AI War:OLD Starships

How Do I Best Use Starships?

A: Starships are very powerful, but they are also harder to use than your main Space-Dock-based military ships. Here are a few tips:

• Try augmenting your fleets with Starships, but avoid making fleets that purely consist of starships. On enemy planets, when they see you doing this, they will build lots of Anti-Starship Arachnids to counter them. You'll want other ships to support your starships and take out those enemy arachnids.

• One or two starships by themselves aren't generally that powerful. They do a lot of damage and can strike several ships at once, but they are weak against fighters in particular, and also some other ship types can whittle away at them from a distance (such as missile frigates). Like with an aircraft carrier in a naval fleet, your starships are meant to have strike groups of fighters, frigates, and other smaller mobile ships to augment them.

• Starships can be repaired. So if a starship is getting low on health, be sure to retreat before it's too late! Having engineers repair it back to full health is free, but having to build a replacement is quite expensive.

• There are two basic upgrade paths for Starships: Raid/Leech or Flagship/Zinth/Spire. The Spire starship is the most powerful in the game, firing powerful frigate-style missiles. However, you get more of both the Raid and Leech starships, and the Leech starships allow you to "reclaim" enemies like parasites do. This in itself can be quite a formidable bonus, so it's not always an easy choice as to which path to take.

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Scout Starships

What Are Scout Starships Good For?

Q: I've been using them as scouts, but when I send them out into the galaxy they tend to die too quickly for them to be really useful. What is the point of these versus just regular scouts?

A: Scout starships are not really meant for long-range scouting, although you can use them for that if you are prepared to micromanage them a fair bit. The best way to scout the galaxy remains the core Mark I through Mark IV scouts that you build at the space dock and advanced factory.

The purpose of Scout starships is more as a support position with your attacking fleets. Bringing a scout into enemy systems reveals a lot of up-to-date information in the planetary summary and the intel summary, which can be invaluable. With their cloaking, and higher health, scout starships are easy to bring in and then have hide at the edge of the planet you are attacking. Smaller scouts will often get picked off by sniper turrets or other ships, but the scout starships can provide a very durable and useful mobile scanning station.

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Riot Starships

How Do I Use Riot Starships?

A: The new (as of 3.029) Riot Control Starship is a some-assembly-required product. Here's how to get started:

• 1) Unlock the Riot Control Starship at the Science Lab.
• 2) Build one at a Starship Constructor (costs comparable to a dreadnought).
• 3) When it is finished, it only has the base gun which is decent but relatively short ranged.
• 4) Select the Riot starship, and click on the "MOD:RIOT" construction group tab at the bottom.
• 5) Now you can queue up construction of its subsidiary modules, the in-game descriptions should be enough but here's a brief rundown:
  • Machine gun, mounts on any of the 4 outer hardpoints.
  • Laser gun, mounts on any of the 4 outer hardpoints.
  • Shotgun, mounts on either of the 2 inner hardpoints.
  • AOE Tazer, mounts on either of the 2 inner hardpoints.
  • Forcefield Generator, mounts on either of the 2 inner hardpoints.
• 6) This construction will take time like any other, and engineers help.

You can mix and match as you please, and if any point you want to change you can select the module(s), scrap them (careful not to scrap the ship), and rebuild. You can also rebuild (even during combat) them if they are destroyed, and they can be destroyed individually (though the forcefield will provide cover if you have one, or two).

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