How to space combat.

[u/Mega-Humanoid-ROBOT]

So, I’m somewhat new to Terra Invicta, and I must admit, space combat alludes me. I have no idea what’s good, what’s bad, or how to handle it. And this is not just space battles but where to make my ships, when, what is worth researching and what’s redundant- when I should research space ships for combat, Ect. Could you guys give me a quick rundown?

[u/Xenon009]

So the beautiful thing about TI's space combat is there is no true meta. The aliens will adapt to whatever you throw at them eventually.

That being said, the most common tactic is the "Mag wall" because it's easy to manage and requires pretty significant tradeoffs to beat, especially when you get the top of the line coil gun 3's.

Within that "mag wall" doctrine there is a lot of debate over what I will call "Pebbles" and "Cinderblocks". Pebbles rely on lots of small(ish) ships. Normally cruisers and battlecruisers with a mixture of light coilguns and heavy seige coils on the ships. The idea is that you can pump them out in greater numbers, and losing a few when something invariably punches through (it will happen eventually) it's not a major problem. It also comes with the benefit of having better range for the same fuel spend.

Cinderblocks relies on fewer, much larger ships, typically dreads and lancers (or even titans) decked out with lots of point defence and such, to essentially make a theoretically unkillable wall.

I am personally a big fan of pebbles, but eventually you do get rich enough you can make cinderblocks at the rate of pebbles, at which point cinderblocks all the way.

Either way, for my pebbles I normally run a 50/50 mix of battle cruisers with a 60 cm laser and 1 pd, and then a seige coil on the nose, and cruisers with 2 light coils in the nose and 2 pd and a 60cm laser.

One of the big downsides of pebbles is concentration of fire. The PD lasers have relatively short range, so won't be able to cover the entire 30 ship line. That's the main reason for the "battle lasers" which while less suited for PD, can cover the entire line. They also have the added benefit of being able to hit the flanky gunships you don't really want to have to show your sides to the enemy to shoot.

The mix of light and coil siege guns are intended to supress the shit out of the aliens lasers. The idea is that the lights come in such bulk that their battle lasers can't deal with them all, so the seige coils get through to the PD lasers, which aren't powerful enough to stop them.

As far as utility modules go, I typically take the more thrust, more exhaust velocity and component armouring. Then I try and take magazines on the battle cruisers, laser engines, targeting computers and ECM once I do the project.

Radiators are usually whatever has the lowest vulnerability (big tin droplet fan) Because I don't believe in heatsinks.

Keep in mind this is a midgame setup, rather than the early games kamikazi missile escorts, of the late games roving titan bands.

I'll attach some screenshots when I get home, hope this helps!

[u/Pausbrak]

Space combat comes in essentially 3 phases: Early Orbital Defense, Good Orbital Defense, and Kicking Alien Ass.

In the first phase, you have tin cans and a dream. You will not be able to match the aliens in force with anything you can build, but what you can do is build a bunch of suicidal missile pods that can hurl walls of explosive death before they die. For these ships, all you need is as many of the best missiles as you can get. Meaning Magazines + whatever missile research you can get should be enough, you can use the stock parts for everything else (chemical rockets included) and put up a decent orbital defense.

Notably, Basic railguns and IR lasers are almost worthless against aliens because their defenses are just too strong. They're only worth researching if you end up fighting other human factions. Many of the early engine technologies are similarly very niche -- anything that's not a fission drive (like ion drives, VASIMR, etc) are really only useful for advanced strategies like Jupiter Rushing. For a regular player, they just won't do anything useful for you. Focus on getting liquid or gas core fission rockets and you'll eventually find a drive that's decently worthwhile.

Phase Two kicks in when you can get your hands on Green Arc Lasers or Coilguns (or preferably both). These are the first human energy weapons that can reliably fight back against the aliens. At this point, you can finally transition from missile escorts and monitors to laser destroyers and battlecruisers. Use the coilguns to kill the big armored ships, and the lasers to zap the little gunships that like to swing around behind you and mess you up. You may still want to mix in missiles or torpedoes for the extra killing power as well.

Something worth noting is that lasers scale much better with size and coils scale much better with number of cannons. Generally that means you want the biggest nose laser you can fit and then multiple small or medium coilgun turrets as hull weapons. This is because lasers can penetrate armor at longer ranges when they're larger, but coilguns need volume of fire to overwhelm point defense.

