OK, so. This is my first serious, large-scale combat, and i have some questions based on my impressions.
1) lasers seem astonishingly useless. I've never once been able to even get remotely within range of anything, since all combat takes place at a range of tens of millions of kilometers due to missiles. But then, i see people posting around beam warship designs, so apparently lasers CAN be used. What am i doing wrong?
2) related, turreted point-blank defense lasers are just as useless. Sometimes, if the missile approaches fast enough, they don't even have time to open fire.Isn't it better to just ditch them completely and get more CIWS in their place?
Still, sometimes they DO hit something, and can target missiles not aimed at that ship, so i guess they're not nearly as useless as ship-to-ship lasers.
1. Lasers and other direct fire weapons are only useful in several specific circumstances. If combat begins at close range, like in orbit around a world with former friends or neutrals, or in a contested warp transit, then they are useful. Otherwise, missiles are the king of combat. Direct fire weapons only become useful in the above circumstances, or if you can survive the enemy's missile barrage and close with his ships to engage at close range.
2. CIWS are a relatively new development in Aurora. Before that, the only point defense was turreted weapons and rail guns. One important thing is that CIWS only defends the ship it's mounted on, meaning that an enemy can try to overwhelm each individual ship if you don't have any other defenses.
The best missile defense is a nested defense, with long range anti-missiles, short range turreted beam weapons, and point blank CIWS. You can get away with eliminating one of the above and still probably have a decent defense, though.
Kurt
- Missiles are nigh-useless in warp point assaults, and mediocre in warp point defense.
- Point-defense is a maze of choices and theories, many of which do not mesh well together. One of the toughest things in Aurora is to design and build a good squadron point defense net.
- Virtually every new player to Aurora builds ships that are too big, too slow, and too lightly armoured.
- Tech differential and size-of-fleet differential is going to decide combat two times out of three, regardless of the weapons employed.
- NPR combat AI is (currently) far weaker than a good human player. Especially in the area of changing tactics that clearly aren't working.
- Missiles are hideously expensive in terms of minerals & manpower. It takes 50,000 people three months and twnty-two days to build a single SS-N-4 Shadow:
SS-N-4 Shadow
Missile Size: 4 MSP (0.2 HS) Warhead: 6 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 24000 km/s Endurance: 68 minutes Range: 97.5m km
Cost Per Missile: 3.1
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 240% 3k km/s 80% 5k km/s 48% 10k km/s 24%
Materials Required: 1.5x Tritanium 1.35x Gallicite Fuel x3250
Development Cost for Project: 310RP
Most empires struggle to build enough missile to fill their fleets' magazines
once. Any protracted war results in economic upheaval.
Most Player vs Precursor combats go like this: A single ship encounters a precursor and is abruptly destroyed. Later, a massive player fleet arrives, blows up one at a time until the precursor runs out of ammunition, then whatever ships remain close and destroy the near-helpless precursor.
Oh, and missiles don't work in a Nebula.
At all.