Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Aurora Chat => Topic started by: Drgong on May 04, 2017, 03:57:30 PM
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I had the idea of building some long endurance inexpensive beam ships to be system/regional "Militia" units that could be the first line of defense on isolated systems...
But I am guessing that in game that is a silly idea since if any type of warship came though they would be wrecked before I could slow them down?
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Honestly missile ships vastly beat out beam ships, by and large. So maybe a similar idea with either missile ships or a mix of the two types?
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They've been very useful in my games. I especially like the concept for missile defence, where these ships are good enough for fleet use: base-tech railguns are dirt-cheap, firing every 15s is enough against most ASM attacks, and even just tanking hits isn't a disaster given their components are cheaper per HTK than armour.
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My current theory is to have picket ships, long endurance fighters that cycle to a fighter base, not so much for defense as for warning and tracking.
The second priority is point defense for a colony, so that it can't just be cheaply blown out of existence from long range. This allows me to take advantage of the fact that storing LOTS of ammo on a planet is easy, and doesn't slow the planet down.
Third priority would be protecting the shipping, but mostly they are just going to bug out when the scouts spot something.
Given one of my colonies whole purpose is to exploit an asteroid field, and I anticipate having LOTS of small mining colonies, I am going to have to rely on a fast response fleet, which means prepositioning tankers to make redeploys more easy. I have a large number of small commercial jump ships around, where I bulked them out with fuel tanks to act as tankers for survey support. Still kind of mad I lost a full tanker/jump ship to a spoiler because it was trying to rescue a stranded Grav survey ship.
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The militia ships would be handy when stationed at a jump point, but if they don't have the endurance for it they might be useful as a second line, to be used against a fleet thats already been bloodied by your main fleet. Or otherwise against any inferior force anyway.