Gold codex craft discussion

[Eddie]

I'm currently giving the gold codex a try and am thinking about how to use the codex crafts.

- The Turtle is straight foreward. It's your main troop transport.

- The Shadowbat is a bit more tricky. The Turtle is a better troop transport. The Shadowbat is faster, but still slower than an aircar. If you really need speed, you can use a Hawk as a fast troop transport. I see a potential usefulness, but do you have the hangar to spare? In my base I will have a Turtle as the main troop transport, a Hawk or airspeeder as the fast interceptor and then I also need an aircar to shoot down civies. If a Hawk is present to fill the fast troop transport role, the extra hangar for the Shadowbat is just too much price for too little gain.
The Shadowbat can be armed with missiles, but what are the potential targets? Missiles do too much damage to shoot down civilian craft, and everything else is most likely too fast to catch. You might get lucky, but I don't expect the Shadowbat to do much aircombat. Putting thrusters or targeters in the missile slots might be their best use (once you get them).
The most useful feature I guess is the radar range (600) combined with the large fuel tank. You can use that to quickly fill gaps in your radar coverage. The Hawk can somewhat do that as well with radar range 500, but cannot fly too long (6 h).
Sooo... the Shadowbat will probably be the last of the codex ships to get. As a troop transport in your secondary base, once you have expanded enough to have one.

- The Hawk. At first you will only get one, as the flame cannon will be the only heavy weapon you have. With a flame cannon, a Hawk is very much like an airspeeder with a seagull launcher, just more sturdy. It is also a decent fast troop transport.
The main problem of the Hawk is the armament, if you want to get a second one. What are your early game options? The spike launcher will be the quickest you can get (bounty prize), but a single one doesn't have enough ammo to be useful. I guess the best option is to try and get the ramjet cannon. But that depends on luck on your interrogations (needs rogue fields). Any better ideas?
Early game, the Hawk would actually be much more useful if it had a light weapon slot. The light cannons have much more ammo and low enough damage to intercept civies. With luck you can also have a reticulan plasma charger or a sonic oscillator. I'm really missing the option to mount light weapons in heavy weapon slots (could that be a special of the Hawk?). Or a heavy weapon version of the light cannons. Like a 25mm gatling and 30mm gatling. Shouldn't the runts be able to clobber something together?

[BBHood217]

Those are Shadowtech (STC) crafts, the codex craft would be the El Fuego in your case.

I got nothing for any of those though, because I always go gray and get the Snake which like the wiki mentioned is like a mini-Fortuna; it's got one of each weapon type and one STC slot (which always ends up with an STC fusion reactor for its entire lifetime because the Snake is long obsolete by the time I find any other STC device), it can go underwater, and it's got a wide roof where you can take a lift up to for sniping shenanigans.

[legionof1]

The shadowbat is not that good as a early interceptor cause missiles are expensive, however its unique battle map features make its capable of doing missions other crafts may struggle with.

The shadowbat has a battle map that sets the area under the craft as total darkness and lights up the area around the craft in full light. This allows you to attack from under the craft with relative impunity against foes with poor NV. It also has other useful battlefield features.

[ivandogovich]

When I play gold, I use Shadow Bat as my assault transport.  As legion mentioned, its very good on the ground.  Punches above its weight.

Turtle is only for underwater and special cases.

Hawk is an interceptor only until I get a Jetbike.

[legionof1]

Depends on playstyle vs the mission. The shadowbat's lighting gimmick is somewhat situational since a number of factions have very good NV.

[Martin]

The Purple Turtle is better troop transport than El Fuego as it has doors. El Fuego is honestly rather awful for a Menace class. Low transport capacity, no shields, no repair bonus, no light weapon slot, still slower than a real interceptor, no space/sea capabilty. I suppose that is the price to pay for officer’s lash and admiral outfit.

The Golden Hawk on the other hand is a really great ship! If you can rush the naval gun, either by bank or by researching it, you have solved your air problems for many months, just don’t forget to buy chemicals.

[Rince Wind]

I don't usually keep an extra craft to shoot down civvies. Anything with a light slot will do, since you can disable all weapons you don't want to fire during a given interception.


Haven't really played gold, but with grey the Shadowbat is my normal troop transport while the Snake is on my secondary base and gets to do the underwater stuff. Later it might also be the one to go after civilians on the ground as a training vessel.

