After an unfortunate ramdisk incident, I've restarted my Terran Union game.
Two jumps out (Sol - Centauri - Epsilon Eridani) I make contact with the Church of Andromeda, a particularly hideous NPR living on a 0 colony cost water world. They soon begin flooding Sol with surveyors, plus a construction ship. Their warships and grav surveyors move at 5200+ kms compared to my ion fleet speed of 4000 kms, but they don't seem particularly warlike. Even lightly dinging one of their surveyors doesn't provoke a reaction.
However, when one of my explorers tries to carry a "contact team" to their homeworld, they blow it out of space. My light patrol ships promptly destroy the construction ship and begin ambushing surveyors at survey locations.
A war that will turn into a comedy of errors has begun. First they send four 22,000 ton battleships through the Sol jumpgate. My tracking station in Centaurus sees a large force of escorts moving a day or so behind them, but the battleships don't wait. They plow through the jumpgate and my destroyers (8 missile, 4 beam) destroy them without taking a scratch. The escorts head back to Epsilon Eridani.
I'm not sure what the Church is about, but they're not very good holy warriors. Their ships are fast (inertial fusion, I discover after salvage), but don't seem to have great armor or point defenses. Their missiles are just embarrassing--size 5, 25kms, warhead 6. The missiles have active sensors, but I'm not sure if they're armored. Maybe they just have a low power multiplier.
After this, they complete a jumpgate link to Centaurus. Unnoticed by me, civilian colony ships immediately make a beeline to my now forgotten espionage colony on Epsilon Eridani. The civilian ships are destroyed by the PD escorts, which then move into Sol. This time my destroyers are badly shot up by AMMs, but I only lose one compared to 6 or 7 Andromedan wrecks. There a couple of Andromedan survivors who bug out.
My tracking station then detects the Andromedans salvaging the wrecks of the civilian colony ships. Somewhat overconfident at this point, I only send in two of my light patrol craft (2400 tons, 2 10cm lasers) to destroy them. They must having a tracking station in Centaurus too, because a Andromedan destroyer moves to intercept before shipboard sensors should have noticed them. Both patrol ships are killed even though they could've escaped--I thought they had a good chance of handling the 5 missile barrages, but the occasional leaker took its toll on them. I send in my three undamaged beam destroyers to deal with the salvagers. This time there isn't any response.
I could easily deal with the rest of the Andromedan fleet (now just 4 known warships and some defense bases plus however many FACs they've built since contact), but I'm unsure exactly how I want to proceed. I can lift a division at a time--a two month round trip for my transports. I'm reluctant to invest heavily in new construction since my ion ships will be obsolete by two generations after the war.
