research and marza questions

from Sins Forums

1--  Do more research labs decrease your research time?  (IOW, is it usefull to build more than 8 of each?)

2--  How do you keep the missile barrage of the Marza going?  I give the command to stop, I even tell it to hold position and turn off auto targeting, but after starting the ability, a few seconds later it targets something else and starts moving.  It's supposed to keep firing for 25 seconds, right?

 

3--  In a large game, do you still have all your abilities for the cap ships disabled?  I try to hotkey each one, but after having more than 6 or so, it's tough to keep them all organized and efficiently using their abilities.

 

 

4-- misc. question here:  Is a player knocked out if you take his homeworld, or do you have to take all of his planets?

thanks!

RM

strategy
2,766 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

@1 - afaik, no.

@3 - depends on the situation, I don't micro everything all the time, only when it counts ;)

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

1) no

2) if you've disabled auto-cast for its other abilities, a Marza should continue to fire for its full duration.  However, there are abilities that can disrupt missile barrage, and a good opponent (usually not an AI...) will make sure to do that promptly.

3) turning on auto-cast depends on the ability.  In a huge battle, motherships can just spam shield regeneration or malice anywhere at any time and get away with it, so they're great choices.  However, it will often interrupt shield regeneration to use malice (quite stupid, really) so you really want one or the other on autocast on each mothership. Alternately, abilities like flak burst have a huge anti-matter cost and require good timing to be effective, so these should never be on auto-cast.  Typically the lower the anti-matter cost and the more applicable the skill, the better it works on autocast. 

4) you have to take all his planets, although typically there is no hope for recovery after this point.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

AI DOES disable mazda

 

And it does much better than probably 60% of people here.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

The AI will disable the Marza if it has a cap ship with the appropriate ability and the anti-matter.  Often times (more than half the time, in fact) it doesn't have such a cap ship in its fleet, or it's run out of anti-matter or I can just disable that cap and then barrage away.  The AI is purely reactive, and not proactive, so it's really easy to set it up for a full Marza barrage.  I can't speak for players, and I know quite a few are careless or ignorant, a player will learn from his mistakes, whereas an AI will not.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

1- pretty sure it doesn't matter. i think the only method in the game for increasing research time is the tier 1 civilian tech that the Advent has.

 

2- if the Marza is part of a fleet, make sure you don't give the fleet any orders that would override the missile barrage. sometimes the fleet AI will interpret orders given to the lead ship of the fleet as orders given to the whole fleet. its inconsistent in this regard, doens't always happen but sometimes it does. something to watch out for, in addition to the other things you've tried. 

 

3- whenever i've got a fleet of 4+ cap ships in it by default i keep all autocasts turned off. when a battle starts ill look at what i'm up against and then switch on the autocasts i want to use. its much easier this way than to try to micro the abilities of 5 different caps, i don't trust myself enough to get peak efficiency with that much going on at once. 

 

regarding hotkeys, i generally just hotkey the fleet itself and use tab and shift+tab to run through the cap ships in the fleet. its pretty fast that way and doesn't require me to remember a half dozen or more different control groups. 

 

4- have to take all his worlds. the planet designated "homeworld" can be moved actually, its a planet infrastructure upgrade. your starting world has it built by default but you can build it somewhere else (one per empire) if you want to or need to. 

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Thanks for the help!