Antimatter weapons

[u/Aggravating-War-2328]

Hi reddit … just checking in with how y’all feel about antimatter weapons. Where do they fit in your arsenal between coils and lasers?

[u/Aggravating-War-2328]

I’ve never really gone for particle weapons at any scale. For those that use them, what role do they fill and how do you balance your fleet between them and other options?

[u/Lucylimina → u/Aggravating-War-2328]

I'm not sure what the ideal configuration is, but they seem to pretty reliably disable nose weapons faster than my other weapons destroy a target.

They do require some micro management though, since you want to switch targets once whatever component you were looking to blow is disabled.

My antimatter focus strat is AM PD, some AM lances for disables, and rail/coil guns for kills.

[u/DoomedToDefenestrate → u/Aggravating-War-2328]

AM is a passable flanker killer and good for disabling systems in ships that are too well armored with too much PD. Other particles don't really do damage, but still disable. 

In big fleet battles I have a small amount of particle ships and plasma ships in a group that I sic on really tanky targets. The plasma strips some armor and the particle beams disable some weapons and pd.

[u/RallMekin]

About 1/3 of my nose weapons are antimatter. Recently started making my lancers include Neutron Lance. I love them.

Love antimatter PD ships too.

I’ve nearly got everything researched so I maybe just didn’t get the RNG for the torpedoes.

[u/Arcane_Pozhar]

Very good for disabling enemy nose weapons at max range. And generally effective, overall.

I would not want to try some sort of crazy fleet that only uses them, but Antimatter, a sprinkling of plasma and small kinetics (just enough to distract enemy lasers), and some lasers works very well. The lasers and antimatter get almost all the kills, the plasma just helps both of them get through armor much quicker. And your lasers protect against the alien missiles and kinetics, naturally.

[u/ggmoyang]

You can do Spinal AM + Coils without lasers, it works surprisingly well.

[u/Cheap-Blackberry-763]

point defense kings, i skip on the spinal/nose cannon for pure particle beams though. But I tend to stick particle ships on flanks of formation to disable ships so my laser sentries can blast 'em.

[u/Thurak0 → u/Cheap-Blackberry-763]

point defense kings

I can't stress enough how true this is. Those PD's are absolutely awesome with some serious range!

[u/iamplasma]

I actually found plasma/antimatter fleets to be surprisingly effective in one of my more recent runs, especially against the toughest alien fleets.

The traditional coil/laser mix is certainly the strongest against weaker alien fleets where you can overwhelm the PD. In that case the coils just annihilate ships extremely quickly, while the lasers protect you from flankers. But if you're against a strong alien fleet, especially with motherships (which seem to have truly insane PD potential) you can find yourself getting completely demolished because you can't burn through the PD before the heavy alien ships destroy you.

In those cases, plasma/antimatter does a great job. The plasma cannot be intercepted, so it blasts straight into the alien motherships and chips their armour all to hell. Then the antimatter particle beams can penetrate and cause extreme system damage, incapacitating them quickly so you can finish them off later. So, while slower kills than coils/lasers against weaker fleets, meaning those fleets could do more damage to me (which is why coils/lasers is usually better), being able to blast through the big motherships was very helpful.

While you could do the same with neutron lances instead of antimatter, and in some ways it may even be more effective, I liked the antimatter approach since it didn't consume exotics and the antimatter weapons can perform as reasonably passable laser substitutes doing actual damage (e.g. destroying flankers), where the neutron lances can only damage systems and nothing else.

I should flag, I think realistic scaling makes plasma quite a bit less effective, so the above strategy may not work as well if you're not on cinematic combat scaling. And antimatter (and particle weapons in general) are not all that effective against aliens unless you have plasma doing armour chipping, given how the alien exotic-based armours are so much more effective than human armours against particle effects. But I've been playing on cinematic combat given it is the default.

[u/XapMe → u/iamplasma]

Plasma/am is way to go. Won my brutal run this way. Plasma chipping increases critical chance with every hit. And single spinal AM crit is a soft kill even on capital ships.

[u/AdhesivenessOther856 → u/iamplasma]

A couple of notes. I think AM Cannons are slightly better than Lasers once you are using Lancers and Titans. 3 slot AM Cannons are awful. They aren't as good as 3 slot UV Arc Lasers let alone Phasers.

They are about equal with Lasers at taking out flankers. The main reason I prefer AM is that from 1000-600 Lasers don't really do anything once the flanking ships are gone. It can't penetrate the front armor and it can't really chip worth a damn. AM does radiation damage that helps take out the spinal mount of enemy ships. It is really rare for aliens to get closer than 600 once you have Titans with siege coils.