On a tangential question, is charged mercury sufficient for armor stripping?
Hell yes it is. If you'll go with the best combo, which is mercury + charged + gunengineer with buff kit, the accurate one, it would be a terrible thing for engies on the other side. And gunners. And everyone.
I'm a casual player who wants to try out some long ranged spire, but I feel that the time to kill might be too high in my normal setup. I like to go mercury, artemis, artemis and lumberjack or minotaur.
Go with mercury on the left upper deck, artemis right upper deck, heavy flak for main gun and gatling left lower deck.
Merc for long and mid range armor stripping and disabling.
Artemis for mid to long range disabling and killing with hull down.
Gatling for close-very close range armor stripping.
Heavy flak for close to long range killing the bugger.
Mercury - charged rounds
Artemis - burst rounds
Gatling - greased, for the sake of higher DPS - you want to destroy enemy hull ASAP.
Heavy Flak - lesmoks (auxiliary ammo if the gunner have problem with arcs), charged (should be used as "default"), lochnagars (because fuck you and your pesky ship - for close range certain shots with enemy's armor down will kill most unscathed ships one shot).
Personally, I like using mercury, artemis and minotaur as they are easy weapons for anyone to hit with compared to the alternatives. But assuming competency, what heavy weapon should I go for? or is my light weapon setup already flawed?
Mercury and artemis placed well is one of so-called meta combinations, with added disability potential. Though it's flaw are narrow arcs (every single for merc making it next to useless for close range, upper arcs for artemis).
Minotaur... after the nerf it's not very useful, and thank God for it was damn annoying to fight against.
For Spire I'd take any heavy gun depending on situaions, excluding heavy carronade (because most the time you want to stay at distance, what's more the position of heavy gun on spire discourages it's use) and minotaur (it's practically a loss of heavy gun slot)
If you are taking hwacha I believe it's a good idea to take hades, banshee and artemis as well (though my memory about my personal setup might be failing). Hades as a hull breaker and chaos spreader, banshee as a chaos spreader and lesser ship killer, artemis as disabler and a little better ship killer, and hwacha certainly as a ship killer rather than disabler, if artemis and hades do their jobs (hwacha deals explosive damage, deadly for exposed hull if well timed); even if the first barrage will not sweep enemy ship off, you'll destroy more components, thus making their engineers to choose between repairing vital components, shooting and repairing anything else.
Haven't tried lumberspire yet though.
So, Flak spire as described is for long and mid range with say-your-prayers option for closer ranges.
Hwacha spire - medium range, and you still want everyone aboard to pray if something gets close.
Edit: I'd forgot. Great thing about spire is that if well positioned, it's possible to shoot all FOUR guns at the very same moment - it requires some training from the captain though.
