Author Topic: BP: War in Heaven discussion  (Read 908079 times)

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Offline QuakeIV

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Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
I mean, they are so horrifically out of position that I'm not sure anything could save them short of them basically running directly away from the diomedes as soon as it shows up, or the strike craft assault happening sooner.

 
Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Hehe, yeah, but that's sort of the point... and the sentiment behind the "Sweet fortune, what a jump!" comment. But in theory, you should be able to blitz the beams and rescue the cruisers (or at least you used to be able to). Now though, they soak up too much damage to kill quickly, intercept 50-75% of incoming Paveways, and fire non-stop, killing the cruisers in a matter of seconds.

I understand that originally it was awfully easy to save them (provided you were ready for the Medea), but good grief, feels like the difficulty of keeping them alive has maybe been overdone a bit.   :wtf:

On another note:
During Darkest Hour, some of the warship behavior seems a little... lacking in tactics.
When the Indus jumps in to bring down the Valerie, it generally cripples her engines right off the bat, leaving her stuck in place and unable to reposition herself. And while I understand that it's maybe a bit much to ask of the AI to respond dynamically to an enemy warship's condition, it does seem like Captain Sorenson makes a pretty odd decision: Rather than hang out behind the Valerie and pounding it with Mass Drivers as well as torpedos, or at least attempting to drop underneath the Valerie to get into her blind spot where her slash beams can't hit, the Indus moves into broadside position opposite the Vatican, so that the Valerie can easily bring all 4 of it's beams (well, it would if I didn't disarm it at least) to bear on the Fed's ships. Seems to me that it's kinda silly to purposefully position yourself so as to bear the full brunt of your enemy's strongest fire concentration. It would maybe make sense if the Indus moved to the Valerie's port-side to position herself between the corvette and Rheza, but instead the Indus moves to her starboard, between the Valerie and... nothing.

I guess it also seems strange to me that once the Valerie realizes it's toast, it doesn't attempt to knock out Rheza station and at least complete its mission objective before going down... Or that the Atreus doesn't at least try to take a potshot at Rheza (or one of the Fed warships) after taking down the other station, and instead just sits there taking fire from the Vikrant and Torreador before leaving.
« Last Edit: September 01, 2017, 05:58:13 pm by Soulrheever »

 

Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
The answer to Medea might be hidden in one of the less interesting secondary weapons: one of the swarm missiles, I think it was the Dirk, has got an effective range of about 1600m and can damage turrets fairly well. I used it whenever there's a Diomedes to defang - in Darkest Hour, where you can bring down two of the beams even before they start firing at Indus, and also in Aristea, but I had much less luck there, as enemy fighters were attacking me as soon as I started even thinking about shooting at the Tev corvette, thus I could kill only one of the two beam cannons. At least at that 1600m range you're not being harrased by point defences anymore.

I have also reported the problem with the Indus quite some time earlier. In my opinion, waypoint paths were designed in a way not considering the corvette getting disabled. Seems like an oversight, perhaps related to some changes in stats of Karuna's Gauss cannons.
How do you kill a hydra?

You starve it to death.

 
Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Disabling the Valerie's main beams in Darkest Hour is easily accomplished with Dirks, but it takes pretty much a full bank to take one out. By the time you can empty enough rounds into the Medea's beams, it's already wiped out the cruisers. Not to mention, the Medea's air wing doesn't exactly let you just sit there dumping rounds into it...

 

Offline crizza

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Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Medeas beams are up-armored, so it should word if you attack her from dead ahead and fire Paveways into the side of the turrets.

 
Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Medeas beams are up-armored, so it should word if you attack her from dead ahead and fire Paveways into the side of the turrets.

I've tried that, tons of times. Still a minimum 50% intercept rate before they ever have a chance to land, and still takes 4 direct hits to drop one of the beams. Even with the best possible luck, you'll have to rearm between beam destruction, which gives the Medea more than enough time to tear both cruisers to shred and even if you got lucky and got them down fast, you'd be very hard pressed to get the Hood's main beam knocked out in time by that point.

