Shooting down UFOs

[Zomis]

How many Interceptors/Air Hawks is needed to shoot down UFOs (working with Type 3 now, but it's good to know for the rest as well...)???

 

I only use one Interceptor and one Air Hawk, and with 2 type-3 ufos and 3 type-1 ufos, it is very hard to shoot one of them down!

I need a Type-3 UFO for research.

[Asmodai]

You need a LOT of Hawks! Buy as many Hawks as you can per week. That's usually ab00t 2-4. By the time I get Annihilators, I usually have ab00t 15 or so.

[The Veteran]

Have you tried the swarm approach Zomis? I used it all the way up until Retaliators and I must've only lost about four or five in the whole game...

[NKF]

For what it's worth, the transport ship has roughly 400 - 500 hit points, and the fast attack ship has 100 points more. Work it out from there.

 

The transport ship has almost no armour, so you should be able to whack it down very quickly with multiple plasma, lasers and missiles. The Fast attack ship, while only having slightly more hit points, has better armour, so you're going to have to deal a lot more firepower to shoot it down.

 

Swarm your firepower against anything you can shoot down until they send in an Assault Ship, which looks like a dwarfed carrot. It's the easiest UFO you can shoot down that carries one of the best prizes in the game, the medium disrupter beam. Hopefully it'll be carrying your first small shield sample as well. Anyway, once you have access to a medium disrupter, you'll be one step closer to getting aircraft disrupter shields and X-Com armour.

 

Oh and the medium disrupter is one very fine weapon indeed. It will become the workhorse of your fleet very quickly. You absolutely need some medium disrupter beams to shoot down the capital ships. Lancer lasers and lineage plasma cannons can shoot them down, but they just take too long, even in swarms, as the capital ships have some very heavy armour.

 

By the way, much later in the game, avoid sending hoverbike swarms against the green alien Bomber or the Mothership, as both of these ships carry the multibomb. A weapon built specifically to deal with hoverbike swarms. You won't find it all that useful, but for the aliens it eats hoverbikes for breakfast.

 

- NKF

[The Demi-Godly One]

I actually find dimension probes very good with those anti-missile things (Plasma one, it dosn't take elerium)

on agressive mode so they destroy the missiles. Then the hoverbike swarm works because

they don't get hit by the multibomb launchers. On manual control the anti-missile weapons are very

good 'cause of their huge rate of fire. They don't fire normally except at missiles.

[NKF]

You might also want to fit an evasion matrix on one of your annihilators too. It's got plenty of space, so you can always give up one small shield for the good of all the other ships eh?

 

Speaking of the defense guns, I once had a Retaliator armed with three of the plasma turrets.

 

Feeling silly, I manually controlled it and went along to a Sirius temple and blew the stuffing out of it with the missile defense guns. Wow, it blew up every single ship that exited the tubes before they even had a chance to fire a shot at me. Shields and everything.

 

Excellent weapons. So I went and tried it against a battleship. Bad mistake, but I did learn something useful. It completely obliterated the ship's shields. Pity the battleship's armour negates the damage caused.

 

- NKF

[Jh316]

Hmm, never used them...Does it fire really fast, or something?

[The Demi-Godly One]

Yeah it goes really fast, it can destroy a battleships shield in less than

a second game time(literally) but it's damage is too low to hurt things with high armour.

In other words it's good against several weak things or a shield

'cause armour dosn't apply to shields. It also attomaticly fires at

missiles, I didn't think it would work... but it did! I never used them

till a couple days ago and found out how useful they were, at least against

missiles.(and shields)

[Asmodai]

I walsy used those in my Hawks, but later in the game missles don't even phase my ships cause I put multiple sheild on them, and I also always attak with all 15 of my Annihilators at once.

[The Demi-Godly One]

Asmodai what does wasly mean?

[Asmodai]

Damn! It even took me a little while to figure out what it was! It's 'always', but Imma moron and I can't type, lol