Questions of the not quite capable.

[Shoku (OP)]

I think I'm getting to where I've about figured out how many things I need to look at as I watch the seasons pass but I'm taking so long before I can start jumping around systems that it's hard to become very certain about combat.   I think I want to be developing one energy weapon and one kinetic weapon- still just trying to make better suited configurations of that type or faster ships if I run into opponents that are hard to shoot apart.   Is that about correct?

I've been kind of mystified by the aliens I run into as well.   In the first game I ran into ships shooting around at 6000km and with longer range than me when I went through jump points quickly.   The second game I built up for another ten years but even with my engine focus they were still much faster than me and massed up a force of like thirty ships at a planet near the jump point.   These seemed big but even if I'd been pumping out an armada the whole time it doesn't seem like they would be equipped well enough to dent that.   I don't really wanna drop the difficulty % and stomp a bunch of wimps but it seems like I'm outclassed in every field instead of even being on par in a few ways much less the staggered technology levels I get the impression I should be seeing. 

If I had twice as many shipyards it would be sort of approachable but. . .
Am I reading these aliens all wrong somehow?

Also: I haven't so much worked out the battalions and marines yet.   Do these have the kind of long term skill growth as my administration or do I not lose much by not putting them to some sort of task or producing more of them?

[mckamx]

Fast ships let you control the terms of the engagement (fight or run away).  In some cases, they can also increase your tracking speed, but only to a certain point.   If you need better tracking speed for direct fire weapons, turrets are the way to go.   Early on, most everybody will be faster than you are.   As your tech gets better, you start being able to build ships faster than the NPRs.  I'm about 70 years into a campaign, and am faster than about 2/3 of the NPRs I have run into.   I dont always outrange them - that is a design decision on my missiles.

Just because you are out-teched, it doesnt mean you cant beat the NPR (and capture his tech).   If you can mass enough long range missiles, the NPRs are just fast targets.

NPRs do build fairly large battlefleets.  However, some of the 30 ships you are seeing might be noncombatant or PDCs.   In either case, the solultion is "more misssiles".   Ship count is actually not as important as ordenance carried: you need enough missile tubes to saturate the NPRs point defences, but after that you just need more missile salvoes than targets.

Ground units get better with practice, but they need someone to fight with (actual ground combat) to really practice.   Good leaders help.

[jseah]

A key thing to note is construction doubling time. 

Starting the game with an engine focus is problematic when you are doing a buildup beforehand.  You want a Construction Rate focus, say 25bp.  Perhaps a few levels in mining. 

7 years in, I have 110 research labs, 2000 construction factories and a fleet of 40 ships (6 ktons and 10ktons) with a total missile output per 50 seconds at 310.  Of course, I'm debating the use of building more ships, as currently I build ships faster than I build missiles to fill their magazines. 

[Shoku (OP)]

In both of the cases I described I didn't have fire controls that could lock on at the range the ships were keeping.
So it's not a choice to try and go something that isn't missiles?

-

At 7 years I don't even have enough scientists to use 110 research labs with all the little 5 lab max guys I keep getting.  How many academies does that take?

[Thiosk]

Jesus.  I was 60 years in in my little turtle game before I had 100 research labs.  I simply couldn't obtain the necessary corundium and duranium necessary to get the facilities built.  I did get 2000 factories sooner, and now have two developed industrial worlds and two research worlds.

[jseah]

Firstly, I didn't do a Sol start. 
Secondly, my campaign was made a little easy by my starting system having a semi-high abundance of minerals.  Two of the minor ones are a bit constrained but duranium, mercassium and sorium I don't have to worry about for the foreseeable future. 

Not sure if this matters much, but it could be due to the fact that I don't use fighters or PDCs (apart from the starting allocation).  My defence is purely ships and I've yet to get into a shooting war.  So it's been 7 years pure expansion. 

For a 1 billion pop start, Ion engines is a bit slow, but for 4 years, I did not build a single military ship (apart from surveys) and didn't manufacture missiles so wasn't too bothered by it.  Essentially, I gambled that the NPR would be non-hostile (and they were) and dumped all my tech into construction/mining rate + research. 
In fact, I didn't even start with warp point theory... (although I started it right away)

At 7 years I don't even have enough scientists to use 110 research labs with all the little 5 lab max guys I keep getting.  How many academies does that take?

