Sweep Mechanism for defense modules??
I'm not completely understanding how the sweep mechanism component increases the spread of base defense weapons when, to my understanding, all base defense weapons have a 360° sweep. Maybe I'm getting this confused with minimal range maybe? Could someone explain the purpose for this component. Thank You.
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Stormtrooper
Vega Player ID: 11596
Born in the Beta days in sector 100
stormtrooper is right it spreads out the rounds meaning more damage coverage
both the above people are correct.
what you are thinking of is arc, and the only things as of this moment with a 360 fire are cm's and low tier corvettes. sweep is the scattering arc f explosives. lets say you have a gun that fires a sweep of 10 degrees and you enhance that sweep by 30%, that changes it from 10 degrees to 13.
depending on the case, this is either useful or of no point...in fvf, sweep covers a greater area, making it more likely to hit fast evasive ships like the nighthawk. in fvb, it spreads shots more evenly to damage more than one target.
the only weapon that is unable to use sweep/scatter upgrades is the hydra. this has a degree of spread of 0, and the bonuses increase by a % of the average spread...even if it was 100% increase, 100% of 0 is 0, making the only usable explosive boost for them be am warheads
Thank you Storm, Zeeba, and Combat. It makes perfect sense. I was thinking of arc as Combat said. Time to research!
i think you might be wrong here. There is a very noticeable difference in my NHs 1 with AM other with spread. The spread diverges much farther apart before converging back to 0.
For example the AM NH spreads 40 then converges back to 0 and repeats. The spread NH fires and spreads 60 then converges back to 0 and repeats till end of range or hits something.
You still get pin point accuracy for half the time but you get a wider field for the other half of the firing range. my gladious/ hydra mixed NH fleet is my funnest to fvf with for me each ship has different specials etc
VC ID 21,466
It lowers accuracy, not useful at all. A PC V that lands only one or two plasma bolts out of its entire volley/magazine is nearly deadweight
"it lowers accuracy" thus they are useless, thats a very simply stated.....
Any of the slow traveling weapons dont hit a target unless the attackers i gonna sit still. For this reason all projectile weapons were useless on base defence and so are low level plasmas with their tiny spread.
Explosive weapons got a spread so that they can hit moving targets. The downside is indeed that only part of the bolts hit the enemy. But to offset this, the explosive weapons have about twice the dmg/tonn rate of projectile weapons and do splash damage.
How much spread you need obviously depends on the enemies movement speed. This is mostly an issue against circling battle ships. (a blitz fleet will usually take most of the fire anyway.) The more rear boosters there are on the battle ships, the more spread you need on your plasma to hit them. High level plasmas have more spread so it is less likely they need extra spread from sweep mech. And indeed, if you need to further increase their spread, their effective DPS goes down. So now its up to us all to experiment with projectile weapons and high level magnets to see if they do better. Probably they will do batter against the circling battleships, but the downside is their uselessness against blitz fleets ofcourse.
To expand the topic of these new base specials:
Does anyone see a reason to use ion rechargers and phased amunition ? I see so many reasons why they are absolutely useless. Same for the ship weapon versions btw.
In both cases you deal less damage to 1 half of the ship and more to the other half. Doesnt really help in total damage output unless you can manage to first hit each ship with the ion charged lasers and then with the phased projectiles. We cant target enemies in a base though and the respective range of these weapons makes them function the other way around. And that is even forgetting the fact that the alternatives, irridium magnets and laser range increase are simply a necessity and a very, very nice addition respectively.
Graviton i could see something going for it as it has the range to hit first and indeed actually hit the shields. But i kind of have my doubts if there is any way to overcome the disadvantages of their pathethic dps and make them worthwhile.
Does anyone have anything good to say about these 2 specials ? And how about on fleets where you can have 2 specials and manually target ? anyone actually using these and manually targetting enemy ships one by one with the lasers first and projectiles later ?
1) Yes, it is very simply stated because it's hard reading a wall of text.
2) Explosive with spread hits target, only partially. A PC V fires seven bolts, at max range, only one or two bolts land, it's massive 166 dps becomes a tiny 47 dps. Before the update, you had to use PC V, it was compulsory, but now with optics and mags, you have other better alternatives.
3) More spread = More hits, More miss, the advantage and disadvantage just cancels each other out.
4) Explosive weapons splash damage is a very minor advantage. Only epic idiots stack their ships like mad seriously, are you going to count on enemy to stack revs and venoms and NH into a tight ball and charge at you?? Hence AM warheads are useless for plasma turrets.
5) I'm counting on Mag V Drivers to bash the crap out of battleships. CMs fire slightly ahead (not as much as destroyers). With a Mag V, I'm confident MD IV with Mag V will hit circling battleships with near 100% accuracy. Noone bothers using Deflector IV.
