Will Mass drivers, I don't know work one day?

I just started playing beta again after sitting out for some time and have noticed how horrible mass drivers have become. (I'm sure this subject has been talked about to death) I have an entire fleet made of of different mass driver ships (small fast fighters, heavy battleships ect) and keep getting annihilated.  Two horribly weak Altarian ships laid waste to my entire fleet. The problem is that not a single shot from any of my ships hit. What made it more frustrating is how much anti missile defense I had so it took over 5 min for 2 ships to peck away my forces. Then a cruiser from their empire decided to venture into my system so I sent yet again another overwhelming fleet mixed from tiny ships with thrusters to large battleships and not a single hit was taken to the cruiser. Is there anything to fix this or should I just give up and go beam until they balance this issue? Seems like my giant turrets are there just to make noise to scare away the enemy.

23,163 views 6 replies
Reply #1 Top

oh and to add more insult to injury to my pride all their ships had ZERO in mass driver defense.

Reply #2 Top

Yeah I think weapon balancing needs to be a priority imo, also gal civ 2 at this point I feel did it better.

Reply #3 Top

At least in the early game, kinetics should be the weapon of choice, They should be more powerful, more accurate, and have better range, yet they start out weak and don't gain strength at an equal pace..

Not only would it add balance, it is purely logical. We have been throwing rocks for thousands of years. It stands to reason that cannon would be our early weapon of choice. :)

Reply #4 Top

Have you tried to fight the Alts with beam weapons when this unhittable issue is happening? What the OP is describing is not a mass drivers driver issue, it is an odd bug that makes Alterians unhittable. Happens to me all the time where at some ""random" point in the game first attack hit rolls have a chance to hit but after the first firing everything after that is 100% miss so it is just a longer drawn out fight until they peck away and kill my ships. 

 

I havn't played in .82 since combat viewer just crashes the game but in .81 mass drivers were okay.

 

I have this issue with beam weapons and drivers. I have not tested missiles but assume its the same issue.

Reply #5 Top

Yeah, I've been researching beam weapons myself, but the AI hasn't been having any magical accuracy problems with mass drivers that I've seen, they hit just fine.

 

Mass drivers do have terrible stats, you can do twice as much with missile weapons, but this is ignoring defenses.  You can also buy twice as much ECM to match it.  Armor has pretty good stats, but only against diverse damage, if you're just running mass drivers, they'll be forced to put half of their defensive points into types not being utilized.

 

Weapons may need some balance work, but they're balanced against the corresponding defensive options, not just each other.

Reply #6 Top

Quoting goxwerd, reply 4

Have you tried to fight the Alts with beam weapons when this unhittable issue is happening? What the OP is describing is not a mass drivers driver issue, it is an odd bug that makes Alterians unhittable. Happens to me all the time where at some ""random" point in the game first attack hit rolls have a chance to hit but after the first firing everything after that is 100% miss so it is just a longer drawn out fight until they peck away and kill my ships. 

 

I havn't played in .82 since combat viewer just crashes the game but in .81 mass drivers were okay.

 

I have this issue with beam weapons and drivers. I have not tested missiles but assume its the same issue.

 

I wonder if that is the case. I ended up quitting that game and saving over the file so I can't go back and test it out. It would make sense since I had 10 or so ships firing on one cruiser and not a single round landed. Also now that I think about it, I did have space stations with various weapon systems not landing a hit either.  Now if they could only fix the going to war issue as well. I have to keep restarting games since I get stuck not being able to declare war on a race (even after 100 or so odd turns)