Capship Strikes

For waypoints where you come out of autopilot into a capship missile strike, how come they're invulnerable up until some predefined point? I can target them, but not hit them at all until they get close enough to the convoy. This comes across rather arbitrary.

You are probably not hitting them at all, and they are taken out by capital ships laser turrets. They are really hard to hit with you guns but it is doable. Try firing a missile at them when they are still far away from their six o'clock to see if they are indeed vulnerable at this point.

That's why i can't take them out head on... but those missiles can be easily taken out with glide enabled ships like the Arrow.
Head towards them hit AB, enable glide, get on their six or get into the center of their "formation", hit AB until you match their speed and hit glide again. Then pick one by one.
It's like picking cherrys from a tree.

Even then, it still feels like everything is off. The aiming reticle/prediction circle does nothing to help either. Even when I'm perfectly centered, the lasers shoot way too low.

yeah, once they're vulnerable, their hit boxes are large, there's no problem taking them out. It's just in my last mission, the time to impact was 10-15 seconds when they finally went vulnerable and they were in two separate clusters each with large spreads, so the engagement window was really small. The end result is that i get taken out of the game experience and frustrated because i spend 20seconds following these missiles shooting at them in futile until some magic point, then i have to scramble to tag them all. I forgot what the mission was, but I had to do this at 3 waypoints. Had to redo the mission several times because of this.

I don't have a problem with the mission being difficult; my main suggestion is that not being able to hit the missiles even though you can see and target them really destroys the immersion in the game and calls attention to game mechanics.

Virfortis, do you have external view enabled by any chance? The change in camera position shifts the reticle up from where the guns are zeroed

I'm using first person camera, but yeah it seems like the window of opportunity is a whole 20 seconds, that's not a whole lot, and really does kill the immersion.

Also, I'm pretty sure you're talking about the mission where you protect the TCS Simon and vessels.

EDIT: It also doesn't help that the AI rarely shoots at capmissiles, leaving me the job of shooting all of them down. Most of the time the bigger ships can shoot one or two, but all it takes is one. This isn't really a challenge, just luck.

Virfortis wrote: EDIT: It also doesn't help that the AI rarely shoots at capmissiles, leaving me the job of shooting all of them down. Most of the time the bigger ships can shoot one or two, but all it takes is one. This isn't really a challenge, just luck.

It is duable if you aim well. We haven't released any missions without us and the testers beating them several times you know. It might be hard, but it isn't just luck.

In the prologue mission with cap missiles I used 6 missiles to take 6 caps out. Sufficient enough to complete the mission....

Hm, that might explain why I've developed a passionate aversion against any objective where I have to take out capship missiles.
Going to have to observe if it's indeed them being invulnerable, or if I'm just too stupid to hit them at all (which I was thinking up to now).


I suppose there is no way to make them destructible right from the start, or to change that at a later patch (possibly not, seeing the answer in one of the other threads ).