Apoc Ships

[Ki-tat Chung]

i have heaps of workshops now, but not enough workers. damn. i got enough annihilators to send 'em back to where they came from and one biotrans. then i have ny hawk air warrior(2 of 'em) and my original valkirie intercepter, my last original vehichel.

[Psy Guy]

Yea i don't get why there aren't any workers for hire when you really need them. Ive goon for weeks where there wasn't a single engineer avaliable for hire... (and i checked like every hour or so.) Is there any way to get more engineers to become avaliable (like with hybrids if you make good with the mutant alliance they start to swarm the draft roster)

 

-PSY GUY-

(I can't build my craft without them)

[Ki-tat Chung]

is there a limit? i got....lets see.....5...15...25...35...44! 44 engineerers.

[Brute]

i think it changes with difficulty setting. in a normal game, you are capped to 40 while 44 in superhuman...

[Ki-tat Chung]

no, i just checked. i'm playing novice and i got 50 engineerers. it think thats the limit (in novice anyway)

[Cadmus]

Well, I got 4 Annihilators on the second difficulty setting, All have 1 large and 1 med disruptor, 2 have anopther med while the other 2 have inversion bombs (damn tricky to keep armed eh?), my first foray into the alien dimension yielded this almighty army!

2 Probes

2 Scouts

1 Bomber

1 Escort

1 Battleship

 

As you can imagine those bug-eyed bastards got suitably pwned, and then they seem to be a little thin on the ground, send the Anihilators some time sunday late evening and smash 'em in again. Meanwhile a Biotrans hops in once or twice a week to wreck a building.

[Ki-tat Chung]

uh....you do know this topic has been left alone for quite a while now, right?

[NKF]

New or old, new input into a topic should always be encouraged, unless it's completely unrelated.

 

In my most recent campaign, for my first foray into the alien dimension, I found that with my itty-bitty armada of Explorers, the hardest part was getting them in and then moving them to a safe place in the alien dimension where they could rest and recharge their shields, as the aliens tend to swarm about all over the place -- especially near the gates. Unless you have a huge swarm of explorers (more than 4) or expendable decoys (probes), this is often very hard to perform without losing some of the ships (and you need each and every one of their medium disrupter beams! ). It wasn't so bad in later visits. It was just the initial strike that was really difficult to perform. One or two supporting retaliators really would have helped then. So the moral of this story is: If you're going to use explorers -- don't use them as your first attack wave unless you have lots of them, some decoys, or a few more powerful supporting ships (which you should send into the gates first, by the way)

 

I just noticed how few alien ships you actually need to capture to get the advanced ships. From what I've seen so far, you just have to capture the type-3 (dim. probe and biotrans), type-5 (explorer, I think this was that awfully hard fast-attack ship.), type-6 (retaliator) and .. um, the Battleship (annihilator). All these ships carry a pretty hefty range of useful toys and weapons for your ships (shields and all the disrupter beams). One other ship you might want is the alien bomber (that green ship that just eats your hoverbikes for breakfast), if you want to capture a live micronoid aggregate, but you also get one chance to capture one in the first alien building.

 

- NKF

[Drakkar77]

Nothing can compare to a hover bike! Even another hover bike has a REALLY hard time hitting one! Swarms of hover bikes can take down ANYTHING!!!

 

I keep an airhawk for transporting troops, and build annilators as soon as I can.

[VegasSte]

I like using hoverbikes because the hawk air warriors are too expensive to begin with, but when you get annihilators i have 10 of them, most with full disruptor beam armament( 2 medium and 1 heavy) . When I send them into the alien dimension I move them well out of range of the ufo's and let them fire to their hearts content without taking any damage to their shields. They seem to be able to fire nearly half the dimension with the heavy disruptor beam, which is nice!

[The Demi-Godly One]

I am finding swarms of dimension probes the most useful thing ever. They take a very short time to build and they are impossible to hit. You can put light disrupter beams on them and the defense arrays. I usually send in one defender(One with a defense array) with the rest of my squad, to protect everyone else. And if you control the defenders manuallly they terrorize shields!(Although not much else because the damage is so low it is blocked by armour, shields aren't affected by armour) THey can destroy mothership shields in less than 3 game seconds!

[magic9mushroom]

but which one is it? the one in the assignment stats or the UFOpedia?

 

Both. Missile turn rate is 40% for the Matrix and 20% for the Cloaking Field, which is 60% jamming for the Matrix and 80% for the Cloaking Field.

 

(fifteen years late, but might help someone)

 

EDIT: on further inspection, the Cloaking Field seems a bit more complicated than just being 80% jamming. It appears to be 100% jamming (missiles don't turn) while you're visibly cloaked, but drops completely or almost completely for a short time when you open fire (which is going to be near-constant if you're using beam weapons). Should really have been always-on like the personal one; the 3x4 space cripples the shields of even the Annihilator, so it would need to be basically perfect to be worth it.

 

EDIT2: And I can't get the Missile Evasion Matrix to do anything. So I think it's useless.

[magic9mushroom]

On-topic, Hovercars for the first week - you're generally limited by the supply of Bolter lasers more than anything else, and Hovercars come with one attached so they only need one more (though I suppose you could buy the Hovercar and take the laser for a Hoverbike). Also, Hovercars won't die from a single Light Disruptor hit, while Hoverbikes can.

 

For second week onwards, I'm thinking a mix of cars and bikes is probably best. Cars are way better once you get shields, but depending on your research order that might take a while.

 

Generally, I find that due to the long lead time of the Advanced Workshop, I generally have Retaliator tech done or almost done by the time I can actually build craft; the Explorer is certainly a great ship, but if you have to choose between that or a Retaliator there's no contest. Annihilators... eh, I build them, but usually just because I can't think of anything else to do with my money; by the time you get them, you'll have a few Retaliators in the sky and won't actually need them. The firepower isn't even that much better (though the shielding is).