Using the right weapons
Using the right or wrong weapons has a huge impact on your success in playing this
game. Using the wrong weapons will leave your ships without a chance in battles, and your
empire ready for the takeover, or will cost you too much money leaving you with a
money-shortage forcing you to cut back in building ships. It is needless to say weapons of
a higher techlevel are better, but there will be times when you simply can't afford to put
the highest techlevel-weapons on your ships yet (or in the end: can't afford them
anymore) and the most expensive weapons are not always the best weapons.
There are five things you'll be doing with your weapons: killing ships, laying minefields,
sweeping minefields, capturing ships and shooting down fighters.
1. Torpedoes
Torpedoes are your main weapons. Their primary use is to kill enemy ships, but
you will also use torpedoes to lay minefields. Especially against cloaking ships this is a
must, but minefields can also be a very strong weapon against smaller but nasty ships. The
Patriot for example is quite hard to kill, especially with an engine shield bonus, but
will blow up after just one minehit.
1.1 Killing ships
How well your torpedoes kill enemy ships depends mainly on their explosive
power. Generally speaking, the higher the techlevel the higher the explosive power. From
looking at Eden Tan's
Infolist , which gives a complete overview of both the costs in money and minerals for
and the kill- and exploderatios for every tube and torpedo, two of the ten possible
torpedotypes are by far more efficient than the rest:
1.2 Laying minefields
Minefields are created by converting your torpedoes into deepspace-mines. The
amount of mines per torpedo is based on the position of the torpedo, not the
techlevel (the Mark 4 Photon for example is techlevel 5, but position 6). Torpedoes are
split into mines following the formula Mines = number of torps * (torp position)^2. One
Mark 4 Photon torpedo will give you 1 * 6^2 = 36 mines. In Eden's Infolist you'll find the
following complete listing of the costs in both MCs and minerals per mine:
| Costs in MCs and minerals per 100 mines layed | ||
| Torpedo Type | MCs / 100 mines | Minerals / 100 mines (of each mineral) |
| Mark 1 Photon | 100.00 | 100.00 |
| Proton Torpedo | 50.00 | 25.00 |
| Mark 2 Photon | 55.56 | 11.11 |
| Gamma Bomb | 62.50 | 6.25 |
| Mark 3 Photon | 48.00 | 4.00 |
| Mark 4 Photon | 36.11 | 2.78 |
| Mark 5 Photon | 63.27 | 2.04 |
| Mark 6 Photon | 54.69 | 1.56 |
| Mark 7 Photon | 44.44 | 1.23 |
| Mark 8 Photon | 54.00 | 1.00 |
from which we can conclude the following:
When using the mineral conversion rate by which Merlins make minerals out of supplies
and consider each supply-unit can be sold for 1 MC, the Mk7 is overall the most economical
to use. The 0.69 minerals they cost more than the Mark 8 equal 2.07 supplies/MCs, far less
than the 9.56 MCs the Mk8 costs more.
The 8.33 MCs the Mark 4 is cheaper equal 8.33 / 3 = 2.78 minerals, while the Mark 7 uses
4.65 less minerals per 100 mines.
1.3 Conclusion: the Mark 7 Photon torpedo
So taking into account both killing ships and laying mines the best overall
torpedo is the Mark 7 Photon. There is a very interesting article on Timo Kreike's site on how
you can make hightech torpedoes for less resources by laying mines from lowtech mines and
scooping them up with a ship with a hightech torpedotube. The Mark 7 however can not be
made cheaper by scooping up lower tech-mines. You can use this trick to cut back the costs
of Mark 8 torpedoes very nicely however.
2. Beams
Beams have three uses: they're needed to sweep enemy minefields, they're used
against enemy ships and they shoot down fighters from enemy carriers.
2.1 Sweeping mines
You can expect your enemies -Especially the robots and the Crystals- to lay
minefields too. You can try flying through them and hope not to hit too many mines, but
you'll lose a lot of ships that way. You'd better sweep those mines. To sweep mines the
captains on your ships fire their beams at random, blowing up the mines. Minesweeping
happens according to the following formula: Mines swept = number of beams *
(beamposition)^2 * minesweeprate. The minesweeprate is host-configurable, and is 4 by
default. Six Heavy Phasers for example would sweep 6*10^2 * 4 = 2400 mines, or 600*3=1800
webmines. We'll have to keep this in mind when choosing which beams to use.
