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Serious: Why use anything but Fire All Weapons?
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I'm still fairly fresh, level 4 so my weapons are limited and space combat doesn't require anything but pushing Fire all weapons and managing my shields.
My question, what will occur to make me change my strategy? Why would anyone not want to fire all weapons when available?
My hopes are for space combat to become a chess match of sorts, is this an accurate aspiration?
My question, what will occur to make me change my strategy? Why would anyone not want to fire all weapons when available?
My hopes are for space combat to become a chess match of sorts, is this an accurate aspiration?
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When you lvl up, you will see. You have bridge officer skills, choosing what officers to have what skills, and in what position you have to put them in.
Then of course you can manage power, then you can choose different weapons on different ships (like putting wide arc guns on a slow turning ship)
Lotsa stuff. Also using enviroment, running around roids stopping people shooting you, etc etc..
basically, on the tier 1 ship you have until level 11, energy is not an issue. You can fire everything all the time and weapon energy will always be at max. After level 11, this is not so. Firing 4 phasers at the same time will lower your energy level, which will make the next phaser do less and less damage. That's why you might not want to fire everything you have (although, to tell you the truth, I still do fire all at level 14 in my science ship, but I only have 2 beam weapons, a torpedo and mines, which don't use much energy)
At the very least I can still only have 2 on auto fire and the rest I will have to hit space to fire so they wont always be on.
Just this. Your weapon power drops when you fire more than a couple of weapons, making continually firing a lot of beam weapons less effective. Depending on how you kit your ship out, you might want to save the alpha strikes for times when your weapon power is at full and a you have a worthy target.
Also, torpedoes are best used against targets whose shields are down - it's often worth timing the shots with torps rather than mashing the "fire all" button every time the cooldown is up.
Thanks for all the responses guys, got lots of good info and this answer sums it up pretty much the way i was hoping ship combat would be
Thanks.
It's good to practise this at low level - a well-timed HY against an unshielded side will wreck their hull. But if you continually just mash "fire all weapons", when that key moment of your target's unshielded side being exposed to your torpedo tubes arrives, chances are they will be on cooldown - and opportunity to end the fight is lost.
Effective timing of which weapons to fire when based on shield status, BO abilities cool down, your ability cool down.
Target Priority.
Proximity of your ship, target ship, friendly ship to a core going critical.
What class ship you play, and the weapons you equip.
The play style you adopt/adapt to.
Trying to think of other reasons.
Don't forget to install a torp in the rear when you upgrade your ship. They work MUCH better than mines, and especially well when you are doing the circle dance with an enemy.
It's not much of an issue, since you can prepare your ship to handle the energy drain.
My Tier3 K'tinga Cruiser has 1 Torp, 4 Beam Arrays (Yes, I LOVE beams) and 1 Turret and I can spam all of them just fine without my energy dropping by more than 10.
The Secret to that is: EPS Flow Consoles.
Two of them are enough for this spam of mine (I believe each gives +1 power transfer rate, so they both are already more helpful then the engineer captain skill, which gives only +1,5).
I can imagine that, at admiral level, it will be easily possible to have a cruiser equipped with 8 energy weapons firing non stop and still having his energy not drop (because the admiral EPS flow consoles give even more transfer rate and he has more console slots).
Yes and no. Firing a torp against shields is better than not firing it at all, but sometimes if you wait just a second or two with the torp the beams will have taken the shield down, and the torp will have more effect than if you'd fired it straight away. That's even more important if you're using quantum torpedoes with their higher damage and longer cooldown.
But in an escort, I mapped 2 buttons on my mouse, one to fire all, and one to balance shields, it's more than effective.
bigger targets take 2.........
Red Shirt
But realistically, with the exception of torps, if you kit out your ships with proper weapons and consoles, you shouldn't have to worry very much about not firing your other weapons. I pretty much spam anything that's energy-based on cooldown without any trouble.
I noticed this when I have 3 heavy dual disruptor cannons or 3 photon torpedoes equiped on the front 3 weapon slots.
It does not apear to be an energy issue as I set energy priority to weapons and it never drops below 80%.
If I equip turrets instead, it appears to fire all the turret weapons corectly.
Is this a bug?
-Saavik
I would like to add competency and professionalism.
Map your primary fire keys: one to fire all beams and another to fire all torps, this will give you the best results. also do not map spacebar for either one of those duties, Cryptic might have picked one of the worst keys for firing.
Ideally map your thumb keys on a mouse for these duties.
The reasons in this post and others in this thread *should* end the moronic auto-fire debate (though I realize it is easier to type complaints than it is to build up skill, so the debate will rage on).
Yours in professional Plasma,
Star*Dagger
Torps and mines are not good to fire all the time. Torps are not incredibly effective against shields (they are but not that good, they are much better against hull), and depending on when you throw out mines, they may not do anything at all.
However, other weapons, like beams, turrets and cannons are good to fire all the time as long as you have plenty of energy. And that can happen depending on the loadout, or if you use EPS consoles.
That is also why we ask for autofire on more than 1/1 weapons. Some loadouts (like escorts with multiple front cannons) can constantly fire without energy problems, and just tapping the space bar is stupid and shows no skill nor is it fun.
Edit: Corrected torps to turrets
no more, no less.
to much work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Hope this makes sense....
Seriously, why call it "Fire all weapons" if it fires only one weapon?
Some cooldowns are short enough that it makes multiple weapon slots pointless.
-Saavik