Discuss Battlestation: First Contact here!

Post all your tips on how to beat the game here. And feel free to discuss anything that is on your mind regarding the Battlestation: First Contact mini game.

How far have you made it?
How did you do it?
Anything you need help with?

Stay strong commander!
Admiral Geezer

Thanks for making this section.

I can only make it to about level 45 or so without getting completed swamped.

Im trying a dozen different strategies and just cant figure it out. It seems to be quite random with what enemies get thrown at you. The shields just arent strong enough and then they take out all your weapons and just leave you sitting there. Calling in battleships is nice, but they are so expensive, you have to choose between them or weapons on your ship

Commander!

Have you tried changing the settings on the shield? Play around with them to find out the best settings for each situation. You have made it to wave 45, that is impressive. Only 5 waves more and you meet the final mothership! Also play around with the settings in your hangars.

If anyone has more advice feel free to give them!

god damn this game is addicting. level 50 two times in row now, but that boss is too strong. take out his turrents yet the lasers still work and those just mess you up real quick. had 3 reenforcement ships next to me the whole time yet he just murders all of us. ive tried targeted everything on him and his health never seems to go down.

so the first time, i was able to research plasma and fixer, both are huge assets. the second time i didnt get either, but i upgraded my missles a few times so that helped. im going to beat that bastard tonight and will get report back

Good job Gfunk
I can hardly get past wave 20 but i havent played much, the full version looka awesome

Looks*

Phew, just beat this sucker! Had a little practice last night during a train trip and now I've done it.

My winning strategy was:

1. Had the lowest amount of marines and didn't build a hangar at all. So no ship captures. Distributed the surplus I had from cutting marines evenly between engineers and scientist
2. I didn't change the allocation of research during the whole game, so even steven there as well
3. First I built just one bolter on the station, which I later changed to missile and rest slots were filled with hangars
4. I found that a working trick was to have couple of squads defending the station (one with bolter, second missile) and rest were on offense so they could quickly engage the larger ships before they could do damage from distance (at some points I wish I would've been able to order my fighters directly to fly to a certain point on the map for best strategic positioning. At least I think that this isn't currently possible. However, mostly the fighters were where I wanted them to be).
5. Tweaked the engineers a bit depending on the situation, but generally had allocation to weapons down to zero. Some points when fighers went down like flies, I set all engineers to hangars for some time.
6. I think setting the behavior of the fighters is crucial to success. Bolters handle smaller targets and couple of missile fighters take on the larger ships (shields and turrets).
7. When it comes to calling reinforcements, I started off with a missile boat sitting snuggly next to the station with a squadron of fighters protecting it. Later I called a battleship and finally a capital ship. As I had some surplus near the end of the game at waves 40+, I called couple more missile boats and a battleship.
8. With this strategy my station never had its shields taken down and when the mothership appeared, I just went all in, changed all fighters to offensive and ordered all larger ships to advance on the mother. I guess if I hadn't done this, the mothership would've eaten my offensive fighters alive and then proceeded to rip my station apart. Although I had enough firepower to take it down, I'd estimate failing to make to first swift move against it would've made the difference between winning or losing.

Oh, almost forgot, all my fighters were equipped with shields

So all in all, this little tasty sneek peek to the world of Battlestation got me excited. I guess next I'm off to buy the rest of the episodes. Got the Kickstarter already covered and can't wait for the finished game! Best of luck for all of you guys at Bugbyte on your journey. Let's hope its a long and successful one!

I love the game enough that I paid for all the levels just to support you guys. It's really addicting, and I really like the game play. I made it to 50 last night and knocked the boss down a bit, but ultimately died. I will get him.

A few notes:

Bug: I've had some successful enemy ship takeovers, which are super helpful for defense. However, when my shuttle returns to base (which is successful as often as not) I don't get the option to re-launch even though I have plenty of marines. One key to the game seems to be building an impressive fleet, but that's tough when my marines are sitting around being lazy.

Annoyance: I wish we had a little more control over research trees. It seems that keys to getting far a gatling (early) and plasma (later). Bolters are worthless past level 10, so you're in trouble if you don't have gatlings. Missiles don't compare to plasma later. Those orbs are sweet for close in defense as well, but I get them maybe 10% of the time. Can you give a bit more control on this?

