Why are Grineer Crewships so much stronger than the Railjack?

[(NSW)Sniperfox47]

What's up with the massive power difference between Grineer Crewships and the Orokin Railjack? I get that the Railjack is ancient, but that alone doesn't explain the massive power difference. Let's go over some key points:

• Even with MK3 Shields and MK3 engines the Railjack goes down in seconds if surrounded by a swarm of enemies or pounded by a Crewships. A crewship on the other hand has so much health that you can tank a swarm plus fire from another crewship for literally minutes.

• Crew ships are invulnerable from the outside. If a Railjack takes a few shots it breaches and is destroyed, but a crew ship isn't destroyed from the outside, merely incapacitated.

• Crew ships never suffer hull breaches or fires. Railjacks it happens every 5 seconds during a gunfight.

• The weapons systems onboard the Crewships do dps better than Tenno weapons at early tiers, while also being long range lock on sniper missiles.

 

You need a highly modded and upgraded Railjack for it to be even on par with a crew ship, and even then it has some pretty big downsides by comparison. What do you get out of the Railjack by comparison? The ability to mod it to be slightly less explodie? The ability to change it's weapons to ones that are still inferior? About the only valuable change is drifting and 3 dimensional aim from turrets, neither of which are worth the tradeoffs above.

As a solo player, it's better to just ditch your Railjack some place safe and just pilot a crewship, especially since you need to leave your Railjack defenceless to kill a crewship, but they don't have that same restriction with you. You also need to do this several times, making destroying a crew ship from your Railjack a good way to get it blown up.

It makes me seriously question why we even bothered to retrieve this Railjack... Why don't we just steal and modify a Grineer Crewship? Is there even any point to having a Cephalopod on board our ship when all he does is swim around and squirt in-... I mean tell us mission objectives we already know?

Edited February 17, 2020 by (NSW)Sniperfox47

[Asphyxxia]

I mean. I play solo and don't suffer from those problems. My railjack is fairly tanky but could be better. Leaving the ship to blow up a crewship or two isn't an issue, especially since there's a 60 second timer if my railjack goes into catastrophic failure imminent mode, which is plenty. There's also a tactical avionic that can stall this breach for another 50 seconds if you need that extra time. It's a non-issue, honestly.

[alukard18]

we have railjack health at  2k at beginning  but grineer crew ship earth proxima have 22845 health and not sure how much armor it have

Edited February 17, 2020 by alukard18

[TheGrimCorsair]

Because the railjack is capable of more than lumbering slowly through space and threatening enemies only within a couple KM of it with direct fire-fire weaponry.

[(NSW)Sniperfox47]

2 minutes ago, Asphyxxia said:

I mean. I play solo and don't suffer from those problems. My railjack is fairly tanky but could be better. Leaving the ship to blow up a crewship or two isn't an issue, especially since there's a 60 second timer if my railjack goes into catastrophic failure imminent mode, which is plenty. There's also a tactical avionic that can stall this breach for another 50 seconds if you need that extra time. It's a non-issue, honestly.

I mean, infinity > 60 seconds. Just saying...

[Asphyxxia]

Just now, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

I mean, infinity > 60 seconds. Just saying...

This is like complaining that lvl 100 bombards have a f-ton of eHP but we don't. Besides, you can always just one-shot a crewship with forward artillery.

[(NSW)Sniperfox47]

12 minutes ago, Asphyxxia said:

This is like complaining that lvl 100 bombards have a f-ton of eHP but we don't. Besides, you can always just one-shot a crewship with forward artillery.

Little bit different. More like if a lvl 100 bombard has a f-ton of eHP and there are literally no mods that can give our primary weapons the firepower to adequately take them down so we *have* to use our heavy archguns, and they have an invulnerability phase after you kill them where you then have to inject yourself into the bombard's bloodstream and destroy their heart (and probably a bunch of immune cells) before you can manage to finally kill them, and all missions are exterminate missions where you have to kill 2-8 of them, and your warframe can still be killed while you're inside them.

 

And regarding the forward artillery, again this does not destroy it. It merely incapactitates it. It would, however, destroy a railjack fairly easily (assuming the shield is broken so the shield gating doesn't block it.)

Edited February 17, 2020 by (NSW)Sniperfox47

[taiiat]

it may not ever get breached and has quite high EHP - but it's slow as dog piss, the Weapons are mediocre, it doesn't have the Archwing Launcher nor the Artillery Weapon (usefulness of Artillery aside), and is vulnerable to being Mobility Killed since its Engines can be disabled.

Railjacks can have more than sufficient EHP, considerably better Firepower, have various types of Abilities, and can move very very quickly with the multiple types of Boosting.