Not many surprisingly, I've had 3 for a while then got 4.  I have at least 3 50+lab researchers.  I've never had to worry about having too many labs...

Now, I have 11 academies and climbing, since my fleet constraint now is crew... =(

...
...

Actually, I think this might be due to another quirk of the system.  What time step do you use?  I use a 86 000 construction cycle. 
Not sure if that affects officer experience (intuition is saying yes), but I know it affects a load of things, like wasted construction power, as well as civilian sector movement. 

Because... tell me, what's your highest governor bonus?  I won't bother to check mine, but I do have a 70% construction rate / 55% shipyard rate governor for my homeworld.  (and there are three or four around the same range although they're not quite as awesome)
 - I also kinda "cheated" on that by creating colonies on system bodies that didn't do anything but train governors. 

EDIT:

Jesus.  I was 60 years in in my little turtle game before I had 100 research labs.  I simply couldn't obtain the necessary corundium and duranium necessary to get the facilities built.  I did get 2000 factories sooner, and now have two developed industrial worlds and two research worlds.

Actually that's rather more developed than I am currently.  I have a half-baked research world (which is an empty terraformed rock with nothing but labs) and my industrial homeworld. 

Made the decision that labs should not take up precious space on a planet that needs to run mines, despite the incredibly painful move (seeing messages to the tune of 19.15 labs sitting idle is >.<).  I'm still limited by population. 

[Shoku (OP)]

I've been using the default 400,000 construction cycle.

After the first few flounder games I decided to make a beeline to sticking a mass driver on several rocks with corundium on them so I have a handful of governors with production/mining bonuses training fairly early. I guess I could just declare garbage colonies before I ever click time forward to squeeze a little more out of it but even so I don't think that would get me anywhere near those bonuses in seven years- I'll assume that's at a much later point.

I think this game I counted myself as fairly lucky to start with a guy that had 25% factory production and 15% mining. At the six year mark the governor of Earth is 25% wealth, 15% factory production, 5% mining, and 25% shipbuilding. I placed the sector governor because he had my highest mining bonus at 30% as well as a 20% bonus to terraforming. (I've probably been wasting time trying to start a Mars colony right away eh?)

I'm already scraping the bottom of the barrel at 8 colonies though as I'm sticking guys with 10% production and 5% mining in charge of asteroids. With triple the academies I could stick better starters on them no doubt but-
The bonus growth on these guys doesn't look like it's really going to take off during the first decade when I feel like I'm lagging so far behind the aliens and things. Shipbuilding bonuses and that definitely help in making a fleet but long range missiles seem like they're flat out my only option for hitting enemy ships. It seems like I won't be able to make decent weapons if I put any time behind electronic hardening but that I won't be able to even lock on the things if I don't.

[jseah]

Ugh, I might like to point out that my 40 strong fleet is probably nothing more than paper. 
At Internal Confinement, 5750 is my fleet speed and my missiles have only 60 mkm range, 6 WH and ~50kkm/s speed.  And that's the latest design, which only 2/3 of the ships have equipped.  (previous generation was from before I got a working missile design and runs at a fail 16kkm/s and may as well not exist except to suck up enemy AMMs)
As it is, I, as a player, have zero combat experience and can't quite wait to see how I'd do.  I suspect I'd do better against the spoilers rather than another NPR as my fleet's weakness is in getting outnumbered.  As it is, getting troop transports will probably take me a year or so to retool shipyards and then more years to actually build ground troops (I have 2 divisions, one of which is purely engineers)

I don't really pay attention to governors.  I create as many colonies on rocks as I have governors, then simply manually rotate out the governors on important planets every two years or so.  (that said, the new rotation should be due in about half a year or so)
My starting governor was to the tune of 20% construction and 5% mining or something like that.  Plonk "colonies" on half the system bodies and you get good governors quite easily within three years and the exceptional ones are starting to show up around the time I'm at.  Never got higher than a 70% bonus before so I suppose that's lucky. 


