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:

• The Mark 4 Photon: techlevel 5, explosive power of 30. Lower techlevels have a maximum explosive power of 15, the tech 6 Mark 5 Photon only gives you 35.
• The Mark 7 Photon: techlevel 8, explosive power of 48. You need this one if you're facing serious resistance. The Mk5 and the Mk6 are only slightly cheaper and offer explosive powers of only 35 or 40. The tech 10 Mark 8 requires 1700 MCs worth of techlevel-upgrade, and both the tubes and the torpedoes are 50% more expensive. In return you get an increase to an explosive power of 55; a 15% gain for a 50% higher price.
  A Missouri for example will damage a Darkwing an average of 53% when armed with Mk8s, 50% with Mk7s. If you have the money and minerals to spare to upgrade to Mk8s: it won't hurt you, but wouldn't you be better of building more or bigger ships or more torpedoes to lay more minefields?
• The Mark 8 Photon: techlevel 10, explosive power of 55. Less economical than the Mark 7, but simply the most powerful torpedo available. In post-shiplimit stages of the game it is a good idea to upgrade to Mark 8, simply because you can afford it by then and your enemies will be using the Mark 8 as well.

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:

from which we can conclude the following:

• The Mark 4 Photon gives the best value moneywise: 36.11 MCs per 100 mines. Using this torpedo mines cost a total of 8.34 minerals per 100 mines.
• The Mark 8 Photon is the best buy mineralwise: 3.00 minerals per 100 mines (1 torpedo gives you 100 mines). These 100 mines would cost you 54 MCs though.
• Using the Mark 7 Photon 100 mines cost 3.69 minerals and 44.44 MCs.

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:

• X-ray laser. Techlevel 1, with a kill-ratio of 15. X-rays cost 2 MCs and one KT of tritanium.
• Disruptor. Techlevel 5, kill-ratio of 30. Costs 13 MCs, 12 duranium and one KT of tritanium and molybdenum.
• Heavy disruptor. Techlevel 8, kill-ratio of 50. 36 MCs, 17 duranium, 1 tritanium and 37 molybdenum.

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.

Back to main guide page
Back to index