agodin

How to combat the LRM?

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How to combat the LRM?

from Sins Forums
ok so far love single play pretty much everything is great about the game.
so thought ill try it out online with the amount of diffrent ships,techs etc there should be some really nice battles out there with a good amount of strategy invovled but so far 7/8 games most of the players play TEC and it seems in all the game the same tactic has applyied rush too build the biggest fleet of LRM's which at the moment is very off putting in playing multiplayer games. i am just taking a stab in the dark but the LRM's are WAY too over powered long range good damage and they can even take a hit.

so i wanted to put it too a test just for laughts and giggles the battle eneded up with the player with 55 LRM's i had 6 cap ships and 40 illiusion ships i also added a few of the guardian shield ships (hopfully it helped) when i arrived all the illuison ships used there ablity so bringing my fleet to 80 illys first off the cap ships went down in seconds dont think they even got off any abilites. and low and behold the rest of my fleet lasted a few mins tops afterbeing completey wiped other player suffered min damage.

first question anyone else incounted somthing sim as this with the LRM's
and second has anyone found a way around this?

i have tried hit and runs,
i have tried choking them of resources (but the LRM's are very cheap)
1 have tried hundreds of the little ships (hopfully win in numbers)
i have tried max cap ships and a tone of other (hoping a mix range of abilites would help)
i have tried leading them back to a heavly defended planet (had max def most were hangers)and attacking them but to no avail.

so if anyone has any working tactics please let me know. as it stands when i got into a game and see a TEC player i tend to lose the will to play hehe

sorry for the long post
enjoy the game and thanks in advance
multiplayer
48,585 views 77 replies
Reply #26 from Sins Forums Top
So essentially its a zerg rush, with LRMs instead of zerglings? Sweet. Thats so what the space strategy genre needed. A way to easily no-brain your opponent to death.
Reply #27 from Sins Forums Top

So essentially its a zerg rush, with LRMs instead of zerglings? Sweet. Thats so what the space strategy genre needed. A way to easily no-brain your opponent to death.


Well it could also be like the whole siege frigate thing - blown out of proportion. I only lost to siege frigates once, in my very first game. After that, countering them was easy and so someone spamming them felt like it'd been blown far out of proportion.

I was thinking that perhaps we need to see a good player offering up counters to massed LRMs (I haven't played against massed LRMS, so I don't know how it is to defend against).
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Reply #28 from Sins Forums Top
Ive yet to play against TEC online, so I confess I havent got first hand experience of this.
Reply #29 from Sins Forums Top
what do you mean you checked the .entity files? you mean you can actually unpack them? HOW?!!! i want to mod this game :)
Reply #30 from Sins Forums Top

what do you mean you checked the .entity files? you mean you can actually unpack them? HOW?!!! i want to mod this game


They released an (incomplete) version of the modding data, you can find it in the mods forum. (Actually, I think they moved it to a downloads page somewhere, but theres a thread on the modding forums about the package).

ATM, I'm looking up the damage tables, because I think that flak frigates do the same damage as fighters -- which is to say, flak frigates are a good LRM counter.

Edit: Yeah, flaks do 2X damage to LRMs -- which should be enough to shred them.
Reply #31 from Sins Forums Top
You can get the unpacked versions in the mod pack.

Fighters do great damage to LRMs, but bombers don't. If your opponent is visibly spamming LRM frigates, make sure fighters are your strike craft of choice.

Flak Frigates perform reasonably well against LRMs, presumably on the guideline that LRMs are lightly armored and vulnerable to light weapons.

Capital ships suffer a damage penalty against LRMs, but their abilities dont. Cleansing Brilliance will smash just about any LRM spam.

LRM spam is problematic if you don't understand the counters, since LRMs beat light frigates for cost, outrange defense plaforms, and perform better than light frigates against capital ships.

Edit: Flaks deal antiverylight, not antilight. So they only have a 1.0 modifier against LRMs. But that's a lot better than the 0.25 modifier they get against every other ship. ;)

Reply #32 from Sins Forums Top
Step 1: Scout
Step 2: Find the appropriate counter
Step 3: Engage!
Step 4: Micro
Step 5: Prepare to counter their counter!
Step 6: Rinse and repeat steps 1-5, eventually getting victory!

That being said yes, there are counters such as flak frigates which all sides have however, since this game isn't based on rock paper scissor you might actually have some luck finding a soft counter to it.
Reply #33 from Sins Forums Top
Anti-Fighter Frigates -- Fighters,Bombers

DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:CapitalShip 0.25
DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:VeryLight 1.5
DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:Light 1.0
DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:Medium 0.25
DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:Heavy 0.25
DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:VeryHeavy 0.25

It does ANTIVERYLIGHT. a fighter does ANTILIGHT, so do scouts and colony frigates :O

But 1.0 multiplier vs Light does give you nice damage, since the base for flak is pretty high :)
Reply #34 from Sins Forums Top
... Thats odd. Thats very odd. I must have misread the files... (probably got my fighter data and flak data windows reversed...) Still, even 1.0 is a lot of damage.
Reply #35 from Sins Forums Top
Try dunovs, lots and lots of dunovs.

And only upgrade their shield repair abilities.
Reply #36 from Sins Forums Top
use scouts against any LRM fleet
Reply #37 from Sins Forums Top

The simplest fix is to cap the maximum number of each ship type you're allowed to have, forcing players to have multiple ship types in their fleet.

Another good fix is to take Rise of Nation's idea of "raising the cost of the same unit type" allowing people to diversify their fleets to save resources, while the rushers will be penalized by paying more for spamming the same unit.


