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[Cthulhu]

Drones would be cool as a late game missile tech.  Little high thrust nuclear missiles but instead of impacting the nuke pumps an x-ray laser.

[Impedocles]

Oof I lost my entire Luna fleet to the Aliens.   
It was really fun, tbh.  I'm building another fleet with what I learned from that one. 

I had 4 dreads, several battleships,  and a half dozen PD Monitors.  I had decent drives but most of my ships are big and slow.  It was a mix of coilguns and plasma with long range.  I put 20-30 particle beam PD spread across the fleet,  and that seemed to be enough.

The aliens brought 2 motherships to earth,  along with a few dreads, and a dozen other ships.  They unleashed an enormous swarm of purple missiles, but the PD beams ate them all.  Unfortunately,  the plasma was less deadly than I hoped.  The dreads went down,  and my ships killed half the smaller ships on the first pass, but the dreadnoughts went down after being flanked,  and couldn't penetrate the fronts of the motherships.

I will get better drives soon,  but for right now I think I'm going to go back to missiles.  I think I've realized that dreadnoughts make really good missile boats.  The bigger the ship, the more magazines you can fit.  Magazines do increase the amount of missiles that a ship can fire in a battle.  With 5 magazines,  the ship can fire 6x as long.  A dreadnought with 5 mags and 8 torpedo launchers has 240 missiles it can unleash in a battle if it survives long enough.  And I can just slap heavy armor on it and turn it into a brick,  since the aliens will come to me.

I like the Ares torpedoes most,  over the nuclear-tipped ones: 3g is decent acceleration, 2300 damage will kill smaller things in one hit and damage a mothership heavily,  and they come with 6 rounds instead of 5.  I find that concentrating launchers on fewer ships improves PD penetration,  since the missiles all take the same path through the overlapping beams.  I expanded the Luna L1 Lagrange shipyard to 8 T3 docks, so now I can play around with some different ship builds.  I figure 4 of those and 4 plasma lancers will have less trouble with the motherships. 

I'm about to launch an assault on their Ganymede fleet,  which is pretty large and has a Ring backing it up. But I've got a pretty large fleet,  too. I'm sending colony ships to each gas giant, and will build shipyard ring habs and pump out fleets to secure each of them.

Unlocking ring habs when you have over 100 orbitals and settlements is honestly intimidating.   I've got more of every resource than I've been able to spend, but it takes a lot of clicking to upgrade each one optimally.  But,  turning my nanofactory Dyson Sphere around mercury into a nano manufactory facility Dyson sphere is going to be a very profitable venture. It better be.   I'm losing 10,000 income per month while they are busy upgrading very slowly. But that's only about 50 facilities worth,  and I've got more than that built up.

[Impedocles]

Jove fleet did very well against the aliens around Ganymede.  Lost a few ships to the. missile saturation and the mothership plasma cannon, but the plasma cannons on my lancers and dreadnoughts quickly destroyed their large ships.  My new Princess Monitors with 1 plasma battery and 2 PD did wonderfully, rapidly killing the smaller enemy ships which approached my fleet.

[Android]

How come in a battle where I have several ships with lasers against a single enemy, only a single ship of mine fires it's laser at the enemy?

[Madman198237]

Could be: Range, firing arcs (bow mounted weapons in particular), combat settings (if you've set a ship to Defense mode, its lasers will ONLY target projectiles), etc. Make sure all your ships are properly targeted.

[Android]

Could be: Range, firing arcs (bow mounted weapons in particular), combat settings (if you've set a ship to Defense mode, its lasers will ONLY target projectiles), etc. Make sure all your ships are properly targeted.

None of those are the problem...

edit: someone on the TI discord says its a graphical bug, the lasers are in fact shooting but are just not visible for bug reasons.

[Impedocles]

You can see when weapons fire by examining the battery levels of the ships.  I honestly can't reliably see any weapons except for plasma shots.

[Shooer]

First few battles with my 100% laser fleet.  Took 1 hit in the first battle against one of the few aliens fleets around earth when their destroyer raced into my fleet firing missiles and one missile got through.  Then lost a pair of dreads against a major alien fleet because their Mothership rammed them, after it ran out of ammo.

Hull mounted laser batteries all can do PD, so my dreads with 2 heavy phaser batteries fire twice every 10 seconds against incoming missiles and cannon rounds.  Almost nothing gets through the 12 of them with 16 escort monitors armed with 4 PD lasers.  Next generation I swapped 1 heavy battery for 2 medium to get more PD shots from each dread, not going to make more PD screen ships until they better explain the fleet layouts, so I don't get another deployment with dreads on one side of the battle and the toothless monitors on the other.

My fleet may be a little big, but I love popping enemy ships that charge in before their missiles and most of their cannon shots get in range, and then the rest of the alien fleet tries to stay out of range, until they run out of ammo.  Once they run out low on ammo they stray into range and start taking quick losses when the hit scan instant strike 100% accurate lasers tear into them.

Only problem so far has been alien stations.

Not even using UV lasers yet, just green phasers.

Spoiler: Let the Space Rave continue (click to show/hide)

[Egan_BW]

Pew.

[Madman198237]

If you trade some hull mount space for PD on the larger ships, you can dispense with the PD-only escorts entirely. Laser PD fires substantially faster than the larger laser mounts, is always on Defense mode, and allows you to keep firing with the main laser weapons against enemy warships rather than spending time not shooting them. Saves resources, too, I think it's more efficient to more, slightly less individually powerful (but better-defended) dreads rather than fewer dreads with a bunch of offensively-useless escorts floating around.

[Shooer]

It's nice that PD lasers can be refit to small combat lasers, refitting my fleet's escorts at my new Saturn yards after hitting alien bases in the belt, so they'll be able to put a few shots into enemy ships that fly through our ranks.

Not going to have any issues with exotics after getting 300 from using marines to destroy just an asteroid orbital and hab.  Marines can't take alien bases, but I think you get better loot and you capture aliens alive.  For what that's worth.

Currently confused on the point of terawatt level drives, though.  The drives and reactors are fine, but radiators still are built by the gigawatt.

My current Z-pinch II with 6 triton pulse drive equipped dreads have an acceleration of ~12 miliGs and built to have a DV of 120 and come in at 24kt.  Swap them out for ICF terawatt I and 3 daedalus torchs and they come in at 22kt.  I think the acceleration was 16 miliGs and 440 DV, before I added the radiators.  With the radiators they balloon to 98kt and ~2.5 miliGs.  Still researching down both ICF and hybrid fusion because I know there are better drives at the end of their tech trees but I don't know if they are worth getting.

Edit: Alright yeah, TW IFC III drops the weight of the ship to 19kt and allows 6 drives.  And 40 tanks give 2.1k DV, bit more than we need.