Being a veteran of Trade Wars for 5 yrs, I should not be asking this question, but photon invasions is one of my weakest point of the game. I rarely if ever take part in invasions as most invasions are done at night when one can moth twice before midnite and twice more after midnight to wear down the ore. And I work nights.

Here's my situation. Say I want to photon invade a single H with active sector and atmos cannons and lots of figs on it and i have a planet in same sector I use to refill figs and with a planet beamer.

I have two options to invade:

1) Carry one photon at a time to avoid photons blowing up on a ship if I hit a bit of lag during the photon wave and have the gun hit me(this has happened). Hit the enemy planet until low on figs. Retreat and land on staging planet to refill on figs and beam to SD to get another photon, then warp back to staging sector and repeat. The con of this is I waste turns going to SD to refill on photons, even with the planet beamer on my staging planet to beam to SD to get the photons. It is also time consuming. But the pro is that I won't risk a photon blowing up on me as I already fired the one photon I had.

2) Get the max 5 photons the stock ISS can carry and fire into sector, move, land on enemy planet, hit figs on planet, retreat when low on figs, land on staging planet, refill on figs, beam to staging sector next door, repeat until the 5 photons are gone. The con is the risk is there for a photon to blow up on my if I hit any lag and the gun hits me. The pro is I save turns and it is faster and the planet can be invaded quickly.

Depending on the type of game (laid back, competitive, enemy online or offline, high or low turns, etc), which is the better scenario to do this type of invasion?

Buy a missle frigate, photon, xport, land (with your ISS in the sector with the enemy planet already). Make sure you have another ship ready in the sector with the frigate just in case you do get podded, that's where your pod will end up. The photon xport is cheaper on turns, doesn't encounter the ship delay (250 ms if set to "none"), and allows you to buy 10 photons at a time. Also, keep in mind that with longer durations you can do multiple invasion attempts on one photon. I would feel safe doing 2-3 for each photon wave with 3 second photons.

it would be nice to have the following enhancements in planet citidels:

#1 Ship Garage in Citidel, to protect your extra ships and carry them with you on the planet.

#2 Equipment/Weapons locker, to keep Extra Photons, Mines, etc on the Citidel to exchange with ships.

Of course having multiple ships can do multiple photon attacks, but the cost of dragging extra ships to that attack sector can burn turns too. Like have two or more ISS or Missile Frigites with one Photon each.

That's a great idea, I think. I always thought details like having to buy shields for your planets was odd... Wouldn;t it be great if a new citadel upgrade gave the ability to buy or "grow" shields right no your planet? (I realize there are probably balance issues with this idea, I just want to toss it around.)

I've always thought that a planetary defense shielding system should make it's own shields as long as a certain criteria was met. saves one from the chore of buying them. It CAN get tedious when your corp has hundreds of planets. Being able to park spare ships in a garage on planet would be nice, too, but wouldn't there be limit to how many can be stored? Right now I've been keeping our corp's spares in back sectors of our tunnels and towing them to any invasion site isn't much of a problem. Especially since you'd move a few planets over to refurb your ship from after each attack.

I like the idea of being able to buy planet shields the way one does for planet transporters.

Well in theory the shield is a force field, you should be able to generate power to grow more sheilds. Without being able to generate sheilds, you must get a ship that can hold a lot, and buy them from a class 0 or 9 port and move them back to the planet. It is work, but well worth it when someone invades later.

Most ship designs can hold a lot of figs, but not as many shields. Most I've seen is in EPOCH with 10,000 sheilds on an Assault Carrier, really nice to load up Level 5 Planets with.

quote:Originally posted by Orion_Blastar

Well in theory the shield is a force field, you should be able to generate power to grow more sheilds. Without being able to generate sheilds, you must get a ship that can hold a lot, and buy them from a class 0 or 9 port and move them back to the planet. It is work, but well worth it when someone invades later.

Most ship designs can hold a lot of figs, but not as many shields. Most I've seen is in EPOCH with 10,000 sheilds on an Assault Carrier, really nice to load up Level 5 Planets with.


Max shields ANY ship can hold is 16000, or 1600 planetary shields. And you don't buy shields at class 0 or 9 and then move them back to your planet... you move your planet on top of the class 0 and load up a script to dump shields on your planet. FYI I believe max shields ANY planet can hold is 65500 planetary shields.

There should be a generator for shields that works like the planetary interdict... Eats up ore, but grows shields. IMO, anyway.

Darn this topic went with the wind...And Harley said it best...Use 2 ships to photon and invade exporting inbetween them.. This uses less turns and takes less chance of losing turns...