jacozilla
Posts: 122
Joined: 10/10/2015
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The standoff settinng, while useful many times has a few scenarios that make All Weapons a better setting imo, especially if playstyle is to use wolf pack fleets. (E.g. 1v1 your ships may be smaller or not as high firepower as the enemy, but total fleet vs total enemy - your fleet has firepower advantage)
A. Not an expert by any means, but my observation so far is that standoff is calculated on a 1v1 basis - say the enemy has 1 ship, 1000 firepower. You have 20 small ships, 100 firepower each. Other factors, like shield rating, may go into considering "strength" for standoff decision but lets assume for simplicity firepower is main component.
In this scenario, my observation is the fleet of 20 ships will individually each use the best speed, sprint mode if excess reactor power available, to try and constantly maintain the maximum distance to the target that each ship's longest range weapon can reach.
First flaw with this - with exceptions here and there like your and my very high tech ship encounters, in general I'd rather take a few ship losses and have my fleet with higher total firepower close range and use all weapons at max effectiveness than standoff and have lower firepower (unless designed specifically to be a kiting design with no distance penalty weapons)
Common sense says when your side has significant or overwhelming firepower advantage, you should close for the kill, but standoff setting seems to only factor 1v1, not total fleet.
second flaw - especially against higher tech ships, but also in general, if you use weapons with range penalties - staying at max range can mean each hit does very little dmg. Your pack of wolves may be individually weaker, but if the all close on the bull, will take it down with minimal losses. But at standoff, some weapons do very little dmg at max range. Forgot exact numbers but say you had mix of torpedoes and lassrs on your ships. Standoff would mean you dont use lasers mostly at all, and torpedoes while doing great damage at mid range does horrible dmg at max range
When i play with story lines on, i know the other side - pirates or AI empires may get hold of higher tech ships. Other than your and my uncommon extreme example of tech mismatch, in general the mismatch is more like couple techs distance - manageable if you take a few losses but have your combined ships close to maximum effectiveness range. So with storylines on, i generally use all weapons settings and design mixed LR + mid range weapons ships.
The LR lets my ships start shooting at least some of their firepower at start of engagement, but all weapons settings will make them close to maximum range all weapons can be fired - in my case the mid range of shatterforce lasers, while the torpedoes which started firing at long range to soften up the enemy will now be in perfect much higher dmg mid range.
Depending on uoir ship design playstyle, you may want yo set designs to all weapons even for 'stronger' opponents.
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