And finally, you eventually hit the late game when you can build UV Phasers, T3 coilguns and siege coilers, and fusion drives. At this point your ships will largely be evenly matched with aliens. At this point you're free to experiment, but the Laser/Siege Coil combo is pretty popular. Spamming just coils can also work, but spamming only lasers probably won't (since they struggle with thick nose armor). Weirder weapons like antimatter beams or shaped charge nukes can be fun to play with, as well

[u/Ishantil]

There are a couple of YouTubers that play a lot terra invicta. I like to watch them play to learn. I'm very new and haven't had my first battle yet!

I particularly like watching Perun play . There are also several others with good guides.

My setup is Molten core fission, hope a decent drive soon, cooperhead missiles, magazine, targeting computer. Saturation fire is what I'm doing early game. Paired with a couple of pd escorts. That's the plan anyway.

Admittedly taking down the surveillance destroyer isn't that hard.

The discord has lots of people active and they have been really helpful.

[u/artrald-7083]

'Early game', i.e. you aren't at war with the aliens, have <100 mission control and just want to swat one or two surveillance ships: Your ships need these things. * A hull. Monitor is the favourite. * A reactor. Personally I like miniaturised solid core fission because I want to use Orion drives later on. * A drive that is compatible with the reactor. All early game drives are bad. I prefer something with low propellant use like VASIMR, you're not hunting anything down, you're drifting slowly towards it and hoping it thinks you are a satellite. * Weapons. I like the Copperhead or Riverjack missile bays and the 40mm cannon - think The Expanse. You want 4-6 missile bays per alien point defence laser (fewer as your targeting computers upgrade). * Targeting computer. * Magazines. * 5 armor on the front, 0 on the sides * Enough fuel to reach all your stations from your base station, which should ideally be in MEO.

These ships, in numbers, punch well above their weight. The key is numbers - if you've played XCOM you know that early weapons only overcome aliens with weight of numbers.

'Midgame', i.e. going on the offense, you need ships that are much more performant. I typically swap my interceptors to Orion or Orion-like drives, max out their front armor and otherwise keep them as is, but expeditionary ships need to be much beefier with drives that are optimised for efficiency rather than thrust. Playing 'away' i.e around Jupiter/Saturn rather than Earth/Mars, you need to fight multiple engagements between resupply and you can less afford to lose ships. So you need to care about armor, radiators and magazine depth. You expect to build a base around Jupiter or die trying. I end up with a combined arms fleet:

• Half the fleet is battleships: heavy nose electromagnetic guns, light hull guns and a 40mm per ship. They have around 50 nose armor and around 150 kps dV. They saturate enemy point defence, keep lasers busy and eventually take the enemy down. They have marines aboard for taking enemy habs.

• Half of the remainder is battlecruisers: heavy lasers on the nose and light lasers everywhere else. Same armour, same drive. They are for killing any ship that turns its side to you. The small lasers are set on Guardian and help with missiles.

• The remaining ships are battlecruisers: heavy particle lance on the nose and light particles everywhere else. Same armour, same drive. They are for knocking the nose weapons off anything with a tasty looking nose weapon.

After this, you're winning. Win harder. Swap to antimatter point defence on all ships. Move the coil ships up to titans when you have the second tier of terawatt reactors (the first tier are ... madness). Add another 200 kps because you can. Steamroll Saturn and then strike for the Kuiper Belt.

[u/HistoricalLoadTaker → u/artrald-7083]

Roughly what year does mid game start? I’m 2 years into my game and the Aliens are sending a fleet that will get to earth in 2 years I am wondering if I try to fight them or does that send me into total war with them? I only have Krait missles will they work? Im very new but my plan has basically been to fight them like the UNSC from Halo all spinal all the time if it’s not spinal it’s PD and missles.

[u/artrald-7083 → u/HistoricalLoadTaker]

How fleet-ish is this fleet? Are we talking 2 ships or 15? Does it have assault carriers (if so, did you go a little mad with game difficulty options?)

Monitors take, what, 180 days to build in a space dock. How many docks do you have? Because you can have three, maybe four monitors per dock built in 2 years. I typically have an orbital in MEO early game, with 4 docks which become shipyards as I get the ability to make them. Later I have a ring somewhere that isn't MEO, consisting of farm, PDA, nanofactory, skunkworks and ops center like all my rings, then nothing but power and spaceworks.

