How to get (gatling?) lasers always working

Polaris Sector is a sci-fi 4X game that offers exciting exploration, detailed resource management, unique research mechanics and intense tactical combat.
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Ulthar
Private First Class - Opel Blitz
Private First Class - Opel Blitz
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2018 11:08 am

How to get (gatling?) lasers always working

Post by Ulthar »

Hi all,
is there a way to get the lasers always firing at missiles?
I've at the moment in several fights the issue that several of my ships get destroyed by enemy missiles when the missiles are not actually targeted to this ship but to a ship behind the first one.
It seems the lasers are only shooting at those at are heading towards the own ship and ignoring all others.
At the beginning - with only a few ships in battle - micro this was not that issue. But the bigger the battles become this is less fun.
Darvin3
Corporal - 5 cm Pak 38
Corporal - 5 cm Pak 38
Posts: 43
Joined: Mon Jan 08, 2018 10:21 pm

Re: How to get (gatling?) lasers always working

Post by Darvin3 »

I've also noticed that ships don't intercept missiles for each other, although I'm not sure if this is the intended behavior or a bug.

The most reliable way I've found to deal with missiles is with fighters equipped with missile traps and ideally some shields as well. Because fighters can be built and transported in large masses this gives you a huge number of missile traps in total. Keep them behind your larger ships, and have them move forward to tank when a huge wave of torpedo bombers shows up. In terms of weapon, in my experience you want the longest-range energy weapon available to you on your fighters (other than the hooligan, which only affects shields and is thus inappropriate as a general-purpose weapon). With sufficient mass of fighters, their projectiles form a thick spray that is difficult to dodge, and even when the intended target dodges it's still likely that some ships in the enemy fleet will get hit. This very simple and low-tech approach is incredibly effective at whittling away at large formations of fighters.

I back up these fighter swarms with frigate-class (or bigger) ships equipped with a variety of laser weapons as well as a boson gun. The boson gun is very power-hungry and inaccurate, but its area of effect damage means that a single successful hit will clean out a large number of enemy fighters. Together with the fighter swarm I described above, I find this fleet composition is largely impervious to unsupported waves of enemy fighters. Unless I stupidly let myself get caught out of formation, I never lose any frigates and my kill:death ratio with fighters is usually around 100:1 with this strategy.
Ulthar
Private First Class - Opel Blitz
Private First Class - Opel Blitz
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2018 11:08 am

Re: How to get (gatling?) lasers always working

Post by Ulthar »

Well, at least I consider this a bug.
Why, because the laser ranges are already that sort - a Excimer gatling laser / small turret on the top deck of the magellan destroyer is barley able to cover the whole ship.
So in 'normal' situations they can not help each other that much.

But I also understand that it is maybe intended. :wink:
The balancing in this point seem to be difficult.

The idea with the fighters sound interesting. Even I'm not a big fan of them - but mostly because my saves become huge (~100MB for the GALAXY.SCN) as the AI is building them in masses. And as I play with max. stars / max. planet and -75% research.
But I think I will do some experiment with it. :D

One additional note from my side maybe useful for others - when the enemy has torpedo ships be careful with using the 64A speed. I lost 6 destroyers and the timing was not set to 1/3 as the mentioned top deck gatling did not react.
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