 

as to why does a low Level Crewship outperform a basic Railjack? one of these was just scavenged from scrap around the Star System and reassembled, it's basically a Test Plane going up against a full Air Force.
but we quickly upgrade its capabilities and then it dominates everything.

think of Crafting your Railjack and then taking it out into flight without Researching any Parts in your Dojo akin to dragging a sunken Cruiser out of the bottom of the Sea, patching the holes in its Hull, and then steaming towards a modern Navy. you could still pull it off if you're prepared but your Vessel definitely isn't yet.

3 minutes ago, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

And regarding the forward artillery, again this does not destroy it. It merely incapactitates it. It would, however, destroy a railjack fairly easily (assuming the shield is broken so the shield gating doesn't block it.)

Artillery is the only way to destroy a Crewship exclusively from the outside, and yes that does work.... it destroys it.

[TARINunit9]

37 minutes ago, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

• Even with MK3 Shields and MK3 engines the Railjack goes down in seconds if surrounded by a swarm of enemies or pounded by a Crewships. A crewship on the other hand has so much health that you can tank a swarm plus fire from another crewship for literally minutes.

Shields are garbage on Railjack, but with a maxed out Armor and Health mods, you can make your RJ almost as tanky as a Crewship. Add in a Fire Resistance mod, and you can facetank Crewship missiles all the way up to Veil Proxima missions

37 minutes ago, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

• Crew ships never suffer hull breaches or fires. Railjacks it happens every 5 seconds during a gunfight.

False. Crewships are vulnerable to hull breaches and fires (puncture and fire procs) just like Railjack's. Piling on hull breach procs (which stack) will sharply reduce a Crewship's maximum HP for like 30 seconds, allowing a RJ Tunguska Cannon to destroy them in one shot if you cause enough procs

Edited February 17, 2020 by TARINunit9

[Quimoth]

I think you do not know how forward artillery works or what it actually is.

Even in the veil, you can fairly easy complete a mission without leaving your railjack if you DO know what you're doing.

A quick step by step guide to kill crewships without leaving your ship:

1. Avionics
   1. Equip your best forward artillery avionic
   2. Grofit
2. In mission
   1. Spot the crewship
   2. Hit the engines with your railjack guns to slow it down and take big chunks of health away (optional)
   3. Go into the forward artillery cannon.
   4. Aim for the bridge of the ship or any non-engine part, even a destroyed engine will fully absorb the blast and result in the crewship live to fight another day.
   5. Succes! you just obliterated those pesky grineer.
   6. Refill dome-charges at your ship foundry and repeat.
3. Grofit

TL;DR; Do not dismiss arguments given without at least making sure you actually can. Earth and Saturn crewships CAN be one-shot with the artillery.

Edited February 17, 2020 by Quimoth

[(NSW)Sniperfox47]

Just now, Quimoth said:

I think you do not know how forward artillery works or what it actually is.

Even in the veil, you can fairly easy complete a mission without leaving your railjack if you DO know what you're doing.

A quick step by step guide to kill crewships without leaving your ship:

1. Avionics
   1. Equip your best forward artillery avionic
   2. Grofit
2. In mission
   1. Spot the crewship
   2. Hit the engines with your railjack guns to slow it down and take big chunks of health away (optional)
   3. Go into the forward artillery cannon.
   4. Aim for the bridge of the ship or any non-engine part, even a destroyed engine will fully absorb the blast and result in the crewship live to fight another day.
   5. Succes! you just obliterated those pesky grineer.
   6. Refill dome-charges at your ships foundry and repeat.
3. Grofit

TL;DR; Do not dismiss arguments given without at least making sure you actually can. Earth and Saturn crewships CAN be one-shot with the artillery.

Then they behave totally differently on Switch than PC because I've been running missions and the forward artillery just leaves ships in the same disabled state that whittling away their health does. It does *not* destroy them. And this was the case at least with earlier hotfixes on the other platforms too considering the number of posts I've found discussing how worthless and useless the forward artillery is.

[Asphyxxia]

3 minutes ago, Quimoth said:

Aim for the bridge of the ship or any non-engine part, even a destroyed engine will fully absorb the blast and result in the crewship live to fight another day.

Actually that's not the case anymore. Forward artillery will damage and destroy a crewship even when engines are hit.

[(NSW)Sniperfox47]

2 minutes ago, Asphyxxia said:

Actually that's not the case anymore. Forward artillery will damage and destroy a crewship even when engines are hit.

Again, definitely not the case on switch. Doesn't matter where you aim, it does not destroy crewships. I've been trying this literally since Railjack launched (edit: since it launched on Switch, to be clear).

