.

I'm note sure capital ships should be stackable, but the ability to later deploy squadrons of fighters and corvettes from carrier vessels would be nice. It would make the fighter and corvettes useful beyond the early game, and if there was some tech to support upgrades (fighter-scale fusion laser?) they might do more then mildly irritate the alien cruisers.

[Cironian]

Refitting would be quite a lot of work code-wise, but I am planning to add scrapping ships some time in the next few versions. Scrapping a ship will also give a boost to other construction in the location where the old ship was, to represent parts being reused. That should give very similiar gameplay results while being much quicker to program. After all, there is no experience inherent to the old ship, it's all in the officers and crew who can be reassigned.

I was planning to automatically retire fighters and corvettes some time back, but I was never quite sure when the right time for that would be, so I just left them. If you want to do it manually, the scrapping system should also work fine for that.

One problem with ship stacking is that building thousands of corvettes would slow the game to a crawl if their internal systems remain fully modelled. Also, they were never supposed to be useful later on. Technology marches on, just like there are few armies on horseback in the 21st century. And there'd have to be a new carrier unit since fighters and corvettes are too small to have long-term life support. Plus, I just don't want the game to be about space fighters.

[Frumple]

In the demo, at least, I found fighters to be kinda' useful even once tech was maxed out... because you could build craploads of them and they were so flimsy the enemy apparently preferred to target them, especially if they were up close. Given that they can only blow up one fighter per weapon, if they hit... it worked pretty well as kinda' ablative shielding, so to speak, for everything actually important. More useful on defense than offense, though, as you need a supply source to keep the "shield strength" (i.e. mass of fighter bodies) up.

[Cironian]

That's more of an AI bug though. Due to how armor scales, ships with small weapons should be given lesser priority, but right now that doesn't happen and so the AI assigns the fighters too large a value. Don't count on that to last forever.

(Edit: While looking at it I found a few problems with the targetting. Now the AI is smarter about choosing targets and also far less likely to use overkill firepower on small fighters. This will be in 0.31, probably some time next week.)

[LoSboccacc]

I'll post this because the site doesn't have a forum and the author sometimes pass here...

The cruisers are an easy prey for shuttles since the AI PD doesn't engage them.

[Cironian]

The cruisers are an easy prey for shuttles since the AI PD doesn't engage them.

Hmm, I know PD used to fire at shuttles when I first put them in... I'll see if I can find out what caused this. Thanks for the report!

(Edit: Just tried it. The PD AI does fire at shuttles, but only when they are closer than any missiles. Looks like I completely forget this piece of code when I overhauled the main target selection logic. I'm going to change that.)

[LoSboccacc]

well, I use no missiles

[Cironian]

Could it be that their ships simply didn't have any point defense yet? As it stands, the research for the Aliens is a bit slow and could use buffing again. (I slowed their overall research speed down by 50% some versions ago, which might have been an excessive nerf)