This is the worst idea ever. Unit caps are hackish bandaids. You don't need to 'raise the cost of more units', because fleet supply already eats your economy. If someone wants to build a million scouts, nobody would care: they only care because it *works*. If the LRM does good damage, has long range and decent hitpoints, it is a good unit. Don't like it? Change one of those things. Frankly, I'd like to see some anti-missile defence (they're really slow missiles, slower than a fighter) and more defensive fire generally on caps.

Personally I think many units in Sins last too long in combat: it's ridiculous to shoot 20 frigates at another frigate and have it survive.
Reply #38 from Sins Forums Top
I would use a fleet of carriers...keep the ships out of range of the missle ships and just keep harrassing the missle fleet...
Reply #39 from Sins Forums Top
Carriers, flaks, scouts, Dunovs. Can someone that actually knows what they're doing post a reliable counter? There's a whole lot of speculation but I assume that if anyone actually tried these strategies they'd come to a conclusion.
Reply #40 from Sins Forums Top
I just played a nice competitive game against against a self proclaimed pro sins player (those already exist? :p) and some other people. My mixed fleet of 15 assailts, my battleship, and 6 enforcers which I just started producing got attacked by 66 LRM's (I say 50 in the video, replay shows 66)

Something we've all become familiar with right? But this time.. all 66 LRMs died within 10 seconds of the fight actually starting. Yes that's right. All of them.

How? Youtube video follows.


Click here for the video

I am sorry for the awful quality, but i think it gets the message across rather well
(orange=LRM's, blue=me)
Reply #41 from Sins Forums Top
Cool video, what did your battleship have to help kill them all so quickly? Or what did it exactly?
Reply #42 from Sins Forums Top
I guess it really is hard to see what exactly happens,

This is all about the Vasari battleship level 6 ability. Basicly it works as a sort of 'Corpse Explosion' You might be familiar with from other games. Every time one of the affected ships (indicated by the red glow) dies, it will deal 150 damage to everything around it. Causing an extreme chainreaction as you can see here

Due to the very low health on LRM's opponents often do not have the time to react to this, and it will wipe out their entire fleet if they are not careful, like this opponent here.

The trick is, if you expect any sort of spam from your opponents, is to only get 1 capital, the vasari BS, until it becomes level 6. Even tho getting multiple capitals can be powerful, as a side effect they do level slower. And this entire tactic is build around having this level 6 ability.. it does work extremely well and it's fun to top it off.
Reply #44 from Sins Forums Top
Heavy cruisers, esp. the TEC Kodiak with the rush upgrade, will wipe the floor with LRMs. Most tough fleets I've seen so far use a minimum of 10 heavy cruisers; some players are even spamming them, but this is generally a result of letting them over-expand because you were too busy turtling.

I do think a change should be made, however, to add an ECM upgrade for one of the support cruisers, or the flak frigate, significantly reducing enemy missile accuracy within a typical repair radius. Also, a slight (15-20 sec) increase on the LRM build time would make them far less effective to spam.

Also, a one click option in fleet tactics, to put you units in loose formation, would help negate the ridiculous AOE death of massed LRMs. And for god sake, who else is cursing the absence of a double-click select for all units of the same type...
Reply #45 from Sins Forums Top
Use ALT-Click, to get a 'Double click to select all' effect

Also the AOE effect is pretty big, loose formation would have to be extremely loose for that not to happen
Reply #46 from Sins Forums Top
Thanks for the tip (old habits die hard). True, the formation would have to be very loose, but consider, it only takes a doubling of the distance between ships to halve the # of ships in an attacks AOE.

An interesting change might be to make the AOE do significant hull damage, but poor shield damage. A further upgrade could make it do more shield damage, but it would still be most effective against unshielded or shields-down targets.
Reply #47 from Sins Forums Top

Hasn't it been beaten to the hilt in other threads, that fighters shred LRM? Why are people calling nerf anyway?


Because they don't. Fighters are EFFECTIVE against LRMs, but they do so little damage per pass, and only do one pass every 20 seconds, you need about 15-20 squadrons of fighters to destroy LRMs with any efficiency at all. Meanwhile your carriers are getting pounded (this also creates an imbalance, as carriers are certainly more of an investment and more fragile than LRMs).

If fighters (and bombers) didn't need 12 cubic miles to do a single pass they'd be more effective, but an LRM frigate can fire off about 3 volleys before fighters do another pass.

To me the best solution would be to allow the Command Cruisers to have a radar-jamming countermeasure ability in a radius around them that will cause a percentage of missiles to veer off-course.
Reply #48 from Sins Forums Top
Fighters make a pass every 12 seconds, or faster with support abilities. And they'd not do to well in getting past LRMs' shields, unless they're Vasari fighters but even they only have a 25% chance at best. Flak is also supposed to be good against LR frigates, but their diluted weaponry(spread over four sides) wouldn't not fare too well against concentrated fire or Javelises or Assailants either, only against the Illuminator's diluted fire(spread over 3 sides).

So yeah, only specific abilities like Volatile Nanites or Cleansing Brilliance, or research-intensive heavy cruisers would be precise counters to LRM spam.
Reply #49 from Sins Forums Top
Get a decent force of Advent ships together, throw the damage propagation ability, preferably level 3, on the LRMs and boom, down they go.

Reply #50 from Sins Forums Top
Excellent video btw. A lot of people crying foul about LRM do not know a lot about the game :/ Yes the flak ships have diluted fire spread, BUT they are hard as hell to kill because of heavy armor. And any fight that stretches is very much against the paper armor side which would be LRM :)