Edited February 17, 2020 by (NSW)Sniperfox47

[trst]

If our weapons were able to kill them just fine without use of artillery then the artillery becomes pointless. If they were (even) easier to take out than they already are using artillery then what is the point of boarding?

It's really just some attempts at game balance and to give purpose to the various tools and systems at play. If you don't like how it all functions then go make a feedback thread about how you want them changed.

 

As far as your other issues I don't personally see how they're issues. The mode wasn't intended to be solo friendly yet I can manage the Veil just fine, can even go through it with minimal critical breaches with use of Void Cloak. The only "issue" is how vulnerable your ship has to be when you run off to board ships and objectives.

[(PSN)Quantaminum]

Are you sure about what the forward artillery is?

If you really are, then this might be a Switch issue. It could be the issue below, but I think Switch got a fairly patched up version in comparison to consoles, due to how long it took DE to give you guys the update (but I can't find anything about it in the Switch Notes). Taken from PS4 Update Notes:

On 2019-12-18 at 7:15 PM, [DE]Danielle said:

Fixed Crewships being spawned as Tenno Faction, which resulted in numerous issues such as not attacking you, Fighters attacking it instead, and Railjack Turrets not doing any damage to it. This also fixes a fatal crash related to this bug.

I didn't have any issues on PS4. After maxing intrinsics and slotting that avionics for +Forward Artillery damage, I can two-shot a Crewship in Veil.

[(NSW)Sniperfox47]

Just now, trst said:

If our weapons were able to kill them just fine without use of artillery then the artillery becomes pointless. If they were (even) easier to take out than they already are using artillery then what is the point of boarding?

It's really just some attempts at game balance and to give purpose to the various tools and systems at play. If you don't like how it all functions then go make a feedback thread about how you want them changed.

 

As far as your other issues I don't personally see how they're issues. The mode wasn't intended to be solo friendly yet I can manage the Veil just fine, can even go through it with minimal critical breaches with use of Void Cloak. The only "issue" is how vulnerable your ship has to be when you run off to board ships and objectives.

I never said they're issues. Piloting the crewships is a totally viable strategy. Piloting archwing is a totally viable strategy.

 

I just don't understand why from a lore standpoint we wouldn't pick the Grineer Crewship as a base when they're *so much* better than the base railjack. A modded crewship with intrinsics applied would be so much more effective than a railjack with the same mods and intrinsics applied.

[(NSW)Sniperfox47]

Just now, (PS4)Quantaminum said:

Are you sure about what the forward artillery is?

If you really are, then this might be a Switch issue. It could be the issue below, but I think Switch got a fairly patched up version in comparison to consoles, due to how long it took DE to give you guys the update (but I can't find anything about it in the Switch Notes). Taken from PS4 Update Notes:

I didn't have any issues on PS4. After maxing intrinsics and slotting that avionics for +Forward Artillery damage, I can two-shot a Crewship in Veil.

I think that's probably the case yeah, and yeah forward artillery is the thing I couldn't use until I had a ton of investment into gunnery xD

And yeah, we got the patch for it. I can disable crewships with turrets pretty easy, it's just time consuming.

 

But switch is pretty buggy so I can totally see it being a switch issue. Every time I do a railjack mission I end up with a ton of textures bugging out even after I leave to do other missions, and when I'm in a crewship half the time fighters seem to just ignore me.

 

Even if that's the case though, stock railjack with no intrinsics and no mods vs a lvl 1 crewship isn't even a comparison. Imagine how much better off we'd be applying our mods and intrinsics to a crewship instead of the railjack.

[(XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA]

1 hour ago, Asphyxxia said:

This is like complaining that lvl 100 bombards have a f-ton of eHP but we don't. Besides, you can always just one-shot a crewship with forward artillery.

Yup. I feel like it's fine. You can have a tenno fly out (or use the slingshot) and blow them up very quickly. Have a tenno use the forward artillery. Hitting the engine dead on from the back will one shot a crewship even in veil with NO forward artillery avionics. 

1 hour ago, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

What's up with the massive power difference between Grineer Crewships and the Orokin Railjack? I get that the Railjack is ancient, but that alone doesn't explain the massive power difference. Let's go over some key points:

• Even with MK3 Shields and MK3 engines the Railjack goes down in seconds if surrounded by a swarm of enemies or pounded by a Crewships. A crewship on the other hand has so much health that you can tank a swarm plus fire from another crewship for literally minutes.

• Crew ships are invulnerable from the outside. If a Railjack takes a few shots it breaches and is destroyed, but a crew ship isn't destroyed from the outside, merely incapacitated.

