Well, the day before 6.3 beta came out I started a new 6.2 game, funnily enough. Pretty amazing though, so I'm planning on keeping it going for awhile. Here's why:
Without getting too much into spoiler territory (and if anyone feels I go to far, I'll block it off with the tag), I got extremely lucky/unlucky and found a certain race behind 3 of the 6 JPs in Sol. Two of those JPs, with the hostile presence are within the asteroid belt. All four others are extremely far out, to the point where the inner two are the only ones feasible for low tech development. How I went about finding the hostiles was pretty interesting too.
The month is December 2055, after a 2050 start date. I was quickly probing all the JPs and brought a large survey force into JP1. It was a binary G/K system with 2 planets and a moon of colony cost 2-3. The survey gets off to a great start and scans the G start while the jump tender probes the other points. However, once the force gets to the B star, the lead scout is suddenly blown out of the water with a series of 5 size 9 explosions. I quickly recall the force and send my military in, consisting of 3 command cruisers and 12 destroyers. I lose 5 ships and am forced to withdraw. While repairing I decide there's no reason not to explore the other inner JP and send my scout force there, the jump ship jumping in first. I half expected to find something there as when I did the initial quick jump in and out I had an interrupt, but I was not prepared for upwards of 15 hostile ships picketing the far side that promptly blew up the ship. Was my only jump tender too....
Fast forward to June of 2058. I have another jump tender and decide to try out JP3 just for some action while I'm building up a new class of command cruiser and some fresh missile cruisers. It wasn't fuel efficient out that far, so I only made one scanning pass, but on my way back one scout gets a flyby by the exact same race in the other two systems... and oddly doesn't get blasted out of the void. That scared me enough that I decided to keep all ships at Earth until I was ready to clear out JP1.
I was finally ready to make another go at JP1 in December of 59. This time I sent 6 command Cruisers, 2 of which were actually not only the new class, but a quick refit for new armor as well, 7 Destroyers, and 6 of the new missile cruisers. Long story short, for taking out 4 enemy vessels, with a total tonnage of about 55,000, I lost all but two command cruisers (of the old type too...) and two of the missile cruisers. One of the command cruisers was so badly damaged it almost wasn't worth fixing, and it had to limp home at 333 km/s because that's all the engines it could repair after what was done to it. I had been doing pretty well, with all 6 command ships intact, along with 4 destroyers and one damaged but operational missile cruiser, but had decided to chase down the last ship manually. The thing was, I only had a speed advantage of 70 or so, but was confident because I was fairly sure the main enemy base was on the second planet (it is, actually), but the ship wasn't headed there, it was just basically following what I thought was a course directly away from my previous line of advance. As it so happened, though, that intersected with a smaller, asteroid base, where it quickly resupplied missiles and took out all but those last ships... It was on the verge of rearming again but at the very last second the crippled command ship UNS Albatross managed to get in range and fire it's PD turrets directly on the enemy, wounding the ship enough it couldn't finish us off.
I do not believe there are any mobile units left in the system, though I found two PDCs in orbit of the second planet. Tested it's defenses with my operational missile cruiser and it couldn't breach the AMMs, though if I had had all 6 ships I might do better, as the distance my missiles were stopped wasn't consistent, indicating that one alone might be taxing them. I also sent two assault battalions to capture the asteroid, taking it easy as pie, and capturing about 2200 of the AMMs. They're pretty good missiles, superior to my own, though not in *every* aspect, so I'm confident I'm not too far off from parity.
It's now late 2061, and since my shipbuilding capacity has increased, I'm about 4 months off from trying again with a massed missile strike on those PDCs. Only one problem though. Rather unexpectedly I've hit the inevitable Earth duranium crunch. I had to implement severe rationing that has already delayed the completion of the needed ships by at least a year (and even then, this fleet that's going is less than half the tonnage of the one I lost most of in 2059). One of Uranus' moon has a good acc 1 source though that I'm currently in the process of setting up automines on, also full of Sorium which I'm about to run out of as well, so I think this will be just a minor blip. If I don't get a hold of that world guarded by PDCs in the next 3-4 years though, I'm going to be toast...
