1. Is it just me or are fighter rocket pods basically worthless? They do a lot of damage, but have terrible range and take ages to reload (30 turns, that means you can only fire it once per combat!) I'd much rather have a meson, anti-proton beam, or even a level 3 uranium cannon on my fighters. Maybe they could be useful for fighters that are made to just launch their missiles and then die, but why not just build suicide drones or kamikaze fighters in that case?
Small missile pods allow fighters to fire once, deliver HUGE damage (just imagine your standard squadron of 5 fighters all firing their missile pods for a total of 500 damage, enough to destroy an unshielded cruiser!) and retreat to safety (unlike a kamikaze fighter
). You might have to fiddle with their strategies a bit to get them to actually retreat though...
They also are one of the Uber Troop Weapons, another being Small Shield Depleters, since all troop weapons have rate of fire 1 and normal damage type overriding any settings the weapons might normally have on fighters
2. What exactly does the ionic disperser do?
Destroys the enemy's engines, reducing his speed and his ability to fire weapons (since engines store supplies needed to fire). In the Gold Version the ionic dispersers are required to get past the target's shields first; in 1.49 they skipped them entirely.
3. Weapon platforms are for planetary defense, right?
Yep! Just leave them in cargo on a planet and they will fire at attackers that come in range. They won't work if you put them in cargo on ships, though that does let you ferry them around from planet to planet when needed.
4. Do computers ever keep alliances for more than a few turns? They offer a trade alliance, I accept, and a few turns later they break it.
They do, sometimes. The AI is just plain silly.
5. Are robominers worth it? I mean, they do permanently deplete the planet, but I suppose they could be useful if you really need resources.
IMHO, they're not too useful in the stock game, unless you build a huge starbase that pulls in 10,000 of each resource per turn or something... but those things take years to research and construct anyway
Some mods make them more useful, though.
6. Not a question, but a general comment. Tactical combat seems lacking compared to MOO2. The ships take way too long to move, they're too small, and it needs to be a bit easier to determine weapon range (especially when dropping combat satellites - ugh, if you're one space off, they don't do a thing!) Besides the obvious graphics and sound issues, the tactical combat is the only real flaw I've found.
Yes, MOO2 had excellent tactical combat; the only flaw was that it could get tedious when you had hundreds of ships on the screen! If you want to speed up ship movement, though, you can disable ship animations and/or enable Fast Combat, using the options button on the right. Actually, I don't think many people around here play tactical combat anymore; most of us play PBW games, where you can only have strategic combat.
Now you might like SE5's combat - though no one apart from Aaron Hall and maybe David Gervais have seen it (assuming it's even been implemented yet!) it's supposed to look something like Starfury, only on a larger scale with more ships (maybe a bit like MOO3). (Yes, I know, MOO3 was horrible, but the combat engine did have a FEW good points...
)
Asteroids Champion!
Re: Just got the demo...a few questions
Linear Mode
