Weapons dilemma

Psyonic Beam or Quantum Torpedo?

Two days ago I completed my best game yet - Krynn with 3 Intelligent AIs(2 custom races and Arceans), 6 Bright AIs, 8 Minor Races in a Rare Stars, Rare Planets, Abundant Asteroids Huge Galaxy with Mega Events, Tech Trade and Super Abilities turned on. The game lasted 7 years and I eventually won a Technology Victory(my first TechVictory) to break the 5-digit barrier for the first time and score 10050 points. I conquered the Torians, Yor, Korath, LentzLandians, Drengin, Nuts(custom), Akilians in said order, allied with the Arceans, Korx and Altarian Resurgance(custom), went Neutral, completed the missile, point defense, armor, engine and more tech branches and built an awesome 2860 tp research-only planet on the former Korath homeworld. By endgame, I was doing a total of ~4500tp of research every week.

Mega Events were the mega spy attack(blocked by my Counter Espionage Centers) and Dread Lords(I won tech victory before I could find them). The races that fell to AI wars were the Paulos and Iconians. Pirates also attacked around mid-game and I found 2 obsolete PreCursor Rangers during late game. I also designed my first top-tech Huge Hulled Dreadnoughts, but never built one - I didn't need to, since my Level-9 Medium and the few Smalls I had outclassed the Korx/Altarian Mediums by the time I conquered the Nuts. After that, the game was practically won anyway.

It's clear(as shown on Wiki page 'Ship Design Strategies') that with a sufficiently fast research capability, nothing beats missiles, so until now, in sandbox games, I've used missiles only - no beams, no guns. Sure, Point Defenses are stronger than Shields but they get worn down faster by higher-damage missiles then Shields get worn by Beams. In battles vs. the Yor, Nuts and Pirates(who had PDs), their balanced designs didn't have enough point defense to stand up to the missiles of my defensively-oriented designs - they were taking more damage than I was.

Then yesterday, I decided to continue the Dark Avatar campaign which I had left off after the first mission. In the second mission, Spies, I had to use Beam Weapons since the other weapon branches had been severely chopped down to only their weakest parts. Since I was the Evil Drengin Empire, I could use the Psyonic Beam. Although I had already captured 2 Terran planets with an older, weaker frigate design, I decided to upgrade my warship with the new weapon before the final attack on the Terrans' last world, just to try out the one-off, ridiculously powerful thing.

The result:

So now I'm downloading the 1.8 update and have created a new custom race for my next Sandbox game - the Bunglers, with Super Annihilator, an Iconian personality and 35 Alignment - Evil/Neutral. Now I'm going to go up to Tough and include 3 Gifted AIs(maybe even setting the Iconians on Genius - they're weaker than other races normally). This is going to be my first Evil sandbox game. But I don't know whether I should:

1. Go for Missiles as usual and have the weak(by Psyonic standards) Psyonic Missile and superior Torpedoes later in the game.

2. Go for Beams to get the awesome-but-overpriced Psyonic Beam, but get stuck with weaker weapons later on (if I don't keep using the expensive Psy' Beam) and end up with the comparatively inferior Doom Ray in the end.

3. Go for Beams, get the Psyonic Beam, then buy a Stinger/Harpoon tech from an AI and research for better missiles from there on. The problem with this is that missiles are expensive to research and I'd have already spent a lot of time to get the Psyonic Beam - but with strong enough research it's not a problem.

I'm leaning towards 3, but opinions wouldn't hurt.

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Hi!
For the first weapon I usually use Harpoons. The psionic beam is more expensive to research, because you need to reseach also the evil alignment. But the firepower of the PB is not comparable to ANYTHING until very late weapons tech. So by using it you save tens of thousands of BCs in research, that can be used for ships that will conquer your opponents before they reach that late weapons tech. And you can get that late weapons tech anyway by invasions. A no-brainer decision, that breaks the game.

BR, Iztok

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Since you're going to go evil anyway to get your MCC early on, the Psi Beam isnt really any more expensive to research..it's actually more like gravy. And the psi beam is in no way "overpriced". If anything it isn't costly enough, considering in many cases it represents an early game "technology victory". Sure, it might take your ships a few extra turns in the oven to get built, but once they are, you'll run over everything in your path. The other evil weapons arent even close.

