bah.,... i never pay attention to the shield types.... just find the one with the most shield rating and best regen rate, and then screw the molecular/postron/grtaviton. same for weaps... dont bother trying to find weapons to accomodate your enemies... they are too varied and even if u are trying to kill lots and lots of one type, and they are weak to neutron, inevitably you will come up against random people who are invincible to neutron, so dont bother with the types.

Remember, on a scale of 1 to Awesome, I'm Totally Great

Like Flak said. I never bothered about the types although loads of people do. Especially after you have finished SP and properly affiliate yourself with a particular faction, you can pick your shield and weapons to best match the strengths and weaknesses of your main enemy. Unfortunately there isnt too much choice at the top end of the shield market and the choice between gun types always seems to come down to max damage and or projectile speed.

If a gun is 'most effective' against a particular shield type it will do +20% damage and the opposite for least effective. Therefore even if you are only fighting one faction a random weapon with 20% more punch will be just as good as a matched weapon plus it will mangle any other enemies 20% more.

At higher levels I somewhat agree with Flak, but at lower levels .... say 1 to 29ish.

It does pay to scan your enemy and then redo your shield and weapon loadout to best counter them. If you know your going to be working for a specific faction for the next 10 or 20 missions and the majority of missions are against one specific enemy faction. For the most part they all will have the same shields and weapon types.

on a possible loadout of 6 hardpoints, I been using 2 guns that have high shield damage (geared towards what ever shield type the enemy faction is using) with little hull damage, then 2 guns with high hull damage and I don't pay attention to what type of shield it's strongest or weakest against. Then two catapult missles.

works good so far... only level 32 though.... but only get owned by nomads

AFX, you should never use two missile launchers of same type. They will share the 50 missiles in stead of having 50 missiles each, so you only get 25 shots.

On my Dromedary, I use one Catapult and one Moonstalker. They can't share missiles, so I get 50 shots. Works so far up to Difficulty 36 missions for the Corsairs.

By the way, what is your problem with the nomads?

I found in the lower SP missions that the sheild type did make a difference, as I saved a game at a point and tried a Molecular sheild with a higher rating than my Graviton and promptly got my butt kicked when attacked by a horde of ships!

At the higher levels it makes less of a difference other than the max rateing you can mount on your ship.

As far as weapons go try getting the max hull damage you can mount. Sometimes I just don't think it makes much of a difference on the guns with mostly sheild damage as I always shoot a missle at them to take those down before we get to it.

I try to mix the weapon types Lazers, proton cannons, etc to have a complimentary load out. I personally like having a missle slot as it does do more damage than a gun even though you have to buy them. DO NOT shoot them at the enemy unless you are coming head on, Have a great side angle shot, or they have a very slow ship and you are right up their tail pipe or you are guaranteed to miss!

Just some observations from the edge of space!

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