Final Defensive Fire & Setup (NPR techs)?

[CharonJr (OP)]

Hi,

I am still fairly new to this game and really like it, but there are 2 things I do not understand at the moment (and likely a lot more which I am still not aware of atm ):

1.  What might be the reason that not all my ships with Final Defensive Fire orders are actually firing on the incoming missiles?

I am mainly using these 2 fighter designs (older rail/newer gauss) to shoot down enemy missiles:

Code: [Select]

G-31A class Fighter    455 tons     9 Crew     104 BP      TCS 9.1  TH 80  EM 0
8791 km/s     Armour 1-5     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 6
Maint Life 2.47 Years     MSP 14    AFR 16%    IFR 0.2%    1YR 3    5YR 48    Max Repair 40 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.5 months    Spare Berths 3   

80 EP Internal Fusion Drive (1)    Power 80    Fuel Use 332.63%    Signature 80    Exp 20%
Fuel Capacity 5,000 Litres    Range 0.6 billion km   (18 hours at full power)

Gauss Cannon R3-50 (2x4)    Range 30,000km     TS: 8791 km/s     Accuracy Modifier 50%     RM 3    ROF 5        1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S00.2 16-2500 (FTR) (1)    Max Range: 32,000 km   TS: 10000 km/s     69 37 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes


Code: [Select]

R-31A class Fighter    440 tons     12 Crew     79.5 BP      TCS 8.8  TH 35  EM 0
3977 km/s     Armour 1-5     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 6
Maint Life 3.53 Years     MSP 11    AFR 15%    IFR 0.2%    1YR 1    5YR 20    Max Repair 17.5 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.5 months    Spare Berths 0   

35 EP Internal Fusion Drive (1)    Power 35    Fuel Use 320.86%    Signature 35    Exp 17%
Fuel Capacity 5,000 Litres    Range 0.6 billion km   (44 hours at full power)

10cm Railgun V3/C3 (2x4)    Range 16,000km     TS: 5000 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 3    ROF 5        1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S00.1 8-1500 (FTR) (1)    Max Range: 16,000 km   TS: 6000 km/s     37 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Tokamak Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1 (4)     Total Power Output 6.4    Armour 0    Exp 5%

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes

And usually they are doing a good job, 20 of these usually have no problems in taking out flights of 50+ missiles - simply due to their large volume of fire - but sometimes most or all of them simply will not shoot.  I have them following my main fleet with a range of 0 (initiative for both fighter wings is greater than the main fleet initiative), and they are faster as well and no longer waiting to acknowledge orders.

During my last battle my main fleet was hit by 3 (out of just fairly slow ASMs, and the 5 that were destroyed were taken out by a rail-frigatte set to FDF as well (with a much lower to-hit-chance).  Any idea why the fighters did nothing?


2.  I played a game at 150% difficulty recently and was fairly unimpressed by the 3 NPRs that were created during setup.  They had a good number of people, mines, factories, labs, etc. , but they were lagging behind in tech by 1-2 tiers.

Will the NPRs get the same 120k of free research I get at the start, or will they not get them (cause it looked like that to me - or maybe assigning the research manually like I did will prevent them from getting those points?)?

And will the NPRs be stronger if I SM them in after I have allocated all my research/got my free ships?

Thank you.

[sublight]

1)
The final defense fire issue is known to exist, but it has never happened to me and I don't know what factors create the perfect storm of failure.

2)
a) On tech lagging: Very common. The NPRs do a horrible job at prioritizing research, and will often research junk they will never use or spread their research over multiple tech lines. As a result, even when they have equal research their ships will tend to be a tech level behind.

b) NPRs created at the game start will have starting RP. I don't know if this is more or less than if you add them after game start.

[Varee]

Afaik i think npr starting research depend on there characteristic not when you created them
Also difficulty seem to affect them over time making them stronger slowly. That how it feel to me atleast, after i chaingung the diff ai grow faster but that is just my own observation

[Charlie Beeler]

1)  What are the specifics of the battle in question? 
Specifically:
- what were the missile size(s) and speed in question
- what's the specs on the detection active sensor

2) The difficulty setting affects the total research points available to the AI for NPR creation.  Beyond that the AI is actually vary limited in it's decision making.  For a truly difficult NPR turn off the AI control and instead revert to human controlled NPR's.  For now I would suggest not doing that and reserve it for after you've learned Aurora's mechanics better.


