Escalation: Two days in

Can you imagine anything worse on a Friday night than...
- There's a raid on
- Your shipyard is idle
- Your Retro Lab is idle
- Your R&D is idle
- You are at a concert with a Neil Diamond tribute band

Yeah me neither.  At least I was able to fire up Remote Desktop & take care of the Shipyard & Retro Lab.

There's not much I know of in terms of secrets or tricks to this raid.  The players with an Apollo (or Apollo fleet) are doing it pretty easily.  Those without the Apollo are not.  Yes, I'm sure there are exceptions.  

As an example, my fleet with an Apollo spotting for 3 Rhinos can complete a S target for 2-4 coin repair.  When I took that fleet and swapped out the Apollo for a Harlock Aegis / Punisher combo, beating the S involved the Punisher getting sunk and needing to use my Rhinos to spot for each other to finish the target.  It was more like 12 coins that time.

One interesting observation - I've been talking for a while about how key it is to have 100% accurate Phalanx to beat a Mega Ship... so that you can stop all of the incoming missiles.  If you have a ship without an accuracy bonus, like an Apollo a Punisher, using Phalanx 4 and Frontline Countermeasures, your accuracy will only be 65% * ( 1 + 35%) = 87.75%.  However, if you are in an alliance with full gunner bonus, you get an additional 20% accuracy bonus, resulting in a final accuracy of 100.75%.  It's a big disadvantage for the players who choose to be in no alliance (or a small one).

A few other tips:
- When getting close to being in the maximum missile range of a Mega Ship turret, your ships will get an orange debuff marker.  I'm not sure what the debuff actually is, but it is a nice signal that you're almost there, helping you stop outside of the Scattergun activation range.
- Moving fast when engaging the Scatter turrets will cut your damage because you will outrun many shots.
- You can use a Concussive Gatling Gun to outrange Scatter turrets (drive carefully), but I find you still are taking missile turret fire while trying to kill the Scatters.  Those missiles have some sort of flak evade so that you can't get them all, and so Revenge will take a lot of damage, even with Phalanx cover. I'm sort of intrigued by the idea of V2H armed with CGGs, but I probably wouldn't spend the shipyard time.

I've been trying to use a Savage Kodiak for its aura to improve that fleet, but it seems to just get in the way (damage magnet) without helping much. 

More thoughts on Vendetta builds:
- Hydraulic Resistors are a waste because the Defense Handicap.  Use Speed System 5 instead.
- The Turn Armor on the build I showed in the previous article is probably not super-useful, and will slow your repair time.
- With such high health, those are going to be tough to rank quickly.
- With such high health and short repair, those are real convenient when you have an objective that needs a bunch of armor points repaired.
- I was asked about Agility System instead of Shielded Tactical.  The Agility bonuses help against the duration of slow/stun effects (only), but the Vendetta is already unreactive to ignore those effects.   The Shielded Tactical system helps you against fields in the water, which is what you need to reduce the effects of debuffing ice fields from the Wendigo/Glacial and damaging fire fields from Apoc Mortars.  Siege Targeting and maybe Splash Upgrade could find their way onto Vendetta builds somehow.

Remember... Work like a captain, party like a pirate!