Rock-Paper-Scissors? + Upgrades

is there any?

from Sins Forums
Are there any counter-units in Sins? I've been playing since yesterday but I can't really figure out the benefit of making cruisers or other types of frigates. I tend to just spam carriers and whatever frigate does the same damage type as bombers, or spam battleships and whatever frigate does the same type of damage as them, then upgrade that damage type.

Do LRMs counter cobalts? Do beam cruisers counter LRMs? I'm just trying to get across what I mean, i'm not actually asking about those units. :D It seems to me it is just more DPS = the winner, not unit mixes or micro. This is my biggest concern with the game, because i'd really like to see tactics play a bigger role. Do I just not know what i'm doing?


Another question. Upgrades. When do you get them? I usually get them fairly early to buff my disciples + battleships, then after i've gotten the first few laser upgrades I switch to shields. Am I WAY off? Without doing the math, it would seem like it is a better investment to just build more ships. If so, then are the upgrades ever useful? Seems like even the maximum of 25% isn't that much because for that money you could just build MORE ships. I wish upgrades had a bigger effect. Am I wrong?
13,699 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
The most clearly visible counter is flaks vs fighters/bombers. Beyond that, Sins was designed with little noticeable R/P/S.

Cruisers fill a lot of support roles quite well. Add a bunch of Hoshikos to your fleet, and they'll keep a lot of your ships alive much longer, while the Ceilo helps with shield recharge for friendly ships, and helps with focused fire on enemies, for example. The support cruisers don't shine in direct combat, but they can make a pretty big difference.

Upgrades generally start paying off pretty early - weapon upgrades anyway. Hull/shield upgrades I find are always good off the bat. So, really, unless you always fly around with less than 10 ships, upgrades are good! There's a limit to how many ships you can build, after all, and more ships that die twice as fast as a few fewer ships that don't is a pretty noticeable difference ;)
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
It's all scale. If you're ending the game with a dozen ships, the upgrades are pretty worthless. If you have 2k fleet points, odds are it was worth it to upgrade the entire tech tree by then.

As far as tactics go, dps is nice, but shield mitigation means more dps isn't that much use. There are rps elements of a sort, there are I think five different armor classes, and the various damage types have modifiers against them. You'd have to look up the stuff to see what damage types are better against which ships, but don't overlook the support ships. You seem to like the advent, try using fleets of fairly equal numbers in disciples, illuminators, guardians and subjugators after you get the repair upgrade for the subjugators. Toss in a capital colonizer and carrier and you can take out significant fleets with insignificant losses. The disciples can keep them supplied with antimatter for sustained combat effectiveness as well.

I'm a big fan of the invincible support ship combinations, as opposed to the light frigate spam. 140 disciples and a couple capital ships makes a fleet not, you can kill it with a third of that in attack vessels and the right supports and take very few casualties.
Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
I'd like to see a list of comparative DPSs and armor type values.


I like the game, but I wish there was a bit more rps. Even in Starcraft, certain units are better against others and you want one type to take priority over another.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Such a list will pop up after we can easily read the entity files - there are plenty of people ready to dive into the nitty gritty numbers :)