Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Aurora Chat => Topic started by: DaMachinator on July 25, 2016, 03:48:30 PM
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Escorted, armed, defensive only, or completely defenceless?
For me, it's completely defenseless, with only the single layer of armor. Especially geosurvey ships. Gravisurvey ships may acquire shields because they're already military craft. I may also thicken the armor and add CIWS to my exploratory craft.
Also, does anyone make armored or armed freighters/tankers?
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Defenceless.
If they keep running into trouble, I may try something:
Make the next generation fighter-sized and escort them with recon fighters equipped with passive sensors.
Escort them if I have cheap and efficient warships available (I usually do).
Put a basic sensor package on the Geosurvey ships if i figure that's enough to avoid getting shot at.
I don't really armour any civilian ships, or even disposable warships. I prefer large low-power engines as damage sinks.
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My primary tactic so far to get out of confrontation pretty much amounts to "jump capable + gotta go fast + big passives". Tactic: GTFO heading on a direction that is not close to the jump point. If possible, use Lagrange points to increase misdirection, then transit out.
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A little trick.
you can put a small sensor (I think 1 HS sized) on a ship and it still commercial.
I use ships that have both Geo and grav sensors most of the time. I give them some passive sensors too and there defense is running. If not, scratch one survey ship.
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A little trick.
you can put a small sensor (I think 1 HS sized) on a ship and it still commercial.
I use ships that have both Geo and grav sensors most of the time. I give them some passive sensors too and there defense is running. If not, scratch one survey ship.
Earlygame size-one passive sensors are useless for ship detection. With size 1 and Thermal Sensor Sensitivity 6, a passive sensor has nowhere near the detection range I'd like to have, and gravisurvey and EM sensors make your ship a military vessel.
My survey ships run in teams of 2 or 3, and are rather expensive BP-wise. Typical outfit: Basic commercial or military jump drive, 50 HS minimum power commercial engine, and from 3 to 5 geosurvey or gravisurvey sensors. Construction times are cut by prefabricating engines, jump drive, and sensors.
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I have been putting a size 1 thermal sensor om my geosurvey ships so they can detect any populations.
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Defenseless, but with decent sensors so they can hopefully see an enemy coming and run. Arming survey ships always seemed fairly useless, as a halfhearted collection of guns and defenses on a single ship isn't going to help against most threats survey ships run into, and escorting always seemed overly expensive and micromanagement heavy. Economically, the most efficient way to handle it seems to be to make cheap survey ships and accept losses.
If I'm playing a game where I want to roleplay keeping the crews safe, I'll generally have an actual fleet detachment check out the system first and then send in the survey ships.
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I've done both. I find that it's better to make them defenseless, at least for how I play, because I would have to send a large fleet of armed survey ships, or make my survey ships dramatically bigger, in order to actually make them viable in combat against enemy ships. And while that is obviously not impossible, I much prefer to send single survey ships out, and if one gets destroyed, so be it.
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Defenseless, but with size 1 TH and EM sensors.
Once at middle game (and after having lost several defenseless ships), I usually design a first-contact ship which is a small carrier with gauss defense and armor. It is staffed with a jump fighter (minimal sensor suit) to check the other side of a jump point. Then the first-contact ship jump in system at low speed, and lauch several mini fighters optimized for range and low-profile EM and TH. These small fighter will go to each planet with small sensors.
Once every planet and moon on the system is checked, the defenseless geo and gravsurvey ship can start to work.
Use a bit of micromanagment, and is far from perfect (won't spot spoilers), but I consider it more logical once the first hostile encounter happened.
My 2 cents
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Defenceless. I found it's hard to fit enough weapon arrays into my all-purpose exploration ships. But my design carries some sensor-tipped missile and space mines for blockade, if they made it to jump point, there will be a surprise for enemy.
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How do people feel about mixing geosurvey with gravsurvey? I like being able to point a ship at a system and eventually have it completely surveyed.
Also, is there any way to automate exploration so the ship will go through jump points and explore? And a way to make it jump back for fuel?
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You can probably hunt through old thread in ahip design and find my normal surveyors.
But i usually run an all military fleet, usually 1.5x the speed of a normal warship, and split into 4 classes, a geosurvey, gravsurvey, em, and therm detection ships. All designed closely enough that call can be produced from the same yard without retooling.
Usually works quite well.
Am running a game now though. 0 NPRs, cause i wanna mess with apoilers alone. And for that ive been running small carriers "seaplane tenders" that service tony long ranged FAC surveyors and scouts.
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How do people feel about mixing geosurvey with gravsurvey? I like being able to point a ship at a system and eventually have it completely surveyed.
Also, is there any way to automate exploration so the ship will go through jump points and explore? And a way to make it jump back for fuel?
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by automate exploration, but you can have them survey all the survey locations in a system automatically, and you can have them survey all bodies in a system automatically. However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no "go through nearest unexplored jump point" order, or such thing. You can have them automatically jump back for fuel too, just use the conditional orders ("Fuel less than X%", "Refuel at Colony or Tanker").
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How do people feel about mixing geosurvey with gravsurvey? I like being able to point a ship at a system and eventually have it completely surveyed.
