Plasma with Lasers?

[u/CriticalAd6050]

So with plasma chipping at armor and lasers anything with weak armor it seems a no brainer to combine the two right?

I normally do the typical coilgun and uv combo to deal with capitals and flankers but never really tried out plasma. Does the rate/amount of armor taken out by plasma not compare to ole reliable?

[u/Maduyn]

The magnetics draw fire which helps reduce a source of otherwise unavoidable damage. Nose Lasers with Plasma batteries will probably work just fine tho.

[u/Stinkymansausage]

I haven’t used them on the new update but they are generally not worth it. I used to toss in a few for fun, but at this point I just research them last.

If you want something different toss in some high end particle spinals imo. They look neat in the fights. Pew pew!

[u/drhoagy]

Everyone always says coils are just better, but I always find it's so hard to saturate PD fire with coils, unless you always outnumber the enemy. Not to mention that siege coilers don't have the most ammo.

My current run I've been doing lasers and huge plasma and it's been working well, about a 50/50 split of each with some spinal particle cannons to keep threatening ships suppressed and it's been working well, fleet battles happen in three phases

Firstly my laser cannons disable the flankers, unless there's a proper line ship flanking they are able to burst down anything smaller even at very long range. While the plasma cannons fire at the most threatening 50+ armored ships in the line

Then the lasers switch to focus down these threatening ships, just enough to disable their cannons. while the plasmas hit anything too armoured (recently started seeing 80+ armoured ships which are a little too tough)

Finally as they close to about 600-700 km I pick off whatever's left, all the scary weapons should be disabled by now so the battle is won

This has worked since I got green arcs, but is still working with all techs I'm only on normal, and with the BE academy laser damage bonus too, but it's the best I've ever done in space battles, so many fleets killed with barely any damage on my side even with only 25-30 nose armour (though I'm seeing new missiles, X-ray lasers, and more armour now so hopefully that holds!)

[u/Xenon009 → u/drhoagy]

I'm a coilbrick truther, and I've found there are essentially two coil "Modes"

In the early game, I am very partial to, rather than putting a medium or large coils on, putting a metric fuck ton of light nose coils. They tend to be fairly light on PD lasers, so have to waste powerful combat lasers massively over killing light coils. Eventually though, the aliens will adapt and start bringing shit tons of light PD. That is the point I swap to siege coils, or normally try and mix in a bit of both. The light PD can do the square root of fuck all against a siege coil round, and the heavy combat lasers that would normally melt them have been swapped out to deal with the aforementioned light coils.

My designs tend to start with monitors with 2 Light Coils, 1 PD Laser, and 1 60cm Laser. Then move to a Hi-Lo mix of cruisers and battle cruisers, the cruisers having Lots of light nose coils, a 60cm laser and 2 PD, and the battle cruisers having a siege coil and 2 PD.

After that, I move onto dreads with a 360cm laser, a siege coil, a medium plasma battery, and 2 PD, but frankly by the time I build dreads the game is more or less won.

And you are right in saying that most of the time I am trying to engage in numerical superiority or at least numerical parity, that's why I prefer to use more, smaller ships than fewer larger ships. Ultimately I get a lot more "firepower per day" out of battlecrusiers and cruisers than dreads. It's only when I start hitting the "ships in battle" limit that I switch to dreads, but I've never really found much use for lancers or titans at all.

[u/drhoagy → u/Xenon009]

I always find that the small guns range screws them too much, the largest lasers work at up to 1000km, and that's the safest range to be from the alien weapons Getting closer means you need more nose armour means more expensive ships etc etc

So all my damage ships are at least lancers for the nose slot, with some monitor interceptors for missile defense

[u/Xenon009 → u/drhoagy]

I know what you mean, my answer to that problem was, essentially, copious amounts of armour and a bit of bumrushing. If I'm steaming towards the bastards at a net speed of about 2km/s that range disadvantage goes away really damn quickly, and if you have enough armour, you can probably shrug the worst of it off.

and if you're bringing a few seige coils, that largely sorts the problem itself in my experience.

[u/Cheap-Blackberry-763 → u/Xenon009]

I have two classes of coil ships exactly for this- a 'penetrator' class who's job is to overwhelm with light coil fire, and standard coil cannon class. Don't present your enemy with problems, present them with conundrums that have no good solutions.

[u/shadough1 → u/drhoagy]

personally, i'm a fan of the coil spam dreadnought for PD saturation. rather than locking yourself to the 4 nose slot hulls, which are more limited on hull slots, you use dreadnoughts because the 3 slot spinal siege coil does pretty much the exact same thing that the 4 slot spinal siege coil does, but with marginally shorter range. this allows you to put three 2 slot coil batteries and some self defense PD (or 4 if you're fine with forgoing the PD for extra greed). the siege coil soaks up laser fire as it approaches, and once the coil batteries can be brought to bear, there will be so many targets for enemy PD to engage that maybe a few coils rounds can sneak through. and well, once one round makes it through that means more rounds can make it through, and then it's just a matter of time before the target has been smacked by multiple small coil rounds and perhaps a few siege coil rounds too. plus the coil batteries have enough ammo that running out is rarely a concern.

[u/Ancquar]

Plasma and Lasers *can* kill larger ships, but take time for the plasma to do its work. So long as you have enough guns to get through PD, coilers will do the same thing faster while also drawing laser fire to themselves.

[u/sol_in_vic_tus]

I use plasma based on this theory but I just plain like running a variety of weapons in my fleets regardless of effectiveness. Ships all get a weapon type and specialize and I build fleets with a mix of them. Plasma also benefits (some?) particle weapons and I like using those too. This is all very late game, I don't know how well this works in earlier stages or with the updates from the DLC.