6) If Mag is so effective at enhancing MD - You can put more lasers than EVER in your base, lasers aren't useless against battleships, but yes useless against destroyers, it's rather difficult moving six separate battleships around a base while simultaneously selecting new primary targets, you cannot see a CM's firing range and with the optics added on Optic II or III - Mistakes will be painful (Noone uses Spec V torp battleships, only shock IV)
7) Ion Recharger *shrug* meh
8) Phase V and Mag V on a bridge with MD V will kill your Fury in a handful of shots. NH will die in two shots. Fairly hard to dodge since the projectile travels as fast as graviton, especially when I put four more MD IVs with Mag V. Unless you blitz, then my Lasers and Plasma will annihilate it.
9) If MD with Mag V is good, then don't need Graviton
Not completely useless, when your dealing with Tridents or Swords that snipe it has a value of its own. When used on Torp III in base defense it forces the Sniper to spread out more and even then they still run the risk of being damaged to a less degree, combined with plasma for back up fire, it puts the offense at a distance as long as they are not doing a blitz assault aka Chicken run on your base. I am researching level II for my counter sniper batteries I will have to put it to the test, but I believe my theory to be sound.
"Participant in the Jova Crusades; the winning side"
"I hate cargo fleets. What else do you want me to say"
"I attacked you because you stole my piece of cheesecake with cherry toppings."
"The government has ordered me to harvest this farm. Please be patient as your base is harvested."
IGN: MasonD
~Condolences to all who share a similar name - there can only be one.
MD destroyers (snipers) outrange plasma cannons. Granted you need to be carefull and stop them manually since the range difference is tiny, but they do. The combination with projectiles and/or plasma batteries that force your destroyers to keep moving makes the plasma cannons a little usefull though as this forced moving greatly increases the chance to make mistakes and going into plasma cannon range.
I mostly do agree with all that holy ASDF sais, except that i do think plasma has a more important role than he portrais. Most importantly because while indeed high magnet projectiles will anihilate destroyers and battleships alike, depending on mostly or only lasers to stop blitz fleets makes it to easy for an enemy to come with a spec5 shielded blitz fleet and laugh about your single damage type defence. So the way i see it, giving scores 1 to 10 for weapon type vs enemy type:
Lasers
Plasma cannon
High magnet Projectile
Plasma battery
So i figure that pretty much everything is going to be good vs battle ships and the dominance of circling battle ships for base hitting is ending. Also since everything is good against this, i will not pay too much attention to modeling my defence against this. This is the reason i will try to use a minimum of projectile weapons.
Vs destroyer i hope projectiles are going to do the job. However, i have doubts if they alone can do the job even with magnet 5 because the destroyers have such a tiny hit area. They only need to move a fraction to dodge. Now destroyers will not be the ones that are going to 100% your base, just prep so it isnt a disaster. But still there might be need for a few of those plasma batteries. which i strongly dislike because they are useless for other purposes.
So that leaves mostly blitz i think to concentrate defence against. A proper mix of plasma and lasers so that not 1 shield type can dominate your base.
The spread does not go on PC, they go on plasma torps
"Participant in the Jova Crusades; the winning side"
"I hate cargo fleets. What else do you want me to say"
"I attacked you because you stole my piece of cheesecake with cherry toppings."
"The government has ordered me to harvest this farm. Please be patient as your base is harvested."
IGN: MasonD
~Condolences to all who share a similar name - there can only be one.
*shrug* -I loved the PC V cause of its sheer damage output. But i ran into someone with Rear V, Shock V Fury and I hated them. I will have PC V in case there's an occasional Double Spec V Rev (80 dps) blitz hit.
Sweep would be useful against large numbers of ships but the most we get in this game is 6 so its effectiveness is situational at best, IMO. Sweep in conjunction with AM would be the best you could squeeze out of that special and that only happens on the bridge. Now on a CM it might be fun to watch it against a full fleet circling a base, you would need it equipped on every CM, and that would not be very effective on any other kind of attack. Since the only unit that can hold lvl5 Torps is the bridge, lvl 5 sweep and lvl5 torp might be fun to play with.
Sweep would be good for Torps against Trids. Makes strafing destroyers futile.
Yes. thats what i think. I dont think plasma cannons will need any sweep. If the magnets 5 are enough to stop destroyers ill use those, if not i think ill use a single torpedo on my bridge with AM and possibly a little bit of sweep. Although i think the AM is more important. Too much sweep and your enemy can see where its going and strafe the other way anyway.
Not when you fire four torps that goes everywhere.
Oh they fire 1 torp per level or something ?
I got only lvl 1 now...
Torp IV and V fires four torps. II and III fires two and three torps respectively.