Also, is there any way to automate exploration so the ship will go through jump points and explore? And a way to make it jump back for fuel?
Seems terrible. It means the whole ship counts as military, and the automation will be suboptimal (we'd need a "survey nearest body or survey location" to avoid wasting fuel and travel time).
Having them automatically jump to unexlored systems isn't possible afaik... and it probably wouldn't be very useful either, because new system may be discovered or connected to the gate network while the ships are underway. I rarely use automated jump gate building for similar reasons, and that has one less source of sillyness.
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Seems terrible. It means the whole ship counts as military, and the automation will be suboptimal (we'd need a "survey nearest body or survey location" to avoid wasting fuel and travel time).
Having them automatically jump to unexlored systems isn't possible afaik... and it probably wouldn't be very useful either, because new system may be discovered or connected to the gate network while the ships are underway. I rarely use automated jump gate building for similar reasons, and that has one less source of sillyness.
I have been known to do that for this reason.
Have Jump tender, and bring two science vessels with both sensors.
No matter how the layout of the system I can set one to grav scan, and then do geo, and one Geo and then grav scan. I have a fair amount of fuel and set it for 24 months. They finish the search unless it a really crowded system, and even then, its the 24 months that comes before the fuel issues. In that case a new jump tender shows up and the old science team heads back, goes into overhaul mode. Works well.
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Seems terrible. It means the whole ship counts as military, and the automation will be suboptimal (we'd need a "survey nearest body or survey location" to avoid wasting fuel and travel time).
Having them automatically jump to unexlored systems isn't possible afaik... and it probably wouldn't be very useful either, because new system may be discovered or connected to the gate network while the ships are underway. I rarely use automated jump gate building for similar reasons, and that has one less source of sillyness.
I'm going to have a military ship anyways in the form of my grav surveyor so why not just give it a geo sensor as well? Its one less ship to have to manage and one less shipyard to have to dedicate.
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The way I usually build them (one big, low-power engine, little else), sensors account for most of the cost.
we wouldn't save much compared to building 2 specialised ships, and now the whiole thing is military and we'll have much longer travel time.
I usually take steps to be able to build both designs on the same yard anyway, but they may be considered a little gamey.
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I always go for cheap and unarmed at the beginning, before first contact. By the time of first contact, I usually will be slowing down my exploration, with a proper survey fleet including military escort surveying a system at a time in force.
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I use combined grav and geo survey ships with a single laser, railgun or gauss turret plus a Size 4 or so missile launcher with 4-5 reloads.
Works well for me and is very versatile.
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I've also moved over time to a survey fleet model, in my case to help with the micromanagement. Much more efficient in my personal time to move a jump tender/tanker and a mixed group of geo and grav survey ships to a system, and have them sit there until all survey work is completed. Obviously it is less efficient in-game as there will times when geo survey is completed before grav survey, but I generally find that exploration runs ahead of exploitation anyway.
I won't assign military escorts at first, but after the first few inevitable loses then I will do so for rp reasons.
I know that I could also achieve this with a mothership/FAC design, but I find that adds too much micromanagement for my tastes.
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I have a hard limit of 6k tons set for my exploration ships ( unless im doing some crazy Star Ruler/Warhammer theme ).
With one 2.5k tons civilian engine, full active/passive/geo/grav sensor suite and some fuel/spares/crew quarters/bridge.
No weapons because anything with a civilian engine is simply too slow for any weapons to be viable ( missiles ? Too few launchers, to few reloads - if i add many of them this will slow down ship to a crawl and cut its range which in turn heavily reduce efficiency. Beams ? Too slow ship to engage anything with it etc ). Sometimes i add some CIWS or turret but its rare and only when i climb higher on the tech tree.
Attachment : sample ship.
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I arm my survey ships because I find them uniquely well-suited to hunting other survey ships. Another common scenario is being faster than an NPR battle fleet but slower than its scouts. Sometimes you really don't want them following you through the jump point. They're also likely to encounter construction ships.
A launcher drastically increases survivability when used to launch reconnaissance probes at likely planets, preventing the classic blunder into an orbital weapon station mistake.
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After scouting out the immediate neighboring stars to make sure I even have the luxury to think about exploring (as opposed to fighting a war of survival on my doorstep), I go to a fleet-based exploration model with a 60k-ton carrier as a command ship for an exploration task force, which will travel with a tanker and several corvette-sized escort ships. The big 60k-ton command ship has fifteen FAC-sized survey ships in its hangars, 10 for geo scans and 5 for grav scans.
When exploring a new system, at first the escorts peek in (the carrier doubles as jump tender), and if there's no sign of trouble after an hour (ie, a hostile fleet camping the other side), the carrier and tanker follow. They all wait at the entry jump point for another week and if nobody seems to be home (ie, no long-range missile fire, no scouts showing up to investigate what the heck just showed up in their system, and no giant thermal/EM signatures coming from terrestrial planets), I give the all-clear for the parasite surveyors to go out and play, scan all the things, then come back to the carrier.
