4000 missiles?!

[Aloriel (OP)]

As some of you have probably read in the Chat section below, I have been dealing with a situation where an NPR has launched a massive quantity of missiles against me. Each wave of them is probably just under 1000 missiles, and they typically launch 3 full waves... plus a few extras here and there after those 3 waves. Grand total: ~4000.

I am vastly ahead in tech. So much so that my slowest warship flies faster than their missiles. So, I can avoid being hit forever, if I am careful.

My main problem is that this leaves me with two choices. Leave their homeworld system until I have even more vastly superior tech or numbers, or fly in and attempt to evade the missiles, while destroying the launchers.

I have been doing the latter strategy, but it is painfully slow and excruciatingly micro-management. Each 5 second tick takes 10 real life seconds. I can't click anything higher than the 5 second tick, because I need to know where my ships are relative to the missiles at all times. Plus, they launch new ones all the time. I have to be ready to alter course if they do that. They also appear to have a virtually limitless supply of these size 1 missiles. So, waiting until they are out of supply seems pointless.

Anyone have any suggestions as to how to handle this situation?

[Nightstar]

Head your ships in until they get shot at, head straight back out of range. Might be 10-100 mkm or whatever, but it should far less clicks to eliminate a wave.

[Aloriel (OP)]

Yes, but with the seemingly unlimited supply of missiles they have... how many times will I have to do that? I was actually doing that at first, while I still had missiles to fire at them.

It was feeling like no progress, which is why I went in to engage with lasers.

[Nightstar]

As many as it takes... Homeworlds typically have ridiculous stockpiles of missiles, but not infinite. It's probably faster in realtime than trying to shoot the PDCs while dodging anyway. How many waves did you do that to?

[Aloriel (OP)]

Just the one and I was done with it LOL. I did manage to find a pattern for a while, but once that set of missiles expired... the pattern was broken.

[Rastaman]

Launch your own missiles with a longer range. Let them expend their stockpile on those. Those that get through sterilize the planet and stop them from making new ones. Basically - you know how it is: Nuke them from orbit.

[Aloriel (OP)]

Oh, I've done that. My cruisers are empty. LOL I should have mentioned that. My carrier still has some, but I have to wait 6 hours for the reload of the fighters (even though it says 37.5 minutes ). I suppose I *could* manually transfer those to the cruisers and fire them off instead of using the fighter launches. That would shorten the time between launches and kill a bunch of PDCs.

I'll probably do that when I get back from RPG night.

[Hawkeye]

There seems to be an issue with NPR missiles, which makes them way too slow.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,5427.msg59524.html#msg59524

Not that this will help you though

[Aloriel (OP)]

Heh, no. That won't help. Actually, I'm quite thankful for their slowness. Although, with the tech difference, I might still be faster than them. It's hard to say.

[SteelChicken]

Getting in and then out of range works OK.  Hitting them with longer range missiles works as well.

[Erik L]

Build and design bombardment cruisers. Firecons, and mongo big magazine space, then target the planet. See how much of their capacity gets diverted to interception, and maybe you can get other ships closer in.

[Aloriel (OP)]

Build and design bombardment cruisers. Firecons, and mongo big magazine space, then target the planet. See how much of their capacity gets diverted to interception, and maybe you can get other ships closer in.

This is what I am going to do. Withdraw, redesign, and hit them harder with more ships.

First, I'm going to make sure my espionage team lands safely though.

[JacenHan]

As a suggestion for your bombardment cruisers, try designing a large, armored "decoy" missile to draw out AMM fire. Of course, with that many missiles, it might not do much.

[Hawkeye]

Hm, in earlier versions, the AI tended to skimp on the number of firecons used, so you could swamp it with many small salvos.

Blue Emu (from Paradox Fame) came up with a way to do this.

Say, you have a ROF of 30 seconds.
You assign 1 tube to each FC and open fire.
5 sec later, you assign another tube to the same FC, so another missile is fired.

Important! Leave the already fired tube assigned!

Rinse repeat until the first launcher has reloaded.

Due to the reload time and the intervals, your launchers have fired, your ship will now shoot a missile per FC every 5 seconds.

The launchers to FC ratio should be equal to your ROF / 5


It is a bit of an exploit of the way Aurora works, but in a case like yours I will overlook it

[Aloriel (OP)]

The decoy system, and the scaled firing won't actually make a difference in this case. The fact is that their missiles are so slow, and mine so fast, that they have a 0% chance to intercept. Even my older Tomahawk Mk 1 they had no success against, although they actually fired AMMs against those. My Mk 2 moves at nearly 10x their AMM's speed (22,400 vs 2500). They don't even fire AMMs against them.

So, I've designed a new missile cruiser that I will upgrade the older Edgar class to. It will have a bit more than 5x the missile storage, and a couple extra launchers. This new cruiser will be strong enough to have a guaranteed kill on 1 PDC per salvo (as opposed to almost guaranteed), and be capable of some 70+ salvos. It'll also have new launchers that are much faster reload.

That should be enough to eliminate the PDCs, ideally.

Unfortunately, it'll be a lot larger too. I think my missile cruiser is going from about 31k tons to about 38k tons.