Overview
You will want to try and game to one side or the other depending on your playstyle for their benefits, but there is no clear cut, defined way of seeing what exactly shifts the warscale and how.I know this a relatively loose guide but it’s better than the jack s*** the game tells you. Hope it helps and cheers
DEFENSIVE WARSCALE
Defensive war scale gives you a larger maxiumum fleet size to work with (still capped at 8 ships, but those ships can be much larger overall). It will add a bonus that gets progressively more powerful as you swing to the extreme of the defensive warscale as well: munitions resupply between operations. It maxes out at 50%– be sure to plan ahead and do a little rough math so you aren’t being too stingy with your missiles, torpedoes, and countermeasures. Lastly your SHIPS will level up faster but not the flagship crew/main characters. This makes your flagship weaker overall so you will need to protect it better than the aggressive warscale does.
The primary ways to increase your defensive warscale are:
>Maintining shield integrity. You do not need to be in full power to shields, you just need to make sure shields stay up. I like to run at least 40% shields regardless in “neutral” combat, as shields do not recharge at balanced power distribution.
>Use missiles. All the missiles. Lots of missiles. Make missiles rain in the sky. Use torpedos. pew pew pew ‘n stuff. Countermeasures.
>Avoid ramming and taking “reckless” damage (i.e. one target taking too much fire)
>Don’t lose a lot of ships.
>Repairing gives a heavy bonus, as the game treats it as keeping ships alive.
>Defensive formations. Having a dense force makes it more difficult for a single ship to be focused down.
>Save full power to weapons for emergencies.
>Try not to split your fleet too much when you use power to engines; it will read this as aggressive positioning.
>Go an entire fight without friendly fire. Harder than it sounds as you get larger ships. Yes, one graze can blow this opportunity away from you. It blows. I wouldn’t worry about this one much, honestly, as munitions have more weight and are easier to game defensive warscore with.
>Complete missions that are rated as DEFENSIVE using defensive tactics.
>Protect any escorts directly, i.e have them join your formation.
AGGRESSIVE WARSCALE
Aggressive warscore makes your FLAGSHIP CREW level up faster but not your ships. This means you will not have very strong bonuses to anything other than your flagship, but your flagship will become an absolute powerhouse. Flagship accuracy is also dramatically increased; this does not sound like a big deal but later on, your flagships will be boating high damage, low accuracy weapons, primarily medium and heavy lasers. Your flagship will eventually perform like there were two of them firing rather than one and will have large passive bonuses as well from crew. Lastly, reinforcements will arrive quicker– this is the strongest part of this playstyle, as it means losing ships is not the same heavy handed penalty as losing one of your ships in the defensive warscore (where you likely won’t have lots of reinforcement points due to having larger ship sizes in your fleet). It also means you can, say, deplete a corvette of all of its ammo, dismiss it, then have a queued reinforcement corvette arrive in the next battle, mtigating having lower munitions supplies.
Ways to increase aggressive warscore:
>RAMMING SPEED AAAAAAAAAAA
>Focus fire/targeted firing mode shared between ships.
>Only use munitions on clusters of enemies. Dodge missiles rather than using countermeasures when you can by pushing power to engines and changing elevation along the plane. This is the hardest part of being aggressive; munitions are scarce and won’t be resupplied so you need to save everything you can, even countermeasures, while never sitting on a full stockpile and never using them.
>Favor weapons over shields in your power allocation and redistribute shields often to make up for this.
>End missions in a lower amount of turns (unknown how many; just work efficiently and of course, aggressively.)
>Kill lots of targets in a single turn.
>Favor wide, spread out formations and set up nasty crossfires with your firing arcs. Nemo corvettes and swordfhish are the best at this.
The better your crossfires, the more enemies that will die per turn. You will need to favor mid range to do this effectively.
>Double down on that destoryer’s main cannon. Fully powered, that thing can one shot all of the small size enemies. It also has 100% accuracy. I like having two destoyers and focusing on swordfish and corvettes for the other ships as room allows.
>Make sure any ship that is about to die gets to ram a big bugger before it blows. Don’t worry, swordfish are replaced right afterwards and corvettes will reinforce a few turns in if a ship goes down. Don’t be afraid of losing 1-2 ships here and there.
>Use your escorts as bait. Kek. You can win without them surviving but I do advise caution doing this.
>On the topic of escorts, killing enemies before they ever have the chance to even put an escort in their firing arc will grant you a small aggressive bonus. This adds up quickly if your escorts never get touched. Kill your enemy before they do the stuff, basically.
>Use power to engines to get the superior position. Your ships will be wider apart so you can make more substantial manuevers.
>AGGRESSIVE weighted missions, obviously. Finish these as fast as you can.