Your first combat

[Akhillis (OP)]

So, being a new player, I recently fought my first (and second) battles.  Perhaps unsuprisingly they were a learning experience.

Two of my survey ships had been destroyed in a system, so I set to work building a small fleet and sallied forth to do battle.  A number of things then went wrong; I learned I had to assign weapons to fire controls, that shields need time to charge up, that my sensor net had a gunboat sized hole in it, and perhaps most annoyingly, my anti-ship missiles weren't fast enough to catch up with aforementioned gunboats.  Most of my fleet managed to run back home and I promptly designed some faster missiles and a new active sensor, and refitted a couple of ships.

Round two started well; my new sensors spotted the enemy well before they hit me.  Unfortunately, I soon realized I hadn't created a new fire control system.  This wasn't the end of the world; they were short ranged too.  The next problem came when my ships wouldn't fire.  A frantic search let me to discover that the "resupply from colony" does not in fact order your ships to pick up their newly manufactured missiles. . . .

At this point I decided I'd had enough of learning experiences and used SM mode to give my ships their missiles; they promptly shot down the enemy gunboats.

Anyway, all of this got me curious what it was like for other people.  Anyone else have a similiar litany of errors the first time they went to battle?

[icecoldblood]

I forgot to give my ships armour. Then I realised I had no anti-missile PD. That day 12 ships were lost because no one in the Space Navy Ship Design bureau bothered to take a second look at their shiny new destroyer design. Only came out of that alive due to the alien ships entering the range of my PDCs.

[alex_brunius]

Not that related to combat perhaps...

But my coolest learning experience must be designing a small combat ship with a single big effective engine, only to realize after I finished building all 20 ships that they did not have enough Maintenance Supply capacity to repair the big engine with them!

After a few years I had lost almost half the ships to breakdowns on station since I had neither technology nor ships capable of towing them home.


For an early combat I build a 70000 ton railgun Battleship with 15 layers armor and went in for a close range gun duel with an enemy armed with mesons... That party ended 5 seconds later with an engine explosion causing hundreds of internal damage destroying my mighty flagship.

[Erik L]

Missile fleet.

Magazines - Check
Fire control - Check
Sensors - Check
Load the missiles? - uhhhh...

[Nibelung44]

passive sensors are not enough to achieve a lock for the fire controls...

[Narmio]

I had this awesome 12,000t escort cruiser with quad gauss turrets escorting my missile platforms to a fight with what I now recognise as some Precursors. I'd done some calculations and figured they would fill space with enough lead to take out most of each volley, keeping my missile frigates alive.  I was so proud of that design, everything just fit together so perfectly.

I messed up the point defense settings somehow and lost almost everything in one 5s tick.  The cruiser itself was the only ship to survive, atmo streaming into space from multiple hits, having never fired a single shot.  Oops.

[alex_brunius]

passive sensors are not enough to achieve a lock for the fire controls...

I think that's something that should be fixed actually.

Passive sensors should allow you to extrapolate speed and heading and fire homing missiles on the calculated target interception coordinates. That's something fleets can do today already (fire cruise missiles into an area where enemies are expected/tracked on passive and leave it to the onboard missile sensors to find and engage).

I can agree that FC-guided missiles should not be possible to fire using passives though.

[Hawkeye]

I think that's something that should be fixed actually.

Passive sensors should allow you to extrapolate speed and heading and fire homing missiles on the calculated target interception coordinates. That's something fleets can do today already (fire cruise missiles into an area where enemies are expected/tracked on passive and leave it to the onboard missile sensors to find and engage).

I can agree that FC-guided missiles should not be possible to fire using passives though.

Well, you get a heading and a speed from your passives, just extrapolate, put a waypoint there and fire at the waypoint 

[alex_brunius]

Well, you get a heading and a speed from your passives, just extrapolate, put a waypoint there and fire at the waypoint 

Well you still need to run some calculations taking your missile speed into account. I would think they have sufficiently advanced computers aboard these spaceships to solve that for you.

[JacenHan]

I had several 8000 ton laser cruisers, and blew up a smaller amount of Precursor beam ships. I think there might have been some enemy AMM ships that caused my cruisers to retreat, but I'm not sure.

[sloanjh]

Well you still need to run some calculations taking your missile speed into account. I would think they have sufficiently advanced computers aboard these spaceships to solve that for you.

There are two different features of Aurora here.  Are you:

1)  Requesting that the game mechanics be changed so that a missile lock can be obtained with passive sensors?  (Which would mean that the missiles would NOT need to re-acquire the target with their own on-board sensors, but instead could take advantage of the ship's fire control system.)  If this is your request, Steve is unlikely to do it.  He made a conscious decision to do it this way so that there would be a reason for people to put active sensors on ships.  Think of it as a game design abstraction that hides a bunch of "real-world" details that would cause actives to be important in (precise) targeting.

2)  Requesting an enhancement "Add intercept waypoint" where you would give it a target passive contact and a missile speed and it would do the calculation and add a waypoint at the intercept point?  You could then blind-fire your missiles at that waypoint.  I think this one would have a good chance of getting in - I would put it in the suggestions thread.

John

[alex_brunius]

2)  Requesting an enhancement "Add intercept waypoint" where you would give it a target passive contact and a missile speed and it would do the calculation and add a waypoint at the intercept point?  You could then blind-fire your missiles at that waypoint.  I think this one would have a good chance of getting in - I would put it in the suggestions thread.

Something like this is what I was looking at, perhaps without filling the map with actual way-point clutter unless that is absolutely required for it to work. One problem with that setup is that missiles are launched 5 seconds later minimum will change the intercept point.

Perhaps a kind of "soft" lock that would still allow FCs to fire without so much hazzle, but only allow firing of self guided missiles and lock their path towards a specific point (and perhaps even a search pattern after point is reached).


It would be pretty cool to operate some "submarine" style stealth ships that can operate alone and fire self homing missiles in the right direction without having to reveal their location.

[sloanjh]

I saw your suggestions post.  You might want to modify it to add a link to this thread so that Steve can see the context for the request....

John

[Nightstar]

Part of the problem is, if you implement something like this, you'll want to also implement its counter: Semi-randomized movement. Sacrificing 5% of your movement speed to make sure any auto-targeting missiles have to have good sensors could be a good choice. Then you want a better automatically calculated waypoint that maximizes the chance of getting to within sensor range of a randomly moving target, and then... I do like the idea, but implementing it specifically feels like it'd lead to an arms race of features.

Better idea maybe: Let there be thermal and EM MFCs. MFCs that maybe won't do the final hit, but will at least guide the missiles close enough to use their own sensors. Note the vulnerability to dropping engines or active sensors.

[Shininglight]

40 000 ton Shark class assault ship, particle beams and all lasers with massive powerplants and armor, wiped out in two ticks by prespoilers because i couldn't fight properly. Second was a battle in orbit of a needlesly hostile species, i was more advance and had learned FAC tactics by then, lost 5 FAC's but killed 3 10 000 ton cruisers, then the entire population of the suddenly irradiated planet, got a neat shipyard out of it though.