Cosmoteer: Starship Architect & Commander – How to Deal with an Enemy Deck Cannon

Enemy Deck Cannon Tips

Shields are nice for minimizing armor damage. If they have to take down your shields, and then deal with 4 blocks thick armor, they only have a few seconds after taking down to shield to punch through the armor before your shields come back online.

Every time your shields can come back online in a fight before enemy projectiles reach them is effectively a multiplier on the shield hp… a 15000 hp shield that comes back online 3 times after the first fall while they pound on armor effectively has 60,000 hp.

As for the OP, deck cannons have decent penetration. The EARLIEST deck cannon ships are little more than a ship built around a single deck cannon… in that early game, the deck cannon is SUPPOSED to be the counter to the tactic you’ve probably been using: overwhelming firepower and some shields, hoping to cripple or kill the enemy ship before they penetrate your flimsy defense…..that counter means adjusting strategy.

For small ships it can mean indirect fire (using missiles on the sides of your ship, or other weapons that can be mounted on the side but fire on the front, while you have layered defenses on the front….multiple overlapped shields or thick, 3+ layer armor), or it can mean being able to reverse faster than the ship can approach so the cannon never gets to fire on you (most weapons fire further than cannons), or, more riskily, you can try to be agile and/or surgical, using railguns or indirect attack angles to ignore the cannons on the early deck gun ships and take out the vitals (reactor/cockpit).

For big ships, you can simply build a ship with VERY thick armor with some shields woven in. You can fit 6 layers of armor between a small shield generator and the leading edge of it’s shield….and on big ships where you can field several deck guns or ions or rails or missiles of your own, you probably should! if you put multiple shields with the forward edges staggered at different depths, the shields cover each other wonderfully, while the armor slows down the enemy progress to your vitals.