omegav bomb over antimatter bomb

[jianye3]

hello all,

antimatter bomb can do up to 40 points of damage. omega v can do up to 50 points of damage. antimatter bomb is cheaper to research, sooner on the research list, cheaper and smaller to put on ships.

even if omega v inflicts 10 more points of damage, i think you could fit more antimatter bombs than omega v's on a ship.... and still do more damage overall.

unless the enemy planet has class 35 shields (which is unbelievably high and the maximum i think), or you just don't have antimatter bombs....why would anyone ever arm their ships with omega v instead of antimatter?



what is some of the best tech to trade away so you can get better technology?
i don't know why, but the enemy likes energy pulsars. pulsars do almost no damage to large/huge ships. but the enemy will trade good stuff for that.

other things to give to the enemy so you can get good things include repulsor beams, perhaps industrial waste control 60/40, inertial stabilizer?, hypserspace (if the enemy has computer tech superior to hyperspace).

can anyone else think of good things to trade away?

jianye3

[momfan]

Bombs

1. You don't always get Anti-Matter bombs
2. Small ships can sometimes carry 1 Omega-V but not 2 Anti-Matter bombs

I find it worthwhile to make the ship faster rather than to carry more bombs, because faster ships reach the planet sooner. If the first load of bombs doesn't wipe out the colony you can retreat and come back for round 2 without losing any ships. Slower ships may get hit before they can drop their bombs, so you lose ships over time.

Trading Tech

1. Don't trade if you can help it - steal, invade or extort instead
2. Don't trade stabilizers, armour, battle computers or ECM
3. Trade planetology, beam weapons and ground weapons

In general, I prefer to steal, invade or extort rather than trade for tech. I only trade for something I really need, and only in the early game e.g. warp 2 or 3 engines, range 5 or 6, or inertial stabilizer.

I don't give inertial stabilizer because the computer WILL use it, and their ships will be faster and harder to hit. Ditto with armour, battle computers and ECM.

I trade away planetology since the computer will improve their planets = more factories and tech to grab when you invade :-) I trade away beam weapons as I find that in the early-mid game missiles are more important, while in the late game bombs are more important. I trade ground weapons because by the time you invade, you should have overwhelming numbers and the tech difference is not important.

[RefSteel]

Hiya - and welcome!

As momfan points out, there are a number of cases where Omega-Vs may be very helpful (small, fast ships usually make better bombers than large, slow ones, and there are limits to the number of bombs carried) - another reason is that the bombs don't always do maximum damage, and shielding is subtracted from the actual (not the maximum) damage dealt. The amount of shielding necessary to obviate the average damage of an anti-matter bomb attack is much lower than 35.

That said, many games never get as far as even AMBs - Fusion Bombs (and in rare cases, even nukes) can often get the job done on their own.

On tech trading: There are a number of ways to game the tech trade system that we try to avoid where possible. The Silicoids' love of Soil Enrichment (which they can't actually use) for instance can be exploited fairl consistently. From a strategic point of view, I almost never trade computer tech away, since I prefer to keep as much of an espionage advantage as I can, and I almost never trade bombs, but everything else is case-by-case, depending on my available armament, defenses, and the game situation. If my best missiles are Hyper-V and Scatter-V, I certainly won't trade Class VI Shields! And if the Meklar are out to 10 planets but lack terraforming technology, I'm not going to trade them Terra+40....

[jmas]

I hadn't really noticed before but it looks like the OP is right in the sense that in many cases, AM Bombs are better, at least by the measure of damage dealt. It's true that shields of 35 is more than needed to change the balance but...

The amount of shielding necessary to obviate the average damage of an anti-matter bomb attack is much lower than 35.

(emphasis added)

...the amount of shielding necessary is not that much lower from my point of view. In the Strategy Guide book, Appendix G shows "overall effectiveness" given miniaturization, reasonable assumptions about offensive and defensive tech, etc., for different "average tech levels" and defending shields. At average tech level of 30, it takes shields of 24 for Omega-Vs to catch up. Slowly it comes down, but according to the figures, a big decrease doesn't come until average tech level of 70 (!) where Omega-Vs catch up at a shield level of 17.

So I think the real arguments in favor of Omega-V Bombs are the other ones made already. And of course, as has been pointed out, sometimes you just can't get AMs.