Tip: For other players, I tweak my marines/pilots downward and researchers way up to speed tech. It seems to work, though not always. I would focus more on marines if the shuttle bug noted earlier weren't a problem.

Just beat the mothership on stage 1. I took all off my marines and went 30/30/30. I never adjusted engineers and only sent for pilot refill once.

For research i went all 30 into physical,for a simple reason: more control over what I could get. Instead of having my researches scattered between bolter, laser, orb and plasma and their upgrades, plus shields, I had gattling and missiles.

Made 4 bolters and 4 hangars. Got missile research first and though I couldn't afford station launchers, I gave all my fighters missiles. I set them all to defensive, auto launch, shielded, evasive, target strongest, and target hangars 1st.

Gattlings researched second and I bided my time, replaced all 4 bolters with gattlings and eventually replaced all 4 gattlings with missiles.

Every wave a carrier spawned I set my fighters to aggressive, they made short work of the carrier, and i set them back to defensive. I also would select the big ships and tell my guys to focus, just in case.

Later on I bought a capital ship, set it to the left of my station and a missile ship at the right. That's it.

I noticed you can't give orders to fighters from a carrier/hijacked carrier/capital ship, so they just buzz around with bolters and get murdered, making them a waste of space and pilots. They were a minor distraction atbest in the final wave or two, when I threw everything I had at the mother ship.


So.. Suggestions? Here's a few...

1: Let you set fighter orders and layouts from carriers/capital ships too.

2: Different battlestation shields, like ones with a wide area which can help protect near by ships by taking the hits first. Maybe reinforced bulkheads as an option, which gives no shield, just adds more hp and maybe armor.

3: Allow ships to earn kills, giving them something like veteran then ace status, along with small boosts to overall performance. Im assuming from reading the kickstarter page that your adding commanders with their own traits and levels and such so I'm referring to minor ships.

4: Allow commanders of some kind to be set over fighters, piloting a stronger fighter, which will let the squads performance be boosted, maybe even add flight formations and attack patterns as their skills increase. Strafing could be for damaging ships and dogfighting for fighters.

5: In addition to big ships, allow small ships, maybe ai controlled with the same options as fighters, similar to the different varieties that attack the battlestation. Maybe a scavanger could be one of the station modules and lt you gather resources for this purpose.

Just took the beast they call Episode 2 down.

This time I had to rewrite the whole thing. Started playing with the strategy from first episode and got to wave 3

1. No changes on the starting distribution of ppl as I figured I need marines to defend the station (although as it turns out, I built so solid defense that the boarding parties never got through
2. This time I started with focusing on station weaponry first, fighters second
3. I never touched the science section on this episode
4. The core of this strategy was to micromanage engineer allocation for every single wave. For this I noticed a slider controls would serve me better than the +- buttons, so the allocation could be changed faster. So for example I ran out of fighters, I put all my 40 engineers to hangars between waves and just when the enemy got close enough, ordered everyone to weapons as the 40% boost really made a difference between winning or losing. Around wave 45 I had to maximize repair just to hold off incoming missiles. At worst station's shield were down and was down about 5% hull.
5. Had 2 hangars, some bolters, 1 laser and 2 missiles (1 set to engage strongest enemys' shield, other turrets)
6. Had time/resources to build couple of missile boats and 2 battleships. I lost one of each.
7. One of the biggest differences between the first and second episodes was that this time I played it real close to the cheast. Had all my ships near the station and only on the last wave when I was sure of winning went all in with ships (fighters dropped like flies).
8. I think one key factor contributing to this times victory was to ignore the carriers which kept their distance. When I had destroyed the mothership, there were about 4-5 carriers still lurking around. Had I went after them, I could've left the station open to attack or boarding from ships jumping in near it.

Had fun this time around too and it was nice to notice how you really had to shuffle around with your game style to beat this one. One thing I noticed (not sure if it was planned this way or not) was that if you order a ship to jump and cancel the jump as it is underway, the ship gains great forward momentum with weapons active. This can be used as means to quickly advance on the enemy, so it really has some strategic value.

Now onwards to episode 3...