Quote:
Originally Posted by jfp3
Great offering there Z. This is the type of info that helps get us Noobs going with the game. 2 Questions:
At what point should one consider taking on single Pirates? What ship setup for a Merchant for instance?
and
When one does the RTS elements, do Robots made for "repair" do those repairs themselves or do you need to micro manage them? I wonder about this because the battles seem to go quite fast (I've only done the training one so far) and it seems it would be really rough to micromanage much of anything.
Anyone else have something to add here?
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I wouldn't take on pirates until my second hull. Depending on the difficulty, you might be able to do it in the third year of the game or even earlier. One thing to keep in mind is that the equipment available gets better as time passes, so it's not really feasible to take on pirates at the beginning (at least not on normal and hard difficulty).
Particular setups for different classes (merchant etc) don't seem to be necessary in this game. The initial choices you make aren't actually as important as you might think. So essentially you want a ship with a big hull, defensive cladding and all the slots for equipment. Three weapon slots is usually enough. Missiles are very useful early in the game.
In the RTS battles, I have a very simple formula that seems to work well 90% of the time. I only build one type of robot. Fullstack (i.e. four weapon slots), usually with dynamo and mortar as well. The weapons will vary slightly depending on the available resources, but I think that two rocket launchers, one spitfire and one repairer works well. Plasma cannon is great but uses too much of the plasma resource. Repairing will happen automatically when the robots don't have an order, so you don't need to micromanage this. Essentially, I've decided that missiles in the RTS battles own everything. This actually works best when you are retreating from the enemy. It is also VERY easy to lure the enemy robots toward your own robots/defenses. I always build missile turrets and some heavy cannon turrets too. If there are three turret slots, I build two missile and one cannon.
A team of nine of these robots can defeat most enemies without losing more than one robot, often none. Then you repair back to full health. You need to be aggressive in the RTS battles in terms of taking the available resources. Try to let the Dominators fight amongst themselves if you can. Because the robot cap is very low, you want the best robots you can possibly get.