Once you're evil, you only need phasors 1 to unlock psi beam. The drengin and korath both tend to develop missles pretty quickly, and they're suckers at the bargaining table. Arrange a sweetheart deal with a treaty or something, and pick up advanced missle tech from them at some point, and research from there while you run over everyone with psi beam ships. Use the missles as endgame weapons in the rare event anyones left after a psibeam invasion.

The even more bastardly thing to do, is since youll be picking up most of your tech from invasion from that point, and since people will likely be developing missle(drengin/korath) and beam (you) defenses, use that time to tech up mass driver weapons, so just about the time near the end when people start being able to survive your ships (if that ever happens), youll be ready to crank out ships that everyone in the galaxy is defenseless against, to run the table with.

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I began the game on Tough with Gifted(i.e. Painful) Iconians to help them survive. Wow, 1.8 is much tougher than my old 1.5(Yes, I never used 1.6 at all). I used to get good deals in tech trades - now I get effing lousy deals where I have a diplomacy 'advantage' and still have to give up everything for 1-2 techs. And 'Annihilator has been nerfed! In my Altarian Resurgance game(my first game, a few weeks ago), I had started out with Toxic Atmosphere Reductor and Advanced Toxic Atmosphere Reductor from the beginning, and it had only taken me 3 weeks to get Spore Weapons. Now, it took me 8 weeks to research Spore Weapons and I didn't have Advanced Toxic Atmosphere Reductor from the start. All the AIs kept calling me weak and demanding tribute(which I never gave) and I have to run a lot more deficit to fill my homeworld with 16 billion unhappy people(not the old 12 billion). Population seems to decrease morale much much faster than it increases influence.

I decided to go for beams to get the Psy' Beam and would simply research defenses after that. But in late 2227, suddenly, lots of wars broke out with civs declaring war on others who are on the other end of the huge galaxy. The only war declared on me, however, was by those Gifted/Painful-level Iconians. So I hashed up a frigate with whatever tech I had - and since I hadn't researched for armor, it was an all-attack ship. I then put together a single custom Spore Bomber and sent the 2 off to New Iconia.

My Plasma-armed frigate took out 3 fleets of Railgun-armed Iconian Fighters heading for my homeworld, but was reduced to 9 hp while doing so. Not enough to attack New Iconia, and I didn't have Micro Repair Bots so I had to retreat a bit and wait while I researched up to Duranthium 3(for Superior Duranthium). Then I upgraded to a defensive design with 4 Beam and 15 Armor and wiped out all Iconian ships in space before sporing New Iconia. The planet had enough stored production to build me another Spore Bomber, which I did, and used to destroy the Iconians.

Then I saved and finally chose my alignment - I had ~1400 bc in treasury and had to pay 2500 bc to go Evil - since I hadn't had any ethical events and was stuck with my default rating of 35 - leaning Neutral. But then, instead of paying 10 bc a week, my treasury disappeared completely, dropping straight to 0 bc! So I had to load a save game, but can't choose an alignment if that keeps happening. So far, I'm yet to see if it recurs. Currently I'm running -142bc/wk on full Research, full Spending with 21% approval on my homeworld and a net approval of 56%. Now I'll see if the alignment bug has disappeared and then go for a Republic to try and reduce the debt before getting some more research buildings built and going for Concepts of Malice and the Mind Control Center. I already have Phasors and only need to align to unlock Psyonic Beam.

I went for beams because I didn't research weapons at all until late 2226 when 2-attack Defenders started appearing in orbit of AI planets, and decided to look for the best deal I could find in Beams or Missiles and research from there up. The Drengin were offering Stinger 2, the best Missile on the market, but the Torians got the buy - they had Laser 5, by far the best weapon on the market since it preceded Plasma and was a decent step towards the Psy' Beam. Unfortunately, I had to give the Torians some 5 techs to pay for it. Such ludicrous demands never surfaced in 1.5. Also, defensive designs were extremely effective in 1.5 - just use a mix of off-type and on-type defenses. If the on-type defenses deplete out, then the unlimited deplete-proof off-type defenses, even operating at square-roots would be enough to negate whatever's left of the attack.

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