Bio-ships extra effective for early conquest rush?

[Red Death]

Maulers primarily focus on short-range combat with shield penetration and high damage to armor and shields. Equipped with melee-range mandible weapons and either short-range S-slot or PD-slot weapons, these ships will form the bulk of your navy in the early game. Their unique mandible weapons have similar damage scaling against starbases and larger ships as torpedoes.

For traditional mechanical shipsets, the starting ships are corvettes that are not exactly optimised for crushing defensive starports. You usually need to wait for L weapons (destroyers) or torpedoes (frigates) for that. Starting bioship Maulers may be more efficient in destroying these. Will that make bioships more effective at early conquest?

Come to think of it, the fact that you only need food instead of processing minerals into alloys might also help rushing, depending on how food costs are balanced. At the very least in the new zone system you will not have to rely on a zone in the city district for alloy production, food can be simply produced everywhere.

 

[Newbee53]

Not certain. Bio-ship sets start with a weaver, which was necessary because apparently, they were otherwise getting 'melted' by early battles. either early fauna or starbases.

This was mentioned in the stream Thursday and as far as I know exactly what the problem is wasn't known by the people on the stream. this suggests that those early maulers have even shorter ranges than torpedoes--makes sense--and take more damage before they can apply any.

so I don't think its likely to be any kind of 'early conquest special.'

It should be noted that even the small weapons on corvettes will out range maulers by a lot. so its probable that they will be dependent on weaver support early on. At least until you can lean more into their armor and speed.

 

[Red Death]

Not certain. Bio-ship sets start with a weaver, which was necessary because apparently, they were otherwise getting 'melted' by early battles. either early fauna or starbases.

This was mentioned in the stream Thursday and as far as I know exactly what the problem is wasn't known by the people on the stream. this suggests that those early maulers have even shorter ranges than torpedoes--makes sense--and take more damage before they can apply any.

so I don't think its likely to be any kind of 'early conquest special.'

It should be noted that even the small weapons on corvettes will out range maulers by a lot. so its probable that they will be dependent on weaver support early on. At least until you can lean more into their armor and speed.

Interesting! And I suppose that makes sense, they did say the Mauler weapons were "melee range".

 

[jedavis]

the fact that you only need food instead of processing minerals into alloys might also help rushing

In the dev diary screenshots, it looked like they cost both food and alloy. Probably less alloy than a conventional force, but not none either.

 

[Newbee53]

In the dev diary screenshots, it looked like they cost both food and alloy. Probably less alloy than a conventional force, but not none either.

I am pretty sure that the non-food construction cost comes from their components. I'm pretty sure the base cost is always food.

 

[hart30]

I believe with bioships there will be quite a big food shortage early in the game. Too big for constructing many bioships.

As everything costs a lot of food, while at the same time u cannot completely abandon alloy or mineral production. This will also slow down colonization and early expansion till u have at least one planet with enough districts fully specialized on food production.

Therefore I dont believe that bioships are more suitable for early rushing than others.

 

[Bitzo]

From the screenshots in the Dev Diary, bioship weapons appear to have ranges of 0-40. This puts them at around the range of lasers and plasma cannons and actually slightly above disruptors and autocannons.
Granted, said "weapons" were the PD-slot support and suppression "guns" of the Weaver, so their actual offensive armaments might differ.