The best way to learn the game mechanics though is to play several "one off" sessions that are intended to be learning scenarios for various aspects of the game.  Once your comfortable with basic mechanics you can start a campaign.

[CharonJr (OP)]

Thx for the replies

Concerning the battle, my sensor was a huge 88/1 (I didnt know better at this time, it was my first missile detection design), the missiles were size 4 with a speed of 23k IIRC.  But detection/speed shouldnt have really been the problem, since the rail-frigatte was using the same carrier based sensor and was at exactly the same position - teched pretty much like the rail-fighter.  The only difference was that it was right in the TF instead of seperate like the fighters were (but still in the same position - distance 0 ).

[Andrew]

Final defensive Fire only protects ships in the same TF , as far as I know, so your fighters would not have fired as they were in a seperate group

[CharonJr (OP)]

Hmm, which would be strange, since they fired at missiles aimed at their ships before and AFAIK launching a squad of fighters will always put them in a "new" TF.

But maybe I have somehow managed to "disconnect" the fighters from their ships/carriers more than is usually the case and that's why they did nothing this time.  But I am fairly sure that I did exactly what I did many times before (when defensive fire did work), launch them and order them to follow the main TF after making sure that their initiative is higher than the CTFs.

[sublight]

Final fire protects ships in the same location even if the ships are in different groups. I've successfully had ships following other ships and defend each other with final defense fire.

The key word is same location. Task groups not shown on the same dot appear not to defend each other even if they are within final defense fire range.


I don't know why point defense weapons are reported to occasionally fail to fire.

[Charlie Beeler]

Final defensive Fire only protects ships in the same TF , as far as I know, so your fighters would not have fired as they were in a seperate group

As others have stated this is false.  Final Defensive Fire will attempt to protect any ship of the owning race PLUS any ship of a race with a military treaty that is in range.  Range being defined by the range assigned to the point defense not the weapon range.

There does appear to be a select issue with when the range between the defensive platform calc's whether a salvo is in range or not.  My suspicion is that it is related to initiative.

On the other hand, if the Final Defensive Fire (Self Only) mode is selected, only the mounting ship is protected.

[Charlie Beeler]

@CharonJr   One other thought, did you issue a ceasefire to the originating task group?  If so, this may have turned off the open fire flag on the FireControlPDMode table for the fighters. 

[CharonJr (OP)]

Nope, no cease fire orders, but in a new game the same is just happening to me and maybe those details might help narrow down the issue:

My CTF is protected by 2 flights of 10 gauss-fighters (higher ini, distance = 0 - they have been following the CTF for about 1 hour now) while 2 scouts and my bombers are trying to run down a couple of enemy missile carriers.  Those have already fired their missiles at the CTF (size4, speed just at 18k) and my fighters have completely destroyed 4 flights of 2x14 missiles already, but on the 5th flight suddenly 4 fighters (007, 008, 009 and 010) did not fire and 2 missiles got through.  Nothing has changed since the first missiles were shot down and the other 6 fighters in the flight did fire as ordered.

Out of curiousitly I took a look at the inidividual fighters initiatives (despite all of them being in the same flight), the flight is at 113 ini (highest officer has fairly low ini, will have to change that once we get back to Earth), while 007's C. O.  has 183, 008 = 193, 009 = 127, 010 = 112.  So even if individual initiative would be taken into accout (which it is not AFAIK) the only fighter which might have had any reason not to fire would have been 010.  And vs.  the previous missiles at least fighters 007 and 008 did fire (destroying the last missile).

What is interesting is that 011-020 and then 001-006 fired correctly (and in this order), it looks like the last 4 fighters were essentially forgotten or maybe that the game considered those last 2 missiles to have been destroyed after fighter 006 fired at them.

Hmm, I just counted the missiles acutally destroyed by the 16 fighters that did shoot and came up at 23, but with fairly slow missiles like these (18k) some misses vs.  a target moving at 3k should be normal I think.  But on the other hand - even if this seems fairly unlikely - maybe those 4 fighters did shoot, destroyed 3 more missiles and 2 made it through in the end, but this just was not displayed in the event log?

[Charlie Beeler]

At this point I don't have an answer.  The best option is to contact Steve through private messaging and arrange to get him a copy of your database (as is) for analysis.

[CharonJr (OP)]

Yup, might be worth a bug report - on the next flight of missiles again all 28 were destroyed with 009 being the last to shoot.   No real pattern to be seen why they didnt fire before.

And 1 flight after that firing did stop at 004 and 3 missiles got through. . .