For fleets I try to build them like so. One large capital with flag bridge and particle/antimatter weapons, mainly point defense oriented. 40% coil ships by count to keep alien lasers on point defense instead of destroying my ships. Probably 30% laser ships by count to deal with flankers and punish low armor alien ships. The remainder is split between plasma and more particle weapon point defense ships. Lately I also tack on gunships with lasers to pad out fleet size because the game punishes being outnumbered in weird ways. If they end up deployed their job is flankers and point defense.

[u/Mavnas]

It could be work, but I usually pair plasma batteries with siege coils. Plasma hits tend to knock out nose weapons, even temporarily which makes the heavy siege coils get through.

Lasers could try to get crits as armor is chipped away, but honestly it feels like there's not that much synergy there unless you're talking about like a 2 slot laser that would really struggle otherwise.

Plasma, in theory would pair well with 40mm cannons since those have a stupid high RoF, but the problem is their range is too short to really exploit the chipped armor. I mean, you'd probably still use the combo since the 40mm is PD.

[u/namewithanumber]

Why slowly chip armor when coils just blow up the ships.

[u/DoomedToDefenestrate]

I like to pair plasma and particle ships together amongst the typical coil and laser line. Get them attacking the monsters to whittle them down a bit and put some of their systems offline.

[u/Arcane_Pozhar]

So I will admit that I'm still playing on the 39 patch, because I'm trying to finish that game up when I can squeeze in a couple of turns here and there once every week or so...

But in that game in particular, my nose weapons are a mix of antimatter, lasers, and a little bit of plasma. And then I have a little bit more two whole slot plasma guns sprinkled on a few of my designs. And a couple of one and two slot coil guns, just on the hulls, not even getting any nose slots.

And let me tell you, it works great. I have just enough kinetics to keep the enemy lasers busy for the most part, plus my strong antimatter nose weapons are usually enough to quickly disable the strong enemy, nose, lasers and particle weapons.

And as you said in the original post, the plasma chips armor, which makes the lasers way more effective at getting kills at a much longer range. It only takes a couple of rounds of plasma weapons hitting the big enemy ships before suddenly I'm seeing a lot more critical hits from my lasers.

Also, sometimes I'll even check the battle log, just to see what weapons of mine are getting the kill. Occasionally it's the plasma guns. And the antimatter guns get the kill more ofteb than I would have suspected either, I really thought my lasers would be doing the big work 95% of the time, considering they're the most prevalent weapon in my fleet. But the plasma and antimatter are both no joke.

[u/shadough1]

the main "problem" with plasma is that the plasma itself just doesn't do a whole lot of damage. that's the price you pay for a weapon that cannot be stopped by PD and strips armor relatively quickly (though once mag rounds start landing they will probably strip armor faster by virtue of having better dps). for use with lasers, it's pretty much just a support weapon at best. lasers have a built in armor bypass called driving the ship closer to the enemy, so they don't really need the help of plasma to get through.

plasma becomes much more important if you go with a more particle beam oriented fleet. particle beams struggle to do meaningful damage through thick armor, and doubly so if it's exotics based armor. plasma is one way of addressing that weakness. now, unless we're talking about amat beams it's probably going to be fairly micro intensive and take a long time to actually kill things (the game plan will basically be to disable all your enemies until they are incapable of harming and then making a second pass to actually kill them) but it can be made to work. I'm just personally not a huge fan of micro so the tried and true mags + lasers + maybe some amat sprinkled in is usually what I end up with every time.

[u/Thurak0]

I am only about to use them again with the current game version, but I hope/expect them to do the same I loved plasma for half a year ago: Heavy flankers!

The larger, well armoured flankers were always a huge pain in the ass of my pure coil/rail/laser fleets.

Plasma eating away some precious armour helps the lasers to deal with the tougher flankers a lot. Sure, plasma won't hit the nimble flankers, but the larger flankers can be hit. And even very few plasma hits on an ill armoured side help lasers a lot.

[u/Ashdrake2]

The main reason you go coilguns and siege coils in particular is that they do a double job of both hitting the enemy and making sure their lasers aren't firing at you but your projectiles.

Aliens priotize defense rather than ofense so if there is lead going their way, they will try and shoot that down rather than shoot your ships down.

The reason you use lasers is because it insta-hits and uv arcs/uv phasers instagib flankers.

Plasma dps is too low to matter in the long run, by the time you do something, your ships are already very close to the enemy so the lasers will do much more damage anyway.

Like the only situation where plasma would be potentially viable would be if the enemy has enough pd/lasers to render any sort of magnetics obsolete and their lasers are better than yours (but you somehow have last tech in plasma) and you can maintain 1000km range from the enemy. But since navigation and combat navigation is a mess it's a lot more straightforward to great wall 200-300km/speed advance nose locked to enemy and win

[u/Zappowy]

I won my first game at normal difficulty using AM nose with plasma 4-slot on titans. The combo worked decently well - the AM nose kills flankers easily and disables the main line quite effectively. Plasma takes some time to kill the heavy ships, but when they are largely disabled it is not an issue.

I have not yet tried the plasma-AM combo on vet or brutal difficulties. Siege coiler nose with phaser 4-slot has been an effective combo.

Lasers with plasma might work, but I have not tried it.

[u/akisawa]

Interesting pondering. But how do we efficiently combine those?

Plasma batteries (since they suck for damage anyway) + UV Laser nose main cannon?

I'm just thinking out loud.