I just started reading this topic, a newbie asked how to start the game, questions about design, mechanics and development tactics in the game. The topic was started in 2011, so what do you think, could I use tips on the game, some basics of the game from this topic for version 2.5.0, or has the game changed a lot?

Area defense is pretty much the same as you manually targetting missiles every time your weapons can fire. This has the problem of missiles crossing the area that can be fired upon within 5 seconds, giving you no chance to fire.F inal defense only fires once (just before the missiles hit their targets) but is garaunteed that chance to hit (assuming it isn't reloading).

I found somewhere on forum something about escort. IIRC someone write that escort TG ships can fire to incoming missiles more often? Does they need to be separate TG?

They will need to be detached into a seperate TG.  What is happening is that the escorts can be positioned between the primary TG and the enemy and kept at a set distance.  This will often allow them more shots as the enemy missiles cross their position headed for their primary targets.  Of course there are times that the escort itself is the primary target in which case they get hurt as they don't have the rest of the fleet for support.

Brian

So, if i want to place ONE big unit on one JP then it will be better to use CIWS. Time to cancel some research projects and start with gauss. Thanks

The place I end up using ciws systems is on commercial ships that might end up in a combat zone as ciws does not make the ship military.  Even a couple of ciws on a forward area supply ship (mix of fuel and maintenance) makes it much harder to kill and therefore much more surviveable in combat areas.  The other place is on high value targets that would otherwise not have any point defense.  A carrier is a good example here as I am unlikely to put beam weapons and fire control and power plant on them, but a couple of ciws does make sense here to help when it is the target of an enemy salvo.

There is a place for the ciws, I just think it is not the primary point defense of the fleet.  Emphisis on Fleet ships.  On ships that are going to operate solo, or are particularily high value without having other defenses then ciws are very important.

Brian

CIWS give you an extre layer of anti-missile defence - you got area defence, final fire and CIWS - but CIWS only defends the ship that it is mounted on. But you definitely should use them IF your enemies are relying on missiles.

I only find them usefull when ships are operating in small groups (5 or less smaller ships)  This is because of its self defense only limitation.  A tripple 10cm turret with fire control is about 2 1/2 times the size of a single ciws turret.  For earlier techs it will have about 20% more hits on incomming missiles.  So call the relative worth for self defense to be around 3 times that of the tripple turret.  If each ship mounts 1 turret or 2 ciws then by the time you hit 6 ships the turrets are giving you the same defense.  If a salvo is spread between only a couple of ships then the self defense of the ciws is wasted on the other ships.  If you have turrets they are all contributing to the total defense involved.  This is especially important for a fleet of different sizes and specializations as it means that a destroyer which has a primary purpose of launching anti-missiles will still be as well protected with final point defense as the battleship.  It is therefore harder to take out the escorts in a fleet if you have turreted beam weapons instead of ciws.  At higher techs the utility of the rapid fire gauss cannon turret does make them significantly better against most incomming missiles.  The other benifit of having beam weapons instead of ciws is when you are fighting a beam armed oponent your ciws are useless as they will not fire on the enemy ships.  The turreted beam weapons including gauss cannon can be used in an offensive mode.  If you mount mesons in the turret then the are even an extremely good in close weapon system to use against capital ships.

Brian

I am building a missile jump point fortification. It will be big ship without engines placed in top of a JP.

I have two questions.

1) Does something like this benefit from 30cm laser batteries? 

2) My antimissile defense is laser turret. I didn't even start researching gauss weapons. Should i? From what i understand, CIWS use only gauss so i cant use them. Will laser turret be much worse? Of course for turret i use 10cm lasers.

Even ships that don't move are technically speed 1.

Certainly you can change it.  It will not affect anything currently in your game, but when new NPRs are created they will be bigger/stronger - on par with your empire.  Keep in mind that changing it to more than 100% causes bugs, as something in the code is not scaling properly and NPRs will use up their minerals at an accelerated rate and then 'crash' due to sever shortages.

If you want more aliens to play with, up the NPR generation chance (which is the chance that a suitable planet or moon will have a NPR on it.  Suitable bodies are still fairly rare.