What's going on in your empire/planet/battlefield?

[MarcAFK]

How long after the first attempt were you ready to attack again with the new upgraded sensors and fire controls?

[Jumpp]

Not long. Replacing electronics is super quick*. Whole operation took about four months, I guess.  It takes about two weeks for my warships to travel from Okinawa to Earth, about three weeks to refit, and then another two weeks to return to the front. I did half the fleet at a go, with the other half sitting on the gate loaded up with those short-range Harpoon missiles.

Building the new long-range missiles took a lot longer than refitting the ships.

Update: The Second Push was a qualified success, but our position is shaky.

We pushed into BV again, this time armed with sensors and missiles that can reach around 300m km.  In previous pushes, we'd left one fleet guarding the gate and a second pushing toward the homeworld. This time we left the rear unsecured and pushed in with everything--1 AM cruiser, 2 command cruisers with 20 launchers each, 4 cruisers with 40 launchers each, and 4 antimissile frigates with 20 launchers each, plus three colliers. The cruisers are all 16,000 tons. The frigates and colliers are 8,000.

We carried about 900 of the new long-range Lance Mk1s, or four and a half full volleys.

We picked off about ten isolated ships moving alone or in small groups. We saw a lot more slow ships this time. Maybe the enemy is throwing everything including the kitchen sink at us this time? Or maybe those slow ships were in the field last time too and we just never noticed them because they were too slow to catch us and we were too blind to see them.

We found an extremely large task group of Betas, somewhere on the order of fifty ships of displacements from 10,000 to 30,000. This fleet doesn't appear to have much reach, and moves at around 2500km/s, so it's no threat to our fleet. But it's huge, and we expended our entire store of ammo and destroyed only 80,000 tons of what must have been a 750,000-ton fleet., then escaped without incident.

This fleet presents a problem.

If it remains in BV? Then we can just go home, reload, come back, kill a few more, and grind it down. But we don't have many Lances on hand, and the production pipeline is slow. To kill it quickly, we'd have to use our very large store of old Sparrows (100m km) and Harpoons (45m km). We don't know how many of those ships are armed with missiles, and we don't know the range of the missiles they may be carrying. But if any significant number of them have got missiles, our fleet would almost certainly be destroyed if we were to get near enough to them to use our short-range missiles.

If that fleet pushes into Okinawa, we're in trouble.

We've got excellent antimissiles, and large supplies of these on Mare Infinitus (our colony in Okinawa system.) But a fleet that size, if they're mostly missile boats, will be able to easily overwhelm our missile defenses, even if we're sitting at the colony and can reload from the surface.

If they push in, we'll have three options:

1. Defend Okinawa. We can maybe hold it, IF the enemy is composed largely of beam- and gun-equipped boats, or if they've got way less ammo than you'd reasonably expect.

2. Abandon Okinawa and fall back. Earth is four jumps away. It'd probably take them a while to find it, and we've got listening posts all along the route. We'd see them coming well in advance.

3. "The Enemy's Gate Is Down." Abandon Okinawa, go around their huge but slow fleet, and do whatever damage we can to their homeworld.

Whatever happens, our very next move is to withdraw the 2nd Infantry and 4th Armored divisions from Okinawa. There'll be no time to move them if the enemy attacks, and they'd take an extremely long time to replace. They were moved to Okinawa in anticipation of a much easier war than this one turned out to be. Now that it's clearly going to be a long hard slog, there's no point keeping the ground-pounders in harm's way. There'll be plenty of time to bring them up from Earth when we've achieved air superiority in the BV system.

*As a general rule, I've found that replacing sensors & fire controls is cheap and fast. Replacing armor or magazines isn't bad. Replacing launchers is painful. Replacing engines is so costly and slow that it's hardly ever worth doing.

[Cassaralla]

After a year or so of not playing Aurora, I remembered how to get my second monitor to cooperate with my laptop and have started a new game.  \o/

Seven years in to the American Union's conquest of all known space, things are going well . . . until a minute or two ago.

USS Columbia, a veteran gravitational survey vessel with over 8 systems full exploration in it's resume, was innocently making it's way back to the Jump Point of Ross 248 after completing the survey there when it was destroyed without provocation by the first living aliens the Union has discovered in the 7 years since the first Jump Point transit.  The survey cruiser took over 19 missile hits to go down though.  Quite impressive considering it only had 1 rank of armour and no active defences at all.  In all the two engines took 12 hits between them before going offline and dooming the vessel to an undignified death by (if the Intelligence page is to be believed) 10k m/s space Peacocks.  Going to be at least a year before anyone realises the Columbia is overdue though, as she had at least two more systems to survey before a scheduled overhaul.



Trying a new approach to Aurora this time.  In an attempt to simulate Government Bureaucracy, nepotism and industrial shortsightedness, I design two options for every piece of equipment, missile and ship and then toss a coin to see which one 'wins the Government Department Trial'.  This has led to some less than optimised ships.   Most obvious 'problems' this has caused are my Beam FCs having a tracking speed twice as fast as my turrets (and therefore being overcosted and oversized for the ships) and my 'Fleet Carrier' being 350m/s faster than my 'Escort Carriers'.