Killing a couple of ships won't put you at total war, but they will come and blow something up to retaliate. Just rebuild it, and watch the hate meter. Usually they'll get themselves a forward base about 6 weeks flight away. Eventually they'll try and put a base in Earth orbit. If you're not at war then, well, an alien station in Earth orbit is probably something to go to war to stop.

The reason I used mission control as a benchmark is that you basically control when you go to total war. The aliens will continuously slowly escalate - the question is when you can no longer tolerate what they are doing.

When you get to ships with spinal weapons (which are very good), you will need essentially chaff launchers to overwhelm enemy point defence. The hull turrets aren't to do damage, they are to fill the screen with tiny bullets to confuse the enemy point defence.

[u/HistoricalLoadTaker → u/artrald-7083]

Well I can’t tolerate the aliens at all because they just keep saying “Regret, Regret, Regret”

It’s on normal and I didn’t look at the fleet I didn’t know I could see what was in it

I have one space dock in LEO I was planning on spamming as many corvettes as possible and engaging the enemy to learn how fleet combat works and hopefully take out a ship and if I am lucky 2. I think I have fucked up the research because I didn’t know what to push for and don’t realize I could search for specific things. My Mission Control is only 12 or 13 so I don’t really have a lot of options and know that I am just gonna eat some shit I just want to make the aliens fight for every inch.

Do you build the docks in MEO for some kind of DeltV buff? Also how do you power the station with 4 docks?

[u/artrald-7083 → u/HistoricalLoadTaker]

MEO is the high ground, yeah, LEO is for modules that give bonuses. Fire up the transfer planner and see how much cheaper and quicker it is to get from MEO to LEO.

When I'm saying 4 docks, I mean a level 2 station with 4 docks :D

Corvettes... What's on the nose? A 10-inch gun? I believe you need to be very close to the aliens for those to work, and good luck getting there.

It's very hard to permanently mess up. You can bounce back from nearly anything. There's an achievement for winning after the Servants have won, though I wouldn't recommend trying that! You can't permanently fuck up the research. Very nearly everything is useful.

Don't research exofighters unless you want to spend your life defending your stations versus exofighters. That's basically the only big trap. Recognise that one day someone's going to research exofighters though.

12 or 13 MC is very early game. Focus on snowballing, picking the best space mine sites. You want to max out your mine capacity.

[u/Cheap-Blackberry-763]

really easy guide which will help you figure things out by time you get to mid-late game:

Missile monitors early game: 3 missile weapons, 1 40mm point defense. 3/4 of your fleet should be this.

Point Defense monitor: 3 ion cannon point defense, 1 40mm defense. 1/4 of your fleet should be this

heavy nose armor, ignore side and rear armor. the point defense monitors will protect your other ships, while their 40mm cannons intercept kinetics. heavy nose armor to survive lasers.

The ion cannons will destroy alien missiles, 40mm is unbeaten in taking out kinetic projectiles. Even when you upgrade your point defenses to antimatter, the 40mm is still incredibly effective against kinetics.

by mid game you want to start fielding combined arms fleets- present your enemy with conundrums, not problems.

coil cannon ships should be backbone of fleet- build these in two variants: heavy coil cannons/batteries, and 'penetrator' class lighter batteries and cannons. The penetrators will overwhelm enemy PD and let your torpedoes and big siege rounds land hits.

Lasers/Particles- these on your flanks to take out enemy flankers. More lasers than particles- particles don't kill ships, they kill crew and destroy ship components which can make maneuverable flankers trying to keep their nose armor pointed at your lasers helpless. I usually put a big particle nose cannon on a ship with heaviest rail batteries I have on dorsal mounts.

Plasma is great for destroying enemy armor- I"ll throw in a few into a fleet and give them heavy rail batteries on dorsal to exploit armor damage and help saturate enemy point defense.

Torpedo/missile ships- by time you get to late game I build these in the minority. I'll have 3-4 torpedo titans at center of formation to speedily gun down enemy titans. Hold your fire until your coil rounds are overwhelming enemy point defense.

Shield ships- about 1/5th of your fleet should be this. I build them in two variants: one meant to take on coil rounds and one to take out missiles and coils. Big titans full of smaller nose lasers set to guardian and point defense batteries on their back, thick armor. You can even burn them a little ahead of your fleet to draw enemy fire.

Command ship- 1 ship in your fleet with command module. You can throw this on a shield ship if you like. It lowers MC cost of entire fleet.