Missile Defense

[Gilferedir (OP)]

Been playing Aurora for a few weeks now but I have yet to be successful in combat.  I've gone over the tutorials and wiki a bunch but still can't seem to get anything together that has any kind of effectiveness at all.  In my current game, I haven't put too much into combat abilities but now that I'm starting to explore other systems I put together a wimpy gunship to hopefully fend off at least some missiles.  The result is horrid though.  I have difficulty down to %40, initial empires at 0, and generation chance at %10.  Yet for whatever reason I'm always running into alien races that wipe the floor with me, I can't even get past their missiles.  Do you basically have to just over run missiles with shear numbers, or is it possible to defend against missiles going 40,000k/s?  I don't have the resources to build a huge fleet of ships just to be slaughtered by hundreds of missiles I have no chance in hitting.  I might be going about it all wrong, but it takes so long to build up enough to do anything and it's kind of getting old having to start over all the time because I can't move into another system without a million missiles destroying all of my explorers.

[Thiosk]

Remember that there are many kinds of aliens-- some of them have been orbiting their stars since your species was mewling at the gates of sentience.  Those combats will end horribly, and it takes a concerted effort to develop the technology to beat it.  However, those species will seldom go on the offensive.

Why don't you begin with diplomacy first next time, before going in guns a-blazing?

Post designs in the ship design forum so that the community can plug glaring design holes-- like forgetting to install the correct resolution scanners or fire controls.

Secondarily, you do know you have to assign the weapons and ammo to their respective fire controls, yes?  Click the targeting icon on the system map menu, select your ship, assign the details, then copy-->race to propogate that to all vessels of that type.  repeat for all ship types.

[Gilferedir (OP)]

I've manage to get my weapons to fire a few times, but I'm usually destroyed before I can do much.  I tried being friendly with them but after a while it just said they are too alien to communicate with.  I guess I'll have to do more research into how to build a working attack vessel.  I was hoping to be able to have little guys and then build up to bigger ones, but it doesn't seem like that's something you can do with any effect. 

I thought I understood how everything worked (as far as energy weapons and fire controls) but I've yet to produce anything capable of something other than being blown up.
 
I have NPR's at 0 and generation chance at %10, are these aliens I keep running into precursors?  Or am I just that unlucky with all my generated systems?

[Jacob/Lee]

I would suggest throwing as much resources as you can towards researching better tracking speeds, if that still fails then build a ship that is absolutely covered in tiny lasers so NOTHING will make it through that wall of gunfire.

I highly doubt you'll need to do that though, just research better tracking speed for now.

Oh, and make sure your sensors are actually capable of seeing speeding missiles a good distance away.

[Brian Neumann]

It sounds like one particular kind of enemy.  They do not build more ships normally so it is possible to whittle them down.  I noticed one person said to build lots of small lasers onto your ships for a solid wall of energy to shoot them down.  To make this work you need to research a decent tracking speed (5000km/s will work) and at least a matching turret tracking speed (sensors and energy weapons research areas respectivly).  Build turrets that have a matching tracking speed to the fire control speed so your weapons have a decent chance to hit.  At 5000km/s base speed, a times 4 tracking speed fire control gives you 20,000km/s tracking speed.  This will average about 40-50% hit rate against the missiles you mentioned.  For maximum rate of fire go with gauss cannon with a rate of fire of 4 or higher,  this is expensive however so you might want to go with 10cm lasers firing every 5 seconds if possible.  Build turrets with 2-3 weapons per turret and a tracking speed of at least 20,000km/s so they can take advantage of the fire control.  Once you have built the ships you will need to do some stuff on the F8 screen to set them up for point defense.  Select the fire control, turret, or turrets any eccm you may want and then look over to the middle right of the screen.  There is a set of choices for final or area defensive fire.  Set it to final defensive fire, (but NOT the final defensive fire self only).  Once you do this for the first ship you build you can later go back to that ship and on the far right there are a few buttons for copying the settings to all ships in the class.  Do this before you even enter the enemy system so that your weapons will fire in self defense.  I usually assign all energy weapons a final defensive mode as the chances are you will not be shooting anything offensivly if they are shooting missiles at you.

Brian

[Gilferedir (OP)]

Great! Thanks for all the infos,  I think it might be my sensors that are failing me.  I'm going to try and build a sensor only ship to send along with my fighting ships so I can get some bigger sensors out there.  Should I also be working on anti-missile missiles?  I still haven't messed with missiles at all, since I have yet to be productive with beam weapons and missiles are a whole other category from what I've seen.

[Brian Neumann]

Sensors are very important.  Also be carefull of the range your sensors say you have.  Against most missiles it is much shorter than what is listed on the ship design screen.  When you design the active sensor try putting a slash mark and then the range it will detect a size 6 or smaller missile into the name line.  For example  Active Sensor Resolution 1  Range 10m km/ 1m km.  As a rule of thumb the range you can actually detect a smaller missile is 1/10th the range you will see a 1 hull space target.

As for using missiles it will help a lot if you can get a decent point defense missile design.  Try for at least ion engines, and the 8000 research point agility.  A missile launcher reload rate 3 will also help.  When you design the missile try to get one with 5m+ km range, a 1 point warhead and then I usually use .5msp for engine and the rest is agility.  Look at the overall agility of the missile on the design screen.  That is its chance to hit a missile moving at the same speed.  If it is moving twice as fast then your counter missile would only have 1/2 that chance to hit.  Anti-missiles need to be size 1 for a lot of reasons, the biggest is you need lots of them.  I often go for 10 launchers, 2 firecontrol and a lot of magazines.  Most of the time I have more problems with being shot dry than of having to few launchers in the first place.

Hope all this helps you
Brian

[Peter Rhodan]

AS the above post said - list the range on the MFC name - for instance my Resolution 1 AMM Fire Control is designated MFC 75mk-8mk R1
My matching Active Sensor is ASS 75mk-8mk R1

This tells me that they are both Resolution 1 - have a max detect range of 75mK against 50 ton targets and a max detect range of 8mk against size 6 or smaller missiles.
The ASS is size 24 - because of this I use separate Sensor Ships.
You can defeat Precursors quite comfortably with ASS and MFC s of much less range than these - I built a small fleet of 6kT ships - I had a few Sensor ships - my original design had a size 24 ASS Resolution 50 that could see their ships at 300mK and a size 24 Resolution 1 ASS that could see their missiles at about 2mk.
My AMM Corvette of 6KT carried 6 Size 1 launchers and 3 MFCs that matched the R1 ASSs and 360+ Size 1 missiles - a dozen of these ships can stop pretty much anything
They were backed with 12 6KT Corvettes with 78mk MFCs and big anti ship missiles with a a range - initially - of 72mk. They had only 1 MFC and 4 size 9 launchers and carried about 40 odd missiles which did 5 damage each.
This force could beat most any Precursor force as long as you didnt try taking one of the Missile Bases on frontally - in my game they have 46 size 1 launchers and will just overwhelm you. With them you just dance in out of range and let them iuse up their missiles.