M3 Advice and missiles

[Damian Swift]

New back to AP and fter a little time working the stock market i thought i'd do some exploring and a little pirate hunting in a fast, deadly and fun M3/M3+ (I have about 10m to play with)

Was thinking Venti with EBC's and PRG in the turret (from memory)
But I have no idea about missiles...
Silkworms? or maybe wasps?

All advice apreciated

[tbwen]

I'd do wasps against M5's through M3 and Silkworms against M3 through M8's. The swarm and speed of wasp is great against those pesky fast fighters, but they won't do much damage (up to 8k) against slow heavier targets. The silkworms only go up to 190m/s, does 19k damage.

[Imgran]

If you have a Venti, go for it, that sounds like a winning loadout.

If you're strictly attacking fighters, I'd stick with the wasp. You might have to launch a couple of them against an M3, but they're the only missile to use against an M5 because an M5 can outrun a silkworm.

I would pack a few 'worms just in case things get interesting though

[GCU Grey Area]

Personally prefer Hurricane to Wasp for dealing with M5 class targets. Same speed but they deliver their payload in a single 6k hit, generally enough to instantly obliterate most M5s. Don't really need swarm missiles against M5s since few of them have turrets. Hurricane is also half the size of Wasp so you can carry a lot more of them & they have a much longer range (29km compared to 18.1km for Wasp).

Only significant downside is no NPC factories make them so need to either scavenge them after a battle or build your own factory, but it's not horrifically expensive to do that (less than 2.5 million). The factories are sold at the Paranid shipyards in Heaven's Assertion & Third Redemption.

[Honved]

The Wasp missle is fairly widespread, so you can pick them up in a few places without having to build your own complex or factory. I find that two or three at the start of an encounter are often sufficient to even the odds enough that I can concentrate on the main threats, rather than have to divert my attention to deal with a horde of pesky M5s pecking away at me from behind.

I hate changing the settings on my rear turrets from "missles only", because any time I do so, the opponents start spamming missles in quantity, and the turrets tend to get sidetracked following the fighters instead of knocking out the missles.

[Berserkenstein]

Wasps are decent for smaller fighters.

Tempests are probably the best missiles for other m3s, the thunderbolt hits harder but doesn't reacquire targets like the tempest.

If you outfit your ships with tornados, they can put a serious dent in the larger ships.

[ajax34i]

Roguey's missile guide is pretty good. I recommend reading it.

[Lone Jedi]

When I choose missiles I always consider the hit rate. I believe missiles are already overpowered, if someone spams them to foes everything would get killed easily, too easily. Spamming hundreds of Typhoons or Wraiths and watch the sector cleared in a matter of minutes is such a great scene, but too easy.

For this reason I would only fire a few of them when I believe there will be a decent chance to hit, and leave the main fighting to the guns. For the same reason I would choose Hurricanes over WASP anyday. As mentioned above, Tempests are one of the best missiles as they automatically acquire new targets when the old ones die.

In my current AP game I've been trying to keep the missile hit rate at above 90%, not to prove anything, just to try to restrict myself not to spam those missiles.

[Nanook]

....Hurricane is also half the size of Wasp so you can carry a lot more of them...

You might want to check your source again. Hurricanes take up 2 cargo units, while Wasps take just one.

[GCU Grey Area]

....Hurricane is also half the size of Wasp so you can carry a lot more of them...

You might want to check your source again. Hurricanes take up 2 cargo units, while Wasps take just one.

Source of data was in-game info (checked the contents of my ship's cargo hold). Stats quoted for Hurricane & Wasp in my previous post are accurate for AP 3.0, previous versions and/or games may differ.

[Nanook]

Interesting, because Roguey's site for AP also lists the Hurricane as 2 units and Wasps as one unit. Is Roguey wrong? If so, I wonder why the devs would change it? Or are you perhaps running a modded game?

[xant]

I just checked (vanilla AP 3.0) and Hurricane are indeed size S and volume 1, so he is right.

[Nanook]

Actually, Roguey's is wrong on two counts then. The Hurricane in TC takes up 3 cargo units. And my excuse for believing Roguey about AP is that I'm still playing TC.

Question: Did they also change the power of the Wasps and Hurricanes in AP? Because I don't see the point of increasing the cargo size of Wasps and decreasing it for Hurricanes, given their respective strengths. Overall, the Hurricane is a much more powerful weapon, IMO, because it doesn't miss the target and time out so fast like Wasps do in TC.

[Damian Swift]

Other post locked
I didn't realise I had 2 posts going for the same topic
Sorry

[bizbag]

Actually, Roguey's is wrong on two counts then. The Hurricane in TC takes up 3 cargo units. And my excuse for believing Roguey about AP is that I'm still playing TC.

Question: Did they also change the power of the Wasps and Hurricanes in AP? Because I don't see the point of increasing the cargo size of Wasps and decreasing it for Hurricanes, given their respective strengths. Overall, the Hurricane is a much more powerful weapon, IMO, because it doesn't miss the target and time out so fast like Wasps do in TC.

I imagine they decreased the space for Hurricanes because it's a small fighter-to-fighter weapon, so requiring 3 cargo slots is excessive. Plus, since all ships can defend with Mosquitoes, AND since the Hurricane is a single warhead, it's far more likely to be shot down.

They likely increased the Wasp because it's an equivalent to the Hurricane but is harder to shoot down, and can deal slightly more damage total.

[Nanook]

Except that the wasp tends to go into evasive mode when chasing a target after the initial flyby, and many of the warheads just time out. At least in TC, I rarely, if ever, would get all eight warheads to hit a target unless it was a big target. Most of the time, I'd get half to hit, and half to time out. And then there's the fact that the Hurricane can do area effect damage, making them great for taking out Kha'ak clusters just as they break up, or killing multiple drones if they're close together.

So again, unless they've upgraded the Wasp and downgraded the Hurricane, I don't get it.