• Crew ships never suffer hull breaches or fires. Railjacks it happens every 5 seconds during a gunfight.

• The weapons systems onboard the Crewships do dps better than Tenno weapons at early tiers, while also being long range lock on sniper missiles.

 

You need a highly modded and upgraded Railjack for it to be even on par with a crew ship, and even then it has some pretty big downsides by comparison. What do you get out of the Railjack by comparison? The ability to mod it to be slightly less explodie? The ability to change it's weapons to ones that are still inferior? About the only valuable change is drifting and 3 dimensional aim from turrets, neither of which are worth the tradeoffs above.

As a solo player, it's better to just ditch your Railjack some place safe and just pilot a crewship, especially since you need to leave your Railjack defenceless to kill a crewship, but they don't have that same restriction with you. You also need to do this several times, making destroying a crew ship from your Railjack a good way to get it blown up.

It makes me seriously question why we even bothered to retrieve this Railjack... Why don't we just steal and modify a Grineer Crewship? Is there even any point to having a Cephalopod on board our ship when all he does is swim around and squirt in-... I mean tell us mission objectives we already know?

Zetki bulkhead and zetki hull weave. Over 6I health and over 2k armor. Even in the veil proxima catastrophic failures are rare and only happen if I let myself get railed on by fighters and typically 2 crewships at once. Survivability isn't an issue. 

The pilot can kill crewships without help from the squad or leaving the ship effectively by simply flying the railjack behind an enemy crewship (getting close) and blasting its engines with forward artillery. One shot even in veil, no avionics required. 

55 minutes ago, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

Little bit different. More like if a lvl 100 bombard has a f-ton of eHP and there are literally no mods that can give our primary weapons the firepower to adequately take them down so we *have* to use our heavy archguns, and they have an invulnerability phase after you kill them where you then have to inject yourself into the bombard's bloodstream and destroy their heart (and probably a bunch of immune cells) before you can manage to finally kill them, and all missions are exterminate missions where you have to kill 2-8 of them, and your warframe can still be killed while you're inside them.

 

And regarding the forward artillery, again this does not destroy it. It merely incapactitates it. It would, however, destroy a railjack fairly easily (assuming the shield is broken so the shield gating doesn't block it.)

No... they're quite easy to take down.

46 minutes ago, Quimoth said:

I think you do not know how forward artillery works or what it actually is.

Even in the veil, you can fairly easy complete a mission without leaving your railjack if you DO know what you're doing.

A quick step by step guide to kill crewships without leaving your ship:

1. Avionics
   1. Equip your best forward artillery avionic
   2. Grofit
2. In mission
   1. Spot the crewship
   2. Hit the engines with your railjack guns to slow it down and take big chunks of health away (optional)
   3. Go into the forward artillery cannon.
   4. Aim for the bridge of the ship or any non-engine part, even a destroyed engine will fully absorb the blast and result in the crewship live to fight another day.
   5. Succes! you just obliterated those pesky grineer.
   6. Refill dome-charges at your ship foundry and repeat.
3. Grofit

TL;DR; Do not dismiss arguments given without at least making sure you actually can. Earth and Saturn crewships CAN be one-shot with the artillery.

If you hit them in them from directly behind it's a 1 shot even with no avionics. 

40 minutes ago, Asphyxxia said:

Actually that's not the case anymore. Forward artillery will damage and destroy a crewship even when engines are hit.

Can definitely confirm

[Diangelius]

Railjack itself has a lot of functions to utilize. Judging by its design, the RJ was not created to tank shjt.

It is not the problem of enemies' base stats and their level scaling. The problem is that you cannot utilize all functions at once, either piloting, or fixing RJ, or forging, or using side turrets, or using Forward artillery.

While soloing, your only option is killing them all as fast as possible so that they won't cause you anymore problems to take care of, if you know which guns and avionics to use. This option is boring as f*** though.

You need teammates (not your case and I understand why) and with a team who know clearly what to do, not really pro, the RJ is basically immortal and all tasks would be finished in 10 minutes even on Flexa - Veil.

You choose to solo Empyrean and you must accept the difficulties (at least for now until DE change something). You are trying to multitask, which in Empyrean's design, you cannot, and are not supposed to.

Even though you have maxed Bulkhead and Hull Weave, just always reminding yourself that RJ was never created to tank. Those 2 avionics are like "insurance" only.

[(XBOX)SupremeMorph]

4 minutes ago, Diangelius said:

Even though you have maxed Bulkhead and Hull Weave, just always reminding yourself that RJ was never created to tank. Those 2 avionics are like "insurance" only.

