Ship Designs

[Hunkpapa]

A little clarification please...

So to design a aggressive ship I should have the weapons placed before everything else or just put the weapons I want to fire first added to the ship design.

i.e. I want the DUC to fire before the PDC so I should add it to the design first.

Does it matter where the bridge, etc. is added?

All these little nuances I keep learning...

[ April 11, 2003, 13:52: Message edited by: Hunkpapa ]

[Captain Kwok]

They're referring more to adding, say, shield depleters before regular weapons.

[oleg]

Originally posted by Hunkpapa:
A little clarification please...

So to design a aggressive ship I should have the weapons placed before everything else or just put the weapons I want to fire first added to the ship design.

i.e. I want the DUC to fire before the PDC so I should add it to the design first.

Does it matter where the bridge, etc. is added?

All these little nuances I keep learning...

PDC is a special case, it fires by itself It is only order of weapons that matter, other components can be spread to your liking.

[Slick]

BTW, this is mentioned in the Newbie FAQ:

2.3.1 You need to add weapons to a ship in the order you want them to fire in combat. This is most applicable to Strategic Combat. You can manually select weapons to fire in Tactical Combat.

As stated this applies to Strategic combat for ships with more than 1 kind of weapon. Also, even though PDC are automatic, I remember a bug that might still be around. Unless it got fixed, if you manually fired PDC before your weapons, you it would take up 1 "multiplex tracking" channel; i.e. you would lose 1 of your "multiplex tracking" chances to fire. This would not happen if you fired them Last.

Slick.

[dogscoff]

PDC is a special case, it fires by itself It is only order of weapons that matter, other components can be spread to your liking.

However, some mods (proportions & devnullmod in particular, I think) have multiple types of pdc. In these cases you have to decide which PDC you want to fire first- it's usually a good idea to have the short ranged ones first.

Why? Suppose you have four seekers coming at you in a proportions game. 2 of them are at range 1 and the other 2 are at range 5. Your ship has 2 short range PDC cannons and 2 long range ones- enough to take out all four seekers, but only if the short-range cannons target the closer seekers and the long range cannons target the distant ones. If the long range cannons waste their shots on the close seekers, the short range cannons will have be powerless to take out the remaining distant ones.

By putting the short range cannons on the design first, you force them to fire first, leaving the more versatile lang range cannons until Last.

Oh, and I'm surprised no-one's mentioned the old tractor/ripper/repulser combo in this thread yet...

[Slick]

Originally posted by dogscoff:

Oh, and I'm surprised no-one's mentioned the old tractor/ripper/repulser combo in this thread yet...

Hey, what a coincidence, you segued right into the very next paragraph of the Newbie FAQ:

2.3.1.1 An example of this is to place shield depleters before your main weapons. Another example is to place a tractor beam before some high damage weapon like ripper beams, and then maybe even use a repulsor beam after that.

Excuse the shameless plugs of the FAQ, but it really has a wealth of information.

Slick.

[Xaren Hypr]

BTW, this is mentioned in the Newbie FAQ

Oops...I read the FAQ, but I guess I missed a few tidbits.
Time to re-read it...

[Cyrien]

Ordering weapons is key to great ship design. As others have pointed out below already and as the faq illustrates.

Here is another example.

Temporal Weapons

You want to put the shield/armor skipping first.
In this way they fire first and you have a chance of hitting any shield generators and taking them down.

Next the Time Distortion Bursts for the 4x to shields damage. If you don't take the shields down with the skippers the distortion burst can weaken or take em out.

Next you have the damage weapons of your choice be it PPB or APB or DUC or some nice Tachyon cannons. With shields weakened as much as possible already it is time to take em down.

Of course other specialty weapons such as tractors and repulsors and wormhole beams all have their own places as well. Depending on your strategy.

Already mentioned was the ripper combo. But there are others.

Think about it and see which ones you can come up with and you might just find yourself in command of a near invincible fleet.

[Raging Deadstar]

Yeah, My favourite tactic so far is the temporal shield accelerator combined with anti proton beams, not very original but quite effective, especially if you add the religious talisman, but thats a lot of racial points

[Xaren Hypr]

Does the order in which you add weapons (or weapon-like components) to a design affect the order in which the comps are used? First-added/First-Used, First-added/Last-used, etc...