Kanrak Assailant woes

Agreed, and worse. From my post on 1 March:

The Vasari Assailant (LRM) Frigate has, at level 4 military tech, the ability to toggle to charged missiles. This makes the assailant unable to move, turn at a vastly slower rate, in return for extra range and an attack that hits multiple targets. You would expect this to be a good thing.

It isn't. The secondary attack does so close to no damage that it might as well be. As far as I can tell, the secondary, multiple target attack (the beam) does about 5 damage to a nearby target, and (it seems) even less to 2 or 3 other enemy targets, per missile volley. Keep in mind that there's quite a long time between volleys...

What that means is that a fleet of, say, 50 missile frigates focus firing on a single, doomed enemy, will be inflicting a piddling 250 points of damage to a nearby enemy. After allowing for shield mitigation this is barely a scratch in a Cobalt's shields. It's pathetic. It's even worse if you're not focus firing, since by the time the second volley comes along the shields have easily regenerated such tiny pinpricks. I haven't looked closely at the numbers so this might not be quite right about the damage, but I can say that close watching for any significant effect from these missiles with large all-Assailant fleets has so far shown me pretty much nothing.

Worse, since the effect disables your engines until you switch off the charged missiles, the Assailants can't move and can barely turn, making them very easy to get behind and destroy. And worse again, the auto-cast for the things to go back to normal missiles, allowing movement, seems bizarre - sometimes a random proportion (up to 100%) of your assailants will refuse to switch off charged missiles during a retreat, and despite repeated and frantic movement orders will sit there until they die or you go and switch them back to normal missiles manually - which has to be done one by one since manually activating an ability on a group only effects the single unit at the top of the stack.

...and extra range is largely worthless, since the Assailants don't autocast charged missiles until they're in range, anyway, and forward movement is fast enough to make the extra range largely pointless (it only really has an effect in that, when left to their own devices, the long range ships will stop moving and fight while the close range stuff gets closer, and thus into auto-target selection. As long as the missiles are a fair bit longer range than the close-in guns, that's really all you need for the brawlers to "tank" for the missile ships - end even then, only as long as the enemy player doesn't manually target your LRMs).

As it stands, charged missiles are a significant disadvantage for Vasari. You're better off without it.

Vasari has enough difficulty early game - I think this is something that needs fixing.

sigh, bump.

This actually prevents me from playing Vasari. Ships seem to randomly just stop somewhere and there's times I have to manually hunt them down. The Assailants do this and so do the Sentinels. I normally just build Sentinels instead of Assailants. I do agree that this seems like something that should be addressed, but then again I really don't know how many people play Vasari effectively (I don't).

Overall though, I just seem to think Vasari is underpowered compared to TEC and especially when compared with Advent. I thought they were supposed to be menacing?

I'm not sure if it's even a matter of playing them effectively, this is just way too super micro dependent for the game, and it completely destroys not only a strength for the ship, but the smallest amount of fun I have while playing them.

I understand that we are going to see smarter AI when it comes to using abilities, and that may fix the problem, but I'm not sure why we couldn't have the feature where if I turn the ability on while selecting all the ships, they all turn on.

All in all, kinda like how I can't move ships without them just moving right freaking back where they were, this issue just takes away a lot of the fun I was having. Lets hope 1.3 fixes this.

so wait wait you're telling me I don't want to get charged missiles? Isn't that *incredibly annoying* that they actually make my assailants worse? That sounds incredibly lame -__-

If this is true I want it fixed immediately!

Oh yeah that and also I like how I can't simply double click a unit to select all the units of the same type on the screen... like in every other rts ever (besides red alert which has weird controls)

Eh, I'm sure that during combat, it won't make them worse since every bit of damage helps. It's only after that, when you want to move your fleet around that you have problems. Either you can move some because they never changed modes, or some don't move because they haven't changed back...or you get a little of both.

Well even in combat they're worse. The damage is so low it's almost nothing, yet the slow turning speed of Assailants (whether to target human players intentionally taking advantage of the slow turn, or in any battle where targets get spread out), and the lack of ability to chase fleeing ships (against AI and Humans alike) would make charged missiles a disadvantage even if the autocast was fixed - remember it take a little while for the normal missiles to come back online, so retreating forces are usually out of range by the time you start moving again. The pitiful damage increase is just not worth it.

Don't give up on Vasari, though - phase missile upgrades are very good, and Assailants are still a good early spam option. Not as good as TEC LRMs, sure, but what is? Just forget about charged missiles until they're fixed, IMO.

=D Vasari gets much better later on, 'specially the Assailants. Get all of the upgrades, especially the last one. Not to mention that you can get Assailants and their first upgrade with only 1 Military Lab.

But, as a note, I have never used or researched the Charged MIssile ability.

You guys may find that Vasari is weak, but trust me, get those upgrades up, and they will be demolishing left and right. 's all about the upgrades.

well it seems to make sense to me that the charged missile ability makes them worse. There are a lot of worthless techs in this game, but the idea of one that actually makes your units worse does bug me

Same here. And I agree with the rest of your post. The first several times I tried Charged Missile, I noticed the same problems the OP did. Also, this would be even more of a disadvantage against a human player.