It did give me proper battlecruisers though.  Fast, well armed and tin foil for armour. 

[83athom]

Well... I found an alien race like I expected... just it was in the wrong direction... and 1 jump from sol instead of 4. SO far GEV Henry Hudson has been hit by 3 strength 1 (x8) energy impacts and every single bit has been absorbed by the armor. After a second increment with 2 strength 1 (x5) impacts and a strength 1 (x2), the ship broke off and is headed towards the center of the system at about x2 the speed my GEV is capable of. I think its time to pull out of the system and deal with the aliens with the newly formed Force Recon made by 2 of the Challenger class and 4 Ajax class.

[Jumpp]

All Quiet on the Western Front

The Solari pushed briefly into BV and were engaged by those super-fast missile FACs, which exhibited a new behavior: After expending their ammo, they shadowed our fleet from a distance of about 70m km. Once they've shot their bolt they're harmless, but their presence seems to make it impossible to advance the timer at a reasonable rate. Updates are limited to under 10 minutes. Since it takes days to cross that system, and the limits of human patience are finite, we turned back to get new electronics. When we return, we'll have radars and that can see and engage 1000-ton craft at 95m km.

This is an annoying meta-attack. We can handle their missiles, but they're using the slowness of the game as a weapon, which is deeply frustrating.

Apart from that brief push, we remain in Okinawa, standing guard at the BV jumpgate while building enormous supplies of missiles and a great many more ships.  There's been no sign of that monster million-ton fleet.

The enemy still probes Okinawa system every several months. The most recent such push was their most ambitious yet, with a 27kt missile boat, a 27kt gun boat, and two 18kt gunboats. All these ships appear to carry a mix of guns and missiles. One of the "gun boats" seems to have a single size-5 launcher but it's hard to say how many he had before 20 harpoons hit him. Our classification system is simple: They appear at a distance of around 1mkm. The ones that try to close with us we call gun boats. The ones that try to extend, we call missile boats.

We're pleased to see fleet composition heavily skewed toward gun boats since we can easily defeat those. We're alarmed, however, that the enemy has superior engine tech now. We're still on Internal Containment Fusion, and we're picking bits of Magnetic Containment Fusion out of the wreckage. We've recovered enough of it to build our own, but we're waiting for improved fuel efficiency before doing the next generation of engines. Even with the superior engine tech, the enemy are slower than us, so there's no great urgency.

[83athom]

Same is happening to me sort of. The enemy ship is keeping about 17m km away from my GEV, which is the range where I can detect him with thermals. However, he keeps bobbing in and out of this range every 30 sec which causes interrupts. Henry Hudson has about 14 days of travel until he leaves the system and 11 until Force Recon can get into the system.

Edit; Make that 2 days. I forgot that TF Training brings them down to a slower speed than their max so they were traveling about 1/4 their max speed.

Edit again; About 10-15 minutes later, the enemy ship has begun a intercept course with the GEV Henry Hudson. Lets hope they don't try a ramming maneuver like they did before they opened fire the last time.

Edit galore; Another 5-10 minutes, they immediately reversed course after getting about 10m km close. He has begun the same maneuver as before.

[Jumpp]

IMO, you'd be totally justified in using SM to magically move your ship away from this guy. Beating you over the head with interrupts is a hate crime.

[83athom]

Nah, turns out that using the minimum increments setting acutally lets you set the time advance with it rarely changing. So I set it to 10 and hit 5 minutes, so every (just under an) hour I can still see what is going on, but with only 3 gauss cannons they don't seem to want to play, so I increased the time to 20 minutes (with a smaller minimum increment).

Edit; Well... it seems the enemy commander had enough cat and mouse so he brought his ship into a ramming attack. I was unusually hurt by this as the GEV class took over 5 years to build even with its engines (and jump) prebuilt (learnt in the next batch that prebuilding the sensors and CIWS took build time down to only 1 1/2 years).

[83athom]

FFL Belleau Wood, FFL Bennington, FFG Arkansas, FFG Arleigh Burk, FFG Belknap, and FFG Berkeley have entered the Washington system with these orders strait from the top; A) Rescue any survivors from the GEV Henry Hudson (this is time critical because the helmsman on the Belleau Wood, directly tasked with this, reports there will be slightly less than a day remaining of life support in the pods upon arrival), B) Capture any survivors from the enemy ship (time critical for same reasons), and because en route communication was deemed impossible because we are simply too different as a species C) Send the message to their world to not mess with humanity (with salvos of missiles of course).