EDIT:
If you're facing microwave using NPRs... =/  I think my current fleet setup would either smash their fleet before they can get to me (due to the wall of missiles I can throw since I have no weapon other than missiles.  A dual role laser frigate is in the works but I haven't got a useful beam firecontrol yet.  )
And if they do get to me, I'm a bit screwed since I currently have zero defence against microwave FACs or fighters (I don't expect NPR ships to reach me) without a single level in electronics hardening or useful shields. 

Yeah, no shields.  =/  I'm going for the cheap spammy fleet strategy. 

EDITEDIT:
Realized the spoilers... edited out. 

[Shoku (OP)]

Internal confinement?

I don't even know what strategies there are.
I don't know any way to tell if a weapon system won't be able to fill some role or have any comprehension of points in the tech where they pass each other in certain kinds of usefulness. Right now I just know that at least some of them will probably be outranged by whatever I was getting shot by the first time (I couldn't figure out where it tells me or if it does,) and that if they have sensor scrambling tech that I couldn't shoot at them more than point blank anyway.

So far they seem to make a beeline for any signature they can pick up and pummel whatever they find if I can't touch them and I haven't been able to touch any of them yet. I'm hoping long range missiles let me snipe them instead but now I'm not confident that will work either.


It feels like I'm supposed to figure out what their ships do and then design something as a specific counter to that but there's such a small window before they have a fleet sitting on some world in my home system I don't get how I could even build ships for that much less research the parts for them.

[jseah]

Strategy... so far, I'm just talking overall management strategies.  I've an idea of how I want my fleet to look but I've no idea if it will work at all.  It just happened that my cheapest missile frigates came into production first so I just went ahead and filled all my yard space with them.  So I've a lot of ships with missiles, a command ship and not much else. (even in terms of support, my fleet is stuck in my homesystem due to maintenance and fuel transport issues)


Changing the missiles is easy.  You change the missile and make sure it fits in the previous launcher and ta-da, instant fleet improvement without too much fuss. 
Of course, you still need to build the missiles but you can chuck out about two missiles a day or so?

Also are you not sure it's one of the spoilers?  To my experience in the past, I've had a 8 missile salvo not scratch one of the spoiler's gravitational survey ships.  Game died shortly afterwards so I never got to fight their shooting ships, but for lone survey craft to mount CWIS that could shoot down an eight missile salvo... =/

[Shoku (OP)]

Ok. Missile updating saves a lot of shipyard time. Check.

I didn't think the first type of spoiler ships you might run into just one jump away would blow up my survey ships then jump into my home system and beat up Earth. The numerous ones I thought were small rather than all still being 10k tons plus (at least at the one jump distance.) And those ones with the electric interference equipment came into my system before I had even every jumped out of it so I'm pretty confident they were NPRs.

I guess I've got to turn of fleet training penalties and instant tech and ships n such to throw at aliens -_-;
Trying to make effective ships blind frustrates me too much.

[jseah]

Oh... designing ships blind.  =/

I read a few threads in Ship Design and the NATO vs Soviets campaign first so I kinda knew what a fleet should be able to do.  

The other thing was that 40 kkm/s is apparently about par for magneto plasma missile drives.  AMM and AS.  I thought that AS missiles were pretty slow at first until I posted in the Ship Design forum.  


Also, you might want to remember to update the default ordnance loadout on your ships when you update your missiles.  
Not sure if they'll load the old missile if you don't but I want them to load only the best missiles first. 

EDIT for clarity:
I meant that I am not sure if the ships will load the new missile first unless you update their default loadout. 

[Shoku (OP)]

I tried reading through some of those but halfway through the trans-newtonian campaign (strangely named for a conventional start) the ships were still a long ways short of what I was running into.

I don't actually know how to load a variety of missiles onto my ships. There's the ordnance/fighters tab in design where I can say what they are supposed to load and I can tell them to pick up ordnance at a colony. Do they just automatically load older stuff in the same series of missiles if you don't have newer ones on hand?

[jseah]

Do they just automatically load older stuff in the same series of missiles if you don't have newer ones on hand?

That happens to me yes.  I presume that happens all the time... ?

[Shoku (OP)]

I thought you were saying that you didn't know if they would load old missiles after you updated but you were saying if you didn't update- I think?

Well anyway I was kind of wondering about this conquering other aliens for technology thing people keep bringing up. It would be sweet to hear from someone that's done that fairly early. Like with a mention of what year they do it by and maybe other information they can recall.