In the beginning of the game you're not very likely to face serious minefields yet,
since most opponents will be concentrating on expansion and simply don't have the
resources available to lay any serious minefields. At this stage you can probably get away
with putting X-rays on your ships. Be aware of surprise minefields in your shipping lanes
layed by cloaked ships though. Later in the game you can always refit those X-rays for
disruptors or even heavier beams.
Once you're facing serious minefields or Crystal webmines it's better to upgrade
(superrefit) some ships to be minesweepers. Diplomacies and Arkhams make great
minesweepers with their six beams. The eight and ten beams on the Missouri and Nova are
even better, but for the amount of fuel a Missouri burns you can send out two Diplomacies
or Arkhams (i.e. 12 beams). Keep in mind that apart from the cost of increasing the
techlevels the Disruptor costs 13 MCs, Heavy Blasters (tech 6, pos. 7) 31 MCs, Phasers
(tech 7/position 8) 35 MCs, Heavy Disruptors (tech 8/position 9) 36 MCs and the tech 10
Heavy Phasers(two techlevels higher=1700MCs) cost 54 MCs a piece. While Heavy Disruptors
will sweep 9^2*4=324 mines (and kill crews very well), one techlevel lower the Phasers
sweep 8^2*4=256 mines for roughly the same price. One techlevel higher Heavy Phasers will
sweep 10^2*4=400 mines. From the Heavy Disruptor this is an increase of 23% in
sweeping-power at an increase in price of 50%, not even taking techlevel-increase (1700
MCs will buy you a lot of extra Heavy Disruptors) or the extra costs in minerals into
account. A Diplomacy with six Heavy Disruptors will sweep 6*9^2*4=1944 mines per turn,
clearing a path of 44 lightyears. Six Heavy Phasers will sweep 2400 mines per turn,
equaling 49 lightyears. Not much of an improvement for the extra costs.
2.2 Capturing ships
There will be times when your beams are used to fight enemy ships. This is very
rare, however, since your torpedoes should take care of the killing. You should never rely
on your beams to destroy an enemy ship. Beams vs. ships have only one use, and that is to
capture the ship. So what you're looking for are beams with a high kill-ratio rather than
a high explosive ratio.
There are three beamtypes especially suited for capturing ships:
Purely economical: the X-rays are the best buy, both in minerals and in MCs. The
difference between them and Disruptors is that disruptors are twice as powerful, but 15
times as expensive in MCs, 3.5 times as expensive in minerals (4 total vs. 14). Heavy
disruptors are 3.33 times as effective, but 18 times as expensive in MCs and cost about 14
times as much minerals.
Also keep in mind capturing ships will only occur when you're out of torpedoes or have
disabled your torpedoes. When you ran out of torpedoes against a serious battleship you
won't capture it because it either destroys you or has a very large crew. When you've
disabled your torpedoes (NTP friendly code) you know you're facing a freighter, and X-rays
will do in those cases. Again, this is something to keep in mind when choosing your beams.
2.3 Shooting down fighters
When facing a carrier your beams shoot down enemy fighters while your ship
fires torpedoes at the enemy ship. Despite any rumours you might have heard beamtype does
not influence anything here. Each beamtype has the same recharge-ratio, and beams never
miss. Thus tech 1 Lasers are just as effective as tech 10 Heavy Phasers here. For this
purpose it doesn't matter which beams you use.
2.4 Conlusion: which beams?
From the above we can conclude we don't want to be spending too much on our
beams, since torpedoes are our main weapon and the techlevel doesn't effect the amount of
fighters our beams shoot down. Beams should be able to capture enemy ships if the occasion
is there, for which tech 1 X-rays will do. But they should also be reasonable
minesweepers.
Overall the best beams to put on your ships are Disruptors. They are great for capturing
ships, though maybe not as economical for it as X-rays. They're tech 5 but position 6, so
one beam can sweep 144 mines per turn. A Diplomacy with six Disruptors can sweep 864
mines, equaling roughly 30 lightyears (square root of the number of mines) of minefields.
Not all that impressive maybe once you're stuck inside a huge minefield, but it'll do.
Heavy Disruptors are even better crewkillers and minesweepers, but the money you'd spend
on them is better spent on building more and better ships. You also have to take into
account your beams might get blown up with the ship without even having fired once.