[lancev]

The Golden Hawk seems to be the only shadow craft with long term potential. The Gatling Lascannon is the ideal weapon due to the hit bonus. The dodge bonus is just high enough, that you can get an almost invincible craft with a fully trained Loknarr pilot.
The combination Golden Hawk+Gatling Lascannon+Loknarr single-handedly kills everything up to bombers. If at some point you will also be able to get shadowtech, it will be even better with shields and possible complete invulnerability due to dodge. The Golden Hawk could be the best tank in the game.

[legionof1]

In air combat yeah the Hawk does last the longest in theory. If you consider the ground game the turtle and the shadowbat remain useful for a very long time.

The turtles 12 troop capacity for underwater missions is only matched in the late game. And dont knock being the highest capacity battery powered craft.

The shadowbat has just about the best ground layout of any early craft as far as versatility goes. You have roof access, hatches, the gear pile is well protected, and the light gimmick.

[Eddie]

Thanks for the input, it is always nice to get new ideas to try out.

If I'm not mistaken, the Hawk is on paper the fastet heavy weapon slot you can have. Since tractor beams are heavy, this has quite some value. STC fusion reactors are accesible enough that you are guranteed to have Hawks with 5100 speed. I haven't used tractor beams yet, so I don't know how many of them you need to achieve anything.

[legionof1]

Thanks for the input, it is always nice to get new ideas to try out.

If I'm not mistaken, the Hawk is on paper the fastet heavy weapon slot you can have. Since tractor beams are heavy, this has quite some value. STC fusion reactors are accesible enough that you are guranteed to have Hawks with 5100 speed. I haven't used tractor beams yet, so I don't know how many of them you need to achieve anything.

Tractors are a bit meh, slowing an enemy craft in battle, is only effective if A) the combined tractors force the target to zero speed and therefore a landing occurs, or B) It keeps the target engaged when it attempts to flee from slower craft.

But it takes alot of tractors to force landings, and you still need to get them into aircombat, and between max 4 craft in an air combat and the relatively low speed of most craft with significant numbers of heavy mounts.....hard to put into practice.

By the same token if you can get to the point of battle you probably are not fighting something that can outrun you by the margin of 1-2 tractors.

[Zippicus]

I played around with tractors a bunch on my last play through.  By the time you can field them and have the craft to make the best use of them it's pretty much time to head to mars so they're not so great.  They're nice for bringing down crafts intact though so there's that at least.

Interesting note on tractors, you can tractor the ground attack ratmen swarms.  Each one only has the tiny UFO and 1 ratman.

[BBHood217]

If the battlescape shows a small scout, then you're not meant to fight it on the ground.  Or it's an actual small scout.

Say, what happens when you force land a shipping while it's over water?

[KZad Bhat]

BBHood217, just like vanilla X-Com, it just crashes and disappears. Good if you just want to stop them from moving around, bad if you wanted to pick up some people/tech.

[Ashghan]

And remember you get no points for forcing a landing. So tractor also 'costs' you infamy. It is a good way to pick up a some hellerium from small shipping if you have a craft to spare, but by the time you get to tractors you have either solved your hellerium problems or need it in vastly larger quantities (fuel cells) than the pitiful 25 units here and there.
A single tractor will not get you much, so you want a craft which can mount at least two of them. Swordfish has decent enough speed for that. Rest (metallo, kraken and dragon) are too slow to reliably catch most targets. Fusion Drive Scarab might also work, with a near 3k speed and no fuel dependence, may also double as pilot trainer, since you can shoot down anything that you don't need grounded.

As for the topic at hand, I agree with the usefulness of the Hawk - gattling 2xFusDrv remained my main interceptor for a long time in the only game I actually went for gold. No good for early game though, due to unavailability of heavy weapons.
The Turtle is meh - I dislike underwater missions, so I don't care about that special and the abysmal speed eliminates it from being my primary transport. If I'm far enough in the game to need a secondary transport (and an underwater one) I'm probably close to getting a Triton anyway (or a Prospector - my beloved Tarsus), which is superior in all aspects.
Shadowbat - the light gimmick can sometimes get you pinned, since you have to actually cross the light to get anywhere. The one time I suffered through that made me hate it forever. Plus the 2xMS weapon loadout is mostly useless on such a slow ship. It may be a semi-decent fast response B team transport once you put 2x thruster and 2xFusDrv on it. That loadout makes it an unarmed, no-fuel-needed Deliverator.