PD UI Questions

[ArchRylen (OP)]

I'd like some help making proper use of the Battle Control Window (F8).  I just got stomped in my first battle.  I think I know what I did wrong*, but I also don't think I was setting things up on the screen properly.

1) My main problem was switching over from targeted fire to PD.  When I set my ships for "Area Fire", should they target any missile salvo that comes within range? (In my case, a single x64 salvo. ) Or do I need to Assign that salvo as my designated target? And repeat with every interval?

2) Is there a smooth way to deal with being unable to get a lock because of ECM? I got a lot of fire cancellation event text every interval and finally told my ships to Cease Fire while I tried to close the distance.

Thanks


****
So, venturing out of my home system, I came across a wreck and some aliens.  (Likely the robo-spoilers. ) My vaporized survey ship told me there were two ~14k vessels, one with 16 Gauss cannons.  I had starting equipment of 10cm lasers (range 30k) and detection equipment copied from the Wiki, but with lower tech.

After upping my force to around a dozen 8K ships, mostly laser cruisers, plus a searchlight and a jump cruiser, I moseyed into the valley of death.  The plan was to hopefully whittle them away slowly from outside range, or failing that, take them down with numbers.

I had two detection perimeters.  As I approached the inner planets, the first one, tuned for above 10K saw nothing.  The second, picked up a 9K vessel right at the edge of my firing range.  Unfortunately, its high speed (10K) and powerful 30 ECM kept me from firing on it.  But it ran away and, sensing fear, I continued on towards the two larger ships.

Again, I entered the 30K range and tried to prepare my lasers.  Again, they could not be brought to bear, even against stationary ships.  (Those things never moved.  Speed 0 all of the  encounter. ) I slowly closed, hoping I would get firing solutions before I passed within range of the Gauss cannon.  But the guns were not what should have worried me.

At the last moment, I detected a single salvo of 64x AMMs.  I wrestled with the PD system and no one even tried to fire.  More waves of missiles came, eventually destroying one ship.  I managed a few counter-battery fires, eliminating one or two missiles on some of the waves.  Realizing I would be overwhelmed, I had the ships reverse course.  But it was too late and, one after another, they were blown apart.
--
Things I learned:
-A few ranks of armor are extremely effective.  With 3 levels, it took 3 salvos to start getting internal damage.
-I want to see further.  I think I'm starting to understand what I want out of sensors.  Likely some of my problem was missiles not spending enough time detected.
-Tracking is important.  The other problem, even with turreted lasers and Gauss cannons, the missiles were going too fast.
-ECM is powerful.  I don't know how close I would have needed to get to fire.

[Nathan_]

You can manually target salvos, but leaving targeting information clear, the ship set to open fire, and area defensive fire will do the job for you. However, you should use Final defensive fire for most of your pd as that will attempt the highest probability intercept on incoming missiles as far as beam defense goes. Something else to look into is anti-missile missiles, and how they handle pd(somewhat differently than beam fire). They generally have much greater range, and you can assign multiple AMMs to one ASM. 2) you have to cancel the offending orders via cease fire or clear fleet orders.

ECM is hellishly effective against beams, but against missile fire controls one simply needs to overbuild slightly.

[Hawkeye]

As your lasers have a very short range, you can try to overbuild your beam fire control too.
Normaly, this is not an option, as the range of the beam fire control is normally the bottlenech. In your case, the lasers are so short ranged, you should be able to design a beam fire control with a range of 60 to 90 k, which will fight the enemies ECM good (of course, it will also be pretty big, reducing space for other stuff you want to put on your ships)

As Nathan said, set your PD guns to final defensive fire. In that mode, your guns will (automaticaly) engage incoming missiles at a range of 10,000 km, which gives the best to-hit chance (of course, if your guns and/or beam fire controls can only track at 3,000 km/s and the hostile missiles close at 30,000 km/s, your chances to hit are still pretty bad).

Tips:
Research longer ranged lasers and beam fire controls (doh)

As you noticed, armor is your friend. Beam armed ships are close ranged combatants, that have to slug it out with the enemy. You want as much armor on those as you can (for ships of the size of yours, I would build nothing with less than 5 or 6 levels of armor, more if at all possible).

Nathan is correct in suggesting to develop anti-missile missiles, as, in the long run, you are very likely to need a layered defense with AMMs thinning out the incomming salvos and beam PD taking on the leakers.
That being said, vs. the large AMM salvos you encountered, AMMs are pretty much useless (unless you have a serious tech-advantage), as you will need 3 to 6 of _your_ AMMs to shoot down one of _their_ AMMs.

As you say, tracking is important. Be sure to match the turrets tracking speed with the beam fire control´s tracking speed (use the 4x size - 4x tracking speed when designing a PD fire control)

[ArchRylen (OP)]

You can manually target salvos, but leaving targeting information clear, the ship set to open fire, and area defensive fire will do the job for you.

Thank you and Hawkeye for the replies.  I suspect the above was the key bit of UI handling I was missing.  I kept thinking that since the assigned target field was blank, the guns had nothing to fire at.