While it might have a little bit of fight in it, the carrier wasn't made for serious combat, never leaves the jump point, and in the event that something hostile shows up that got missed, it'll just jump right back out along with the tanker while the escorts cause a distraction. The little surveyors are expendable. If they make it to the jump point, the carrier is waiting on the other side holding the door open, and the escorts will do their best to fight off anything unwanted that follows them. If they don't escape, oh well.
Then it's time to send in the bigger guns.
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I was reminded last night about the importance of sending an escort through before a fleet even when the system is not new. I had sent a survey fleet to what I thought was an empty system for a routine geo-survey, only to find that an NPR had moved a squadron to the jump point in the months since my initial scouting. The first target for their meson canons was my jump ship...
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In my current game I been trying out having a "first contact" ship that is the first to jump into a system. it has some launchers and launches probes at anything remotely inhabitable so that it a probe that sets off alerts, not a ship in case the planet is occupied. Not met a NPR or spoilers yet, and after a few games of playing knife actions in one system out of sol, it nice to be able to establish some colonies and so on before meeting anyone.
Of course, my battle fleet might need a big upgrade, and not sure how I shall go about it.
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Yes, I had a first contact ship as well. Just don't assume that because a system was empty a year ago when you checked it out it will necessarily still be empty...
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Yes, I had a first contact ship as well. Just don't assume that because a system was empty a year ago when you checked it out it will necessarily still be empty...
Normally when I doing expansion, exploration happens soon after, or I leave a patrol craft to keep tabs on the system.
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A patrol craft seems sensible, I just don't like the thought of the poor crew sat out in some obscure system for month after month!
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A patrol craft seems sensible, I just don't like the thought of the poor crew sat out in some obscure system for month after month!
Pick crew who enjoy the splendid isolation! ;D
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Pick crew who enjoy the splendid isolation! ;D
Nah, that's what the 5 year fuel harvesting mission is for!
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Early on, defenseless.
I will usually lose a couple of geosurvey ships. As tech improves, they pickup armor, speed, and passives. I usually drop a CIWS on them as well, along with good passives.
The last couple of games, I have a dedicated scout go through with BIG sensors and sweep the system. If its clean, the scout moves on, and the dedicated surveyors come through. Works well, and saves me some ships. A bit more micromanaging, and I still lose the odd geosurvey ship, but meh, they are cheap.
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Early game exploration is a bit of a gamble, expand fast, grow your economy, and then hope you can build up your military in time to deal with surprises. But a large standing fleet, especially of obsolete ships, is a drain on the economy. Starting off with survey carriers and survey drones, you at least have the option of quickly building some fighters and war missiles so they have some fighting capability.
As survey ships, they may have excess magazine capability, but they can use their huge launchers to act as mine launchers. They may be ancient, mostly obsolete ships, but with the most modern missiles.
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All but one of my designs has been more or less defenseless. I had one model with CIWS but it proved to be merely a mass sink as the one ship couldn't handle any amount of enemies.
For my next design I need to put more powerful passive sensors in. That should help keep them alive. Also going to try for higher speed. Currently they go 4545KM/s.
In any case, I honestly haven't lost that many. 3 dozen systems explored and I think I've lost around 4.
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I really hate doing it, but I usually run mostly defenceless. Everything that is a danger to an exploration vessel requires a full battlegroup to deal with, and possible a full fleet. Even a 40,000-50,000 ton survey carrier has difficulty carrying a meaningful amount of military power, considering the tonnage required for the jumpdrive. I can't commit that much force to covering exploration ships, especially in the early game. I don't miss minefields - they were hella laggy - but at least they were something a tough exploration ship could conceivably survive.
I do often put armor and sometimes CIWS on tankers, and sometimes other civilian vessels. Usually a waste of bp, but sometimes it's saved a commercial vessel from taking meaningful damage.
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I'll weigh in again. From my experience the only way to keep exploration ships alive is to make them small and slow to keep signatures down, and equip large passive sensors so you can see stuff before it sees you. Generally NPR's and spoilers run on passives unless they have detected something, so you should be fine untill you get too close.
If I can I usually make my exploration ships quite fast but run them at low speed unless they get spotted, then increase if it'll give them a chance of getting away.
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I am always a bit perplexed by the posts about survey carriers. Maybe it's because I always play conventional start and so...
When I see people talking about large survey carriers..... My warships are not large, let alone a survey ship XD
At any rate, for me it's cheap and expendable. 5-6000 tons civilian cheapo ships with size 1 passives and 2 survey modules (or military ship with grav survey modules for grav survey). Good range/speed tradeoff. I usually have 8-10 survey ships and 8-10 grav survey ships. They cost nothing.
If one gets destroyed well... I can always build another. Or another 10. And I can often say what killed them. Most spoilers are recognizable. If not, provided the survey ship did not die just out of the jump point, I send it a military supercharged sensor ship with huge passives, and an active to turn on if necessary. I can, usually, get it out of the system in time if the bad guys come after it.
At any rate, I will say it again. Playing with a conventional start, main point for me is: do NOT lose something you cannot afford to lose. I have trouble as it is getting up a basic fleet to defend my system with. And I also play with the very bad spoilers on, so it's stressful XD