I have to disagree. The right build (Zekti bulkhead and shield array, vidar hull weave and anode cell) can basically sit there and tank fire ad infinitum from a crewship and/or a fighter squad. Not to mention if you're running that one reactor that boosts your shields for every point of unspent avionics. My friend's railjack has 4k shields that fully restore in under 10 seconds thanks to that

7 minutes ago, (XB1)ECCHO SIERRA said:

If you hit them in them from directly behind it's a 1 shot even with no avionics.

Don't even need to do that, just hit them in either of the side engine pods. You can also hit them in the back of course, just don't aim for one that's already destroyed

[(PSN)robotwars7]

2 hours ago, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

Even with MK3 Shields and MK3 engines the Railjack goes down in seconds if surrounded by a swarm of enemies or pounded by a Crewships. A crewship on the other hand has so much health that you can tank a swarm plus fire from another crewship for literally minutes.

Zetki shields work best, because of the very short recharge delay and fast recharge speed. when it comes to higher levels, a  shield that constantly recharges beats one with higher capacity, because it won't run out. don't bother trying to mod your railjack for speed to evade missiles, because there's no way you can outrun missiles: it's a battleship, not a fighter. you're better off making your railjack tougher and getting a Countermeasures Battle Avionic if possible.

2 hours ago, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

• Crew ships are invulnerable from the outside. If a Railjack takes a few shots it breaches and is destroyed, but a crew ship isn't destroyed from the outside, merely incapacitated.

Forward Artillery says hi, and while it works, I do think the damage can be more consistent. still, Dome Charges aren't that expensive once you've killed off a few fighters.

2 hours ago, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

Crew ships never suffer hull breaches or fires. Railjacks it happens every 5 seconds during a gunfight.

their reactors have a tendency to explode though, at least if you shoot them. it tends to happen a lot more if you try fighting everything at once, rather than just dealing with whatever enemies can see you, and between these smaller skirmishes you can repair. I find that fire and electrical faults mainly just happens if boarders are left for too long.

2 hours ago, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

The weapons systems onboard the Crewships do dps better than Tenno weapons at early tiers, while also being long range lock on sniper missiles.

yeah, at early tiers. once you start getting Mk3 Weapons and some good Avionics for Turret damage and Crit, you can do a lot of damage I personally favour Zetki Apoc or Carcinnox, you want a high Rate of Fire when dealing with fast moving fighters, and while they do generate a little more heat, a maxed Polar Coil helps negate this. even in the Veil, I can usually kill multiple enemies without overheating the guns. add in Battle Avionics like Particle Ram and Munitions Vortex and you've got a ton oif options: ram into the weaker fighters as they loop back to you or spawn a literal black hole and then hit the center of it with everything you've got.

not to sound elitist or anything, but most of the gripes you have seem to be centered around your railjack not being strong enough for the areas you want to go to. i think you just need to focus on getting your ship some better components and Avionics, and eventually you will notice a huge difference: my railjack used to struggle on Saturn a month or so ago, now I can clear Saturn solo without needing to use munitions or archwing. even the veil isn't really a challenge unless I somehow make things harder for myself. 

 

[Diangelius]

1 hour ago, (XB1)Lucas Jameson said:

I have to disagree. The right build (Zekti bulkhead and shield array, vidar hull weave and anode cell) can basically sit there and tank fire ad infinitum from a crewship and/or a fighter squad. Not to mention if you're running that one reactor that boosts your shields for every point of unspent avionics. My friend's railjack has 4k shields that fully restore in under 10 seconds thanks to that

 

I want to know your avionics build.

Are you going full tank ? How long does it take you, in average, to finish 1 veil node ?

[nslay]

I mean, obviously the Grineer have better space technology than the Orokin or Tenno. Heck, they have even mastered making space glass! Not even the Corpus could get that right! Along with space glass, Grineer also have mastered materials that are impervious to any puncture, fire, ice or otherwise. Hence, no omni on their ships! Why need omni when damage never occurs? And you probably thought lack of omni was because of the fact that the Grineer are disposable...

DE has outdone the cliche Sci-Fi of advanced beings taking over the primitive ones. Now it's the primitive ones besting the advanced ones!

 

[XRosenkreuz]

Because they've been building and improving theirs in the time since the Great War, and we only just recently pulled ours out of the ground.

[DoomFruit]

4 hours ago, trst said:

If our weapons were able to kill them just fine without use of artillery then the artillery becomes pointless. If they were (even) easier to take out than they already are using artillery then what is the point of boarding?

Not really. It still takes forever to zero out a cruise ship's health even with maxed out T3 guns. There's also the frustrating imbalance that while they can destroy us with their normal gunfire, we can't destroy them with our normal gunfire.