 
Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion

I've tried that, tons of times. Still a minimum 50% intercept rate before they ever have a chance to land, and still takes 4 direct hits to drop one of the beams. Even with the best possible luck, you'll have to rearm between beam destruction, which gives the Medea more than enough time to tear both cruisers to shred and even if you got lucky and got them down fast, you'd be very hard pressed to get the Hood's main beam knocked out in time by that point.

Not arguing with you on your main point - Normally I've all but given up ever saving Torpedo Two. Even when I've maintained my fighter compliment without a scratch and loaded up on paveways and meticulously ordered everyone (on medium, same as you), something goes wrong every time - the gunships fly into range of the Medea's point defences and get chewed up, or run down by the Medea's air wing horridly fast before they can do anything (even with everyone else guarding them). However, you should only need to worry about the Hood if the Anjaneya goes down, and with a bit of bossing people around keeping it alive without slammers/being a crackshot is fairly trivial.

That said, taking those beams out seem to be frustratingly tough, I agree. One could argue that Torpedo Two is in a bad position and it's supposed to be a difficult bonus goal to save them, but the recommendations state "Try to keep Gamma Wing alive through the opening dogfight so you can use their firepower later to ...  disarm the Medea's beams." - That seems to imply that a healthy Gamma wing and a bit of awareness should make it trivial, but that's not the experience I've had.

Last time I melted my face against this mission to try to save Torpedo Two I decided to generously "donate" myself an Izra'il class fighter to see if I could shove enough Paveways down it's throat - to much the same effect you had. Next time, i'll bring an Uriel, and just try sniping the beams myself - i'm hardly a good shot but at least I can avoid the kill zone, unlike my wingmen...

 
Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Glad I'm not the only one finding it to be impossible! My goal was really to find out if it was possible still, and if so, then how.

Taking out the Hood's forward beam is to save Torpedo Two, since it'll open fire on them when they get in range (since the Anjenya doesn't have the bandwidth to cover them as well), but if it isn't even possible to take out the Medea's beams, then it doesn't much matter. *shrug*

 
Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Taking out the Hood's forward beam is to save Torpedo Two, since it'll open fire on them when they get in range (since the Anjenya doesn't have the bandwidth to cover them as well)

Oh, guess I never found that out because i've never managed to even put a dint in the Medea's beams in the first place

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
I have no idea if it's still possible. The Paveway nerf might've made it too difficult.

 

Offline SF-Junky

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Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Even in the initial release it was fairly difficult to disarm the Medea and the Hood in time, requiring perfect timing.

 

Offline SF-Junky

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Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
How can I beat The Plunder on difficult?

I guess a good way is to kill Libra asap. That's not easy, though. Disarming cruisers is practically impossible. Gamma is not really helpfull in anyhing (seemingly), except disarming the Siren.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
On what difficulty?

Edit: oh, right. I recall that mission's pretty hard above medium. Disarm the siren before it can fire, focus on weapons subsystems, don't get caught in beam/pulse range for long. Use wingmates on the auroras.

 
Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Fly slightly behind your wing and lock onto the siren straight from the front to avoid its pulses having a firing angle on your paveways, wait for your wing to launch then try to launch as soon as they do.
Usually this will happen after beta goes to distract the fighters, empty your entire paveway reserve, don't stop firing until your banks are empty and spread them out across the 3 MBlues.

80% of the time this will result in all 3 MBlues being destroyed, if any are left you can close in for primaries but don't mess up the angle or you'll get torn apart by pulse fire. Go slightly from above to avoid the cruisers then fly down until you're basically facing down the beams head-on.
Engage reverse thrust to maintain distance and fire away until you clean up the beams.

After that you can try luring in the fighters near your capships or if you have the balls just lure them into open space and dogfight them there. Just don't slow down when a nyx is nearby, it can tear you apart from full health in around 1 second if its secondaries connect.

