But they're cheap. Out of cash? chuck on a mass driver.

Then turn up the difficulty.  The game regularly beats me on Tough depending on how things go.

I had a game last night where the Arceans were coming at me with Photon torpedoes, which they had specialized on.  But I'm playing beta 4 of 1.1.

At some point, you'll get good enough that you'll hae to turn up the difficulty level.  You should try Gifted. At that level, its intuition is a bit higher and it's barely getting any advantages.

Early on in the game, particularly if I start near a militarily aggressive species, I research mass driver weaponry and slap it on what I call System Defenders -- basically nothing more than a tiny hulls with mass drivers mounted on them. Cheap, fast to make, and actually pretty good into the mid game if coupled with military starbases (defensively anyway).

I get the feeling the AI (pre 1.1 betas) started off with this approach and then stuck to it. In every game I've played so far, using 1.X, the AI has focused on mass driver weaponry. I was actually surpriced in a recent game when my intellegence reports picked up on the fact that one of my rivals was arming some ships with missles.

i find that on my ships i always have all armor types of a value of at least 1. like if i'm fighting a race that likes beam weapons then i go heavy on the shields and 1 armor and 1 chaff. I do this because the square root of 1 is 1, so i always get two points of damage right off the top whenever my ships get hit! Then my beefed up armor kicks in and takes a big punch out of whatever else is coming at it. I normally have ships that are getting 0 damage for the first 10-20% of the game but i need it big time cause i suck at economy and i'm always strapped for cash

When all AIs are geniuses or above on their difficulty/intelligence level, oh my they send in forces that have combined all weapons pretty nicely. Typically, Guns: 10, Missle: 6, Laser: 8, and some kind of defenses, earlier in the game. With lots of logistics, they later added more. The only reason I live is by....you guessed it....beefed up military bases. Invading is hard, since they too have their beefed up military bases. And yes, they defend that too. Not much by means of ships, but with the modules. Yup...pretty tough.

It is counter intuitive, but combining weapons is not a smart thing to do. It is a weakness of the AI that needs some tweaking. Fleets specialize on one weapon type fare better than fleets with combined weapons. I am not saying that you should have ALL your fleets with one weapon type, but rather each individual fleet should only carry one type of weapon. It requires extra coordination in assembling your fleets.

Reason: Each of the attacker weapon type counts as separate attack against the defender combined defense. Essentially the defender defense got counted two or three times. Conclusion: Either the AI should be tweaked to not combining weapons on its fleets; or the combat calculation should be modified to not penalize fleets with combined weapons.

Actually it is better for a fleet to be multi weapon base, but for a ship to be single weapon base. In your examples, split your fleet into three ships, and arm one ship with beam, one with missile, and one with guns. No matter the defenses, you will come out on top. The reason is exactly as you state, each weapon type does count as a separate attack, but you have to realize that each ship is also a separate attack. So by having different ships focused on different weapons, and then combining it into a fleet, you gain the diversity of being able to kill any defense, but does not get penalized for it. If they designed their ships with defenses to all type of weapons, then they are just naturally screwed all over the place.



As for the OP: I completely agree with you. Mass driver is such a waste of time now. Before, when Nano-ripper was useful, I would attually spend the time grabbing it before rushing for Disruptor III, but now... I rush for Disruptor III and then max out missile, skipping Mass Drivers all together.