I'm going to make another fleet and try out M4s, or probably mix and mash my M4s with M3+. I do however notice that M3s+ are able to survive if most of the shots from 1 burst miss. It's also notable with the Rs since they got only 2 guns to work with per turret.Hector0x wrote: ↑Sat, 17. Oct 20, 10:43Whenever you can't tank with your hp or armor, you have to bring characters or spells which provide high dodge. Or distract the enemy with a lot of cheap summons. If he can only ever attack one unit at a time, his damage output gets severely limited by each summon's hp.
No ship type can effectively tank against the OCV. Dodging doesn't work due to high projectile speeds. So you need something similar to a cheap summon. M5 or M4 will work.
M3 with heavy weapons are worse summons, because they also die in a single hit and you loose 10 times the resources you would loose with a very low cost summon. Keep in mind that some M5 are more expensive than M4. Their is no clear answer on which class to use. But i wouldn't use high tier fighter weapons on either of them (EMPC), unless wasting crystals is no issue. But if that was the case you could do with less crystal fabs/solar plants and have more ship part factories in the first place.
M4:
- better if you want your summon to be the damage dealer. M4 generally have more gun slots and a lot more energy power than M5. And the cost difference between M5>M4 is very low compared to M4>M3.
- 5MJ shields are a lot cheaper than M1 shields. (but against the OCV i'd argue that shields are useless on M4, better get more ships instead)
- this method makes tactics very easy. You basically only need to make sure that your swarm attacks together.
M5
- typically M5 offer way worse combat effectiveness than M4 (for DPS, entry level weaponry like IRE, PAC or MD is a bit less cost effective than tier 2 lasers like PRG or EBC)
- but some M5 designs are the cheapest flying things you can get. They limit OCV damage the most.
- they are only good for distraction. Trying to have them also do much of the damage is less cost effective than with M4.
- use a very cheap M5 with only 1 weapon to minimize the cost of your flying thing. And low range on the weapon to lure the OCV into attacking mostly them. Never use shields on M5.
- if you go this route the rest of your fleet needs to deliver most of the damage. Having high range on them is good.
- this method requires more tactics because your distraction summons need to make first contact, but also get support soon after.
- it should be harder to retreat a mixed fleet with M5 distractions than a pure fleet with M4 damage dealers
Also worth noting is the population cost for each ship. It can get very difficult to maintain swarming tactics with very cheap ships because they get built very fast. Basically your population gets drained until your production speed is low enough to match the population growth. Looping a very cheap M5 will eventually limit your population to something like 60 or so. Having more shipyards helps.
I believe a mix of M4 and M5 is most effective. Fast and deadly. The OCV is just too powerful to risk shiny capships. If it goes south you can still hit "flee all" and have a good chance to save most of your fleet.
Also, why would you not put shields on an M5 other than being a waste of crystals? How do enemies prioritize targets?