Status update: Had a feeling at being at the top of the world after beating out that 30 deep task group. I was ready to pull out a retreat, but decided to wait for one of my ships to do damage control on it's engines and fuel so we could recover it.
Big mistake.
They got reinforcements, first, a 60,000 ton ship with 600 shields that recover at 2 per second.
What's left of my task group can deal 240 damage every salvo, and fires once every 150 seconds.
Looks like this will not work.
I begin to pull back, but it's too late. Even though the big ship is slow enough to escape, the reinforcements, even more fighters, were not survivable. Mainly because they closed combat distance almost immediately due to me trying to increment to escape.
So that's my entire first missile task group, destroyed, and I lack the sort of shuttles needed to clutch-rescue them. Damn.
Spent years fully task training them too.
Woosh.
It's going to be hard to keep pressing on with my campaign, but, i guess, what do I expect? This is my first engagement in the entire game, guess I should learn from my mistakes.
Dang, though, these ships would have been a lot less painful to take on with 1 less armor layer.
Hrmmm, I think my next fleet order of battle is going to use larger missile ships, with less size reduced launchers for a faster launch cycle, and bigger active sensors. And a whole lotta colliers.