After that you can safely ignore the beams on the corvettes, their DPS isn't high enough to threaten your frigates. Once the Siren goes in for guns its pulses will start targetting the capships and stop targetting you. Try to clear the fighters before she closes in, then you're free to tear its weapons apart one by one since they won't be shooting back at you.
As long as you don't forget to disable the Anemoi when ordered the mission should play itself from this point on.
« Last Edit: September 23, 2017, 03:02:38 pm by FrikgFeek »
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline SF-Junky

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Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
On what difficulty?
Oops, I mean on hard difficulty. With FrikgFeek's approach I could just beat the mission, but it was still a very close call with the Yangtze finishing at 12% hull integrity. The Siren ist still extremely dangerous, even without beams.

What exactly does killing weapons subsystems do?
« Last Edit: September 24, 2017, 03:17:59 pm by SF-Junky »

 

Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
I think it screws up aiming turrets and AAA beams.
How do you kill a hydra?

You starve it to death.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Yes, and it'll lower the Siren's turret ROF due to electronic warfare effects.

 

Offline SF-Junky

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Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Whooooho.

Just come back from two ultra successful runs. One with The Plunder again. Yesterday a tried that mission a dozen times (possible more) with FrikgFeek's approach and always failed miserably. Today I used Gamma to disarm the Siren and went directly for the Agincourt's engines. Then I killed the cruisers weapons systems, again taking help from Gamma. Worked very well. Meanwhile Alpha and Beta were very successful at killing enemy fighters. I also managed to destroy Siren's weapons subsystem, but I would've won easily without that.

Then I tried Aristeia on hard and it went as smooth as never before. Although I didn't do anything new. Just keep feeling bad about Torpedo Two. :(

 
Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Huh. Always worked for me on Insane. Maybe the weaker AI on the lower difficulties can't be trusted to lob missiles at the Siren. Or maybe it's the firerate restrictions they get below insane that slows down their paveway volleys.
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 
Re: BP: War in Heaven discussion
Well, I decided to take another go at this, after several years hiatus playing combat flight sims. This and various other campaigns and mods have really caught my eye!

Seem to have hit a bit of a hiccup though. I picked up the Steam version of FS2, figure it's the most up to date. Ditto the latest and greatest of FSO, which appears to be 3.7.4, unless I missed a link somewhere? ANYWAYS, I can get into the game for AoA, but can't seem to click CONTINUE after the initial command brief. As for War in Heaven, I get MANY popup errors, basically very similar to below, although the majority seem to have to do wiht UEF being an invalid species. Everything's freshly installed, openAL is installed, all that fun stuff, and yet... I get below, or can't get past the initial command brief. Anyone have any thoughts?

Too many icons in icons.tbl; only the first 105 will be used
ntdll.dll! ZwWaitForSingleObject + 21 bytes
kernel32.dll! WaitForSingleObjectEx + 67 bytes
kernel32.dll! WaitForSingleObject + 18 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_4_SSE2-DEBUG.exe! SCP_DumpStack + 354 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_4_SSE2-DEBUG.exe! Warning + 491 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_4_SSE2-DEBUG.exe! brief_parse_icon_tbl + 272 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_4_SSE2-DEBUG.exe! game_init + 1650 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_4_SSE2-DEBUG.exe! game_main + 524 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_4_SSE2-DEBUG.exe! WinMain + 328 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_4_SSE2-DEBUG.exe! invoke_main + 30 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_4_SSE2-DEBUG.exe! __scrt_common_main_seh + 346 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_4_SSE2-DEBUG.exe! __scrt_common_main + 13 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_4_SSE2-DEBUG.exe! WinMainCRTStartup + 8 bytes
kernel32.dll! BaseThreadInitThunk + 18 bytes
ntdll.dll! RtlInitializeExceptionChain + 99 bytes
ntdll.dll! RtlInitializeExceptionChain + 54 bytes
Stardust, the Sword of Vengeance[A starship combat addict]