Overview
A general introduction to melee, featuring an overview over the different weapons and damage types as well as useful strategies.
Introduction and General Ideas
So you wanna know about one of my favorite subjects: Breaking Things! 😀
This guide is trying to give an overview over the melee system as employed in the current early access build [December 2016]. The ideas described here are based solely on my own experience, so I won’t be refering to anything related to the actual code of the game, but only on the hours and hours spent trying to figure out what works and why. Still, the devs asked me to do this guide, so here we are. 😉
I tried to keep the respective sections of the guide as short and concise as possible, so refer to the sidebar for navigation. If you still have questions, just let me know and I’ll try to update the guide.
Also, drop some likes if this stuff helped you. It’s how we roll, after all. 😉
The Beautiful Art of Hitting Things
What is Melee?
In short, just power up your engines and go straight into the enemy. Block collision is already a very basic form of melee and indeed deals damage. However, the damage is usually neglectable. To do melee right, you’ll want to employ some of the many weapons offered by the game.
Nevertheless, we can still deduce a first rule of melee:
Speed matters.
If you ram another boat at full speed, there’s a good chance of knocking blocks off. However, after the initial impact, bumping into each other hardly does anything at all, though you might be able to push some already loose blocks off. Still, the basic premise of just ramming into something at high speed offers an insight that will prove very important in the following sections:
The first contact is the most important.
We’ll come to that soon enough. If you want to avoid taking too much damage through ramming, you might want to harden the respective area with the iron braces introduced in the last update. Keep in mind that they add additional weight to the area, so check your weight distribution.
The effectiveness of melee is largely dependent on the respective situation, but I can try to give a short overview. In general, the game features quite a wide and nice spectrum of melee weapons to choose from, which might be differentiated into two main classes:
1) those that do a lot of damage on direct contact
2) those that do damage mostly over time
It’s not a perfect distinction since there are some that fall between the categories, but it helps to keep in mind when you decide you wanna build a boat that focuses on melee.
Direct Contact Weapons
If you go for a melee build, the design should aim to support the main weapon deployed.
Weapons that fall into the first category and therefore are best employed as rams at the front are:
Spikes, Blades, Spiked Roller of Doom, Wrecking Balls
Those things basically break most blocks on first contact; however, you might have to regain a bit of speed to use them to their full potential again.
Damage Over Time (DPS) Weapons
Weapons that continue to do damage after first contact and can be used to “chew” the enemy up, are:
Crab Ram, Drills of any kind, Saws, Spiked Roller of Doom
The nice thing about those weapons is that you can stay on the enemy and slightly adjust your position to cripple or destroy what’s left after initial contact.
It is however very important to notice that the actual DPS-value still seems to be lower than the damage applied via first contact. Nevertheless, it does make a difference if you have a weapon that actually moves forwards and backwards, like the Powered Rams – the Saws and Drills are somewhat ineffective in comparison (I still love them, even if only for the sound 😉 ).
Effectiveness
In terms of pure damage and basically overkill, the Spiked Roller of Doom is the first choice – wide area of contact and since it’s rotating, the full damage is applied with every new contact, as slight as it may be. That makes it an ideal candidate for vessels that just want to go through – so effective, in fact that I actually don’t use it that much, since it makes things a bit too easy. A convenient overkill design is for example the Doom Machine MkII:
[link]Four of the rollers placed in front go through basically anything – and two can be fired as torpedos, which is one kill per torpedo, if done right. The vertical positioning has the advantage that it circumvents the enemy’s hull slipping over or under the own ship after applying the full force of the crash – which would minimize damage or might get you stuck in the wreckage.
That’s another basic rule to consider when building a melee boat: Placing all weapons on one plane (e.g. waterline) often gets you stuck in the enemy, as long as you don’t cover enough ground to break him apart on the first hit.
In that case, weapons from the second category can help, especially the two drills that hammer at the same time (forgot the name …) or the Crab ram. The normal Drills and Saws are actually not that great – they do damage over time, but the amount is rather small (though you can increase it by wriggling around a bit).
Very effective are the various Spiked Balls, though they can be a bit tricky to employ since they actually have a lot of floatation value. That can be fun if you employ several around the waterline, since if combined with enough propulsion, they make your ship drift around quite a bit, which can be useful if you opt for speed.
What makes those balls so effective, is the very high damage they deal in every direction. Even if one gets ripped off, they basically become water mines, since they float. Check the video of the King Crab vs. She Only Wants Your Love on my channel – thing almost ripped half the ship apart and I didn’t even see it coming:
For pure ramming, the standard spikes do a great job, though they tend to break off if you hit at an angle.
Remote Controlled Madness
Melee weapons can also be great on torpedoes!
The nice thing about that is that torpedoes usually have a small point of contact combined with a lot of continuous forward thrust, which means they have a good chance to not only pierce the hull, but wreak havoc on the insides as well. Another advantage is that torpedoes are fire and forget, so you won’t have to worry about actual damage dealt to your own ship.
To give you an impression as to how effective a simple torpedo melee setup can be, check the following video:
You can also go for a combination of classic torpedo boomstickness and melee!
As you can see, the torpedo employs a drill to get a hole in the enemy’s hull. If the opening is big enough, the torpedo will automatically be pushed forward – and the mines attached to the sides will explode, radically increasing damage. Sometimes, the drill even survives the explosion and gets shot even further into the innards of the ship, continuing to deal damage and often killing her outright.
You don’t even have to go that far in terms of sophistication. I had to refit the Anesidora with torpedoes that simply have spikes at the front, since the warheads loved to go off under fire. Those things are probably even more effective, since you can simply run them through the enemies hull, turn around and repeat until the timer runs out.
Submarines & Melee
Since Avraks asked me some time ago to do a feature on Submarines and Melee, I’ll just link to the respective videos here. In short: Yeah, it works and basically the same rules apply.