Vs What Race is best?

[T]

Now I Love this game's flexibility with Ships But although I have already given my AMS ship design out to the Masses
I was wondering anyone else have a "special" Ship Design that seems to Excel against Certain Race's?

If so PLaster it here:

Ive got My Terran Killer the Name:

"Line Cruiser"
6 Engines
Wave motion Guns
Point Defence Cannons
Phased Shields
Crystalline Armour
Meson Guns
ECM
Quantom Torpedo.

This along with 1/2 AMS Vessels can easily take on enemy Cruisers up to 3 of em.

"T"


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Life is Precious, far to precious to squander being doped up out of your brain.

[dmm]

The combat value of higher level engines seems to be under-rated (at least judging by the Posts on this forum). If you research only engines, sensors, and some long-range 1/turn weapon, you may never need defensive stuff like armor, shields, ECM, PDC, etc. You just hit and run. This lets your ships pack quite a wallop! (Of course, you'd be in a heap o' trouble if you ran into a mined warp point.) And consider how valuable super-fast fighters would be, especially for planetary defense against move-shoot-move tactics.

[Instar]

Man, I built a large fighter with 9 engines and that thing zoomed!! I also put some afterburners on the thing and that was perhaps the premier interceptor fighter (If you want bombers cut some engines out and there is plenty of room for bombs)

[Taqwus]

Regarding speed -- it's important enough that, at the 'high' race point setting, APS is pretty much a default pick for me at 1000 pts.

Why?

6 engines => standard 3 combat movement.
6 + 1 bonus => combat speed of 4 for your escorts and frigates (2nd turn) right off...

And 4 exceeds the speed of the early CSMs, which makes the shoot-and-scoot tactic very, very nasty. (Nastier: organic, using parasites; they fire every 2 turns, not every 3. Lower damage/shot but more shots. Or, also amusing, get good organic armor. Put two pieces on your ships. You won't have to bother dodging if it's only a missile or two.). Starting on the second turn, you can build speed-4 FRs with CSM II x2, if memory serves, which can do a goodly amount of damage compared to target ship size and probable lack of good armor / shields / PD.

But you still need shields and armor once you run into a decent fleet, because numbers allow them to fan out and cover a larger area, so you'll probably be shot at if outnumbered badly.

Engine research is nice, but takes a while (for a longer game, 6 advances per +1 combat speed, IIRC) considering the length of the demo.

For a really strange combo, I'm considering Religious + Psychic. (Think 'mindshare'.). If memory serves, at least in 0.56, combat sensors and experience, et al, affected the displayed probabilities for allegiance shifters and mind flailers. It'd be interesting if the auto-hit component given by Religious means that the shifters *always* work... muhahahahahaha.

Even an auto-hit mind flailer is pretty cruel, let alone the shifters. A fleet using master computers is VERY expensive to support... (4000/1000/1000 M/O/R, IIRC, which means +800/200/200 per ship per turn. Combine with a little intel to disrupt their economy...)


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night