Post OP report; Objective A complete, 174 survivors including Commander Madeleine Miller who was the commanding officer. Objective B was classed as a failure as no life pods were detected upon scouting the enemy wreck.  Objective C; The ships of Force Recon halted their advance on the suspected enemy planet at aprox 13m km (average between the 2 detachments), which is well within missile range, and activated their active sensors. 2 additional classes were located both weighing around 15k tons, about the size of the frigates themselves, and were promptly targeted by the Belleau Wood and Bennington while the 4 Ajax class targeted the planet. Side note; My god the screen when those ships fire. Back to OP; 2 Salvos have been fired at each of the contacts in orbit while each Ajax fired 1 salvo at the planet. They were then ordered to recombine and head back home for debriefing and R&R for the crew, survivors, and commanders and R,R,&R for the ships. At  ~300k km, AMM fire has reached our missiles in a wave of 5, then 10 sec later slightly before first impact, the first salvo wave of 5 Sparrows were intercepted with 6 AMMs while a wave of 7 impacted at ~450k km on another salvo. Active sensors on the the Bennington has detected 55 AMMs on approach to it at about 200k km and CIWS have been warmed up preparing for final fire. All have targeted the Bennington so they have been classed as a anti-radar missile, 14 have been shot down by CIWS fire and the rest was absorbed by armor with the deepest of the scars only reaching half way through the layers of armor (6 places). Another wave of 55 AMMs have been detected, this will be a dawn out fight. This is about the time I realize a FC error has grouped all missiles under a single FC and selected only the Sparrows to fire (even out of the size 5 launchers which apparently have yet to fire a Malafon) within the Belleau Wood Detachment. The first of the Missiles from the Ajaxs' have reached the planet... and are now sitting on it without doing anything... why? After 5 more AMM salvos the armor has been breached on the Bennington and the Jump drive is so far the only thing to get hit, it is still functional afterwords though. After a couple 5 sec increments the missiles  sitting on the planet decided to retarget to the ships in orbit, which after PD fire and missiles, a total of 80 Sparrows hit their marks each doing 9 damage. The targets were destroyed. The commanders on mission decided it would be best to go into a standard orbit and use the remaining hundred or so missiles in each ship on the surface of the planet, just to make sure. *Again the missiles seem to not want to hit the planet. This time I even just used the launch missiles at order in the TG window.* Although directly over the suspected enemy world their is no colony/population there. Force recon is now ordered to scout the system in search of any of the other possible locations (Washington AIV was the only Earth-like but there are some 2.0 cost bodies further out).

[illrede]

*As a general rule, I've found that replacing sensors & fire controls is cheap and fast. Replacing armor or magazines isn't bad. Replacing launchers is painful. Replacing engines is so costly and slow that it's hardly ever worth doing.

I have a habit of building a stockpile of engines using construction factories, which alters that.

[Iranon]

It's still costly, it just ties up other assets. I'd rather design my vessels to remain somewhat relevant without major upgrades and mothball them, rather than sinking money into refit after refit.

[Mastik]

Surrendered to the Error 6 bugs, and the Invader fleet that was sitting in Sol space picking off everything that moved.

[Jumpp]

Solari Empire Update: It's complicated.

Armed with our new long-range radars and missiles, we pushed once more into Beta Virginis. Those pesky FACs did their thing again, and we swatted them down.

We learned that if we go in with actives off, we can approach to about 500m km from the homeworld before we're engaged.

We demolished much of that monster fleet, including all six of the 30,000-tonners. We're way faster than them, so we were able to go home, reload, and re-establish contact before they'd even returned to their homeworld. As they fled, presumably out of ammo, we gave chase and shot down a great many more. We destroyed somewhere between a third and a half of the fleet, altogether.

But. Eventually we figured out we were cheating. By accident.

This fleet has phenomenal point defenses. And our fancypants new Mk1 Lance missiles have great range, but poor speed. They only do 28,800kps. These should be easy for point-defense guns to deal with, and indeed they are. We had very large salvos entirely taken down by point-blank gunnery.

Which raises the question: How were we ever getting any hits on these guys at all?

A look at the log, and some experimenting, revealed the answer: Any time we got hull hits on these guys, the step time was a full minute. When the final approach went by 5-second steps instead, they easily shot down everything.

So, basically, I destroyed half their fleet by exploting the kind of time-compression problems that'd lead ME to re-open an old save.

Ashamed, we immediately left the system. When we come back we'll bring far more launchers--enough to fire salvos of upwards of 300 missiles. And those missiles will be doing 60,000 kps.

And we'll be damn sure to use 5-second steps when our missiles are approaching the enemy, so that any hits we get are honest hits.

[83athom]

Okay, now I'm confused. I sent Force Recon to every planet (except B star which was over 1 trillion km away) searching for those annoying aliens but couldn't find them on any planet, so I sent GEVs back in. They found a population on a body with 111 degree temperature, 0.04 gravity, and 2 atmospheres of atmosphere (mostly nitrogen). the funny thing is, Force Recon is performing overhauls at the moment so they can't get back there for a while (another month or so).

[MarcAFK]

I'm out of geo survey ships now, I totally didn't expect the last one to run into something with excessively large shields and a crapton of meson cannons, no sir.
Barnards star looks to be the most important system in the galaxy, it's a single jump from there to sol, or one jump to the wormholers, or 2 jumps to the homesystem of the only discovered NPR, or 2 jumps to the newly discovered meson spoilers. The precursors have yet to make an appearance.