Learning the importance of scouting (the hard way)

[scvn2812 (OP)]

Flush with victory over two advanced alien vessels, whom I suspect to be Precursors, with only minor losses, after rearming and replacing losses, I brought two fleets totaling 12 ships total, more than half my navy, back into the system to clear the inner system. What I ran into was a threat wholely unlike that which I had previously faced.

The first two vessels I fought, outranged me but attacked singly. They hit from well outside the range of my fire control, packed a bit of a whallop at size 13 nuclear detonations and moved so fast and were so stealthy that my area defense ships could not even get a radar lock, I picked them up on thermals only. However, they only fired volleys of four and my CIWS was generally good for a missile, sometimes two if I was lucky. Early on I fired off about 75% of my missile stocks at a waypoint between us, not sure what to expect and wanting my missiles to be of some use before I was turned into floating wreckage. What I hadn't anticipated was that the first alien ship ran out of ammo after only managing to kill one ship.

I was thus able to push on to engage within my own fire control ranges and gradually wear him down. A second, much larger ship (15 KT) took notice and moved in after I nuked the first alien. He fired off a few volleys of the same high speed missile that I could only track on thermals but shot himself dry after just a handful of salvos. He then rammed one of my heavier ships, destroying himself and it.

With more confidence in my ability to handle these aliens, I sent back the first fleet to rearm and reinforce and brought a second with it. We pushed on into the inner system and discovered a pair of what I believe to be PDCs on an inner planet. Instead of small volleys of very large, very powerful but manageable missiles: the PDCs sent a hurricane of 56 missiles my way every 10 seconds from just outside the endurance range of my missiles. Like the heavier missiles, my anti-missile missiles were useless, unable to lock on with radar and while CIWS might swat down 2, even 3 missiles out of the storm. 50+ missiles did bad things to my fleet.

Definitely designing a task force leader with the ability to launch probes from safety.

[HaliRyan]

The first real task force I ever built in Aurora died the exact same way. 

[Thiosk]

Those missile installations are a killer.  I don't think they're pdc, but they are ugly, awful monsters.  I now use similar designs for my mobile AMM platforms-- moved by tugging.

[scvn2812 (OP)]

In testament to the power of imagination, the potent immersion of the game and possibly my own nerdiness, I felt a pang of sadness when the event log listed each ship by name and declared that the life support in the escape pods had run out.

[Steve Walmsley]

In testament to the power of imagination, the potent immersion of the game and possibly my own nerdiness, I felt a pang of sadness when the event log listed each ship by name and declared that the life support in the escape pods had run out.

I am all for the power of imagination . Aurora has no graphics but I still get far more immersed in it than games with the latest graphics technology (although I have high hopes for Skyrim). I sometimes think Aurora is really a lot more like a P&P RPG or even a novel than a computer game

Steve

[Mysterius]

And that's exactly why we love it .
The same rule applies for Dwarf Fortress and other games.

[welchbloke]

I am all for the power of imagination . Aurora has no graphics but I still get far more immersed in it than games with the latest graphics technology (although I have high hopes for Skyrim). I sometimes think Aurora is really a lot more like a P&P RPG or even a novel than a computer game

Steve

Do you have Skyrim yet?  Next week for me hopefully

[chrislocke2000]

Do you have Skyrim yet?  Next week for me hopefully/quote]

Got myself a copy on Friday for the PC. Seems pretty good although the console interface is a bit painful and I'm less of a fan of the dumbing down of the character creation and progression system compared to the likes of Morrowind. Graphics are a bit glitchy for me as well but I hear they are bringing out an update pretty soon - obviously missed some fine tuning to hit that release date!

[scvn2812 (OP)]

In accordance with suggestions I've seen in this thread and others, I plan on "decommissioning" my abysmal first generation colony ships (1 commercial ion engine for a 40 kiloton ship, did I not look and see the top speed of 241 kps before I exited the window?) in the most spectacular way possible: using them as missile soaks against the Ross 128 aliens and their sand blaster doom squad. While they're alive, it may very well be the slowest assault in history but it will be very satisfying. I used these things to colonize a binary. Only took three years to make one delivery and they had to be refueled on the way out. Very, very satisfying... Now I just have to actually rebuild the navy. I'm down to three jump cruisers and about a dozen missile frigates with modest improvements made to armoring (as in they have some now ), top speed and missile range over their fallen predecessors. Which is about what I lost the first time. I have a jump tender with reloads and probe launch capability as well on the way.

Luckily enough, I haven't encountered any other intelligent species in the 30 or so systems I've gone into.

[Atlantia]

Haha, well good luck. I assume it only has 1 armour, so it'll soak up all of 5 AMMs before it gets blown to smithereens. Still, those 5 missiles could be the difference between victory and defeat! Let us know how it goes!

[scvn2812 (OP)]

Haha, well good luck. I assume it only has 1 armour, so it'll soak up all of 5 AMMs before it gets blown to smithereens. Still, those 5 missiles could be the difference between victory and defeat! Let us know how it goes!

Its about 35 KT, armor strength is only 1 but it has 93 columns and 20 internal HP. The spammers were throwing 50 missile salvos of strength 1 warheads so they might be able to eat a couple volleys depending on the throw of the dice. At 200 kps they sure as heck won't be dodging any

[MrAnderson]

Once I sent in a colonyship with escort to a habitable planet. Now, it was part of a story so I was doing ARR PEE that Everyone on Earth was like "LOLROFL ALIUM DUNT EXIST BRAH", and the surveyships didn't have thermals so I didn't realize that there was a alien colony on it.Then, two sensor contacts that were ships. I took them out almost effortlessly, and then moved closer to the planet with the combat ships. Out of nowhere, antimissilemissiles from PDCs that go 20km/s, completely sandpapered my armor and then some beam ships pewpew'd them to death.

[Arwyn]

Just had a similar experience, been playing cat and mouse with the Precursors in a system, last Precursor fleet was one large missile cruiser and four beam armed destroyers. I finally managed to splash their warships with only some shield damage. Big Precursor missile boat shot his mags dry and ran for the one habitable world in the system with moderate damage.

My fleet chased him down and lobbed three volleys of missiles at him, and then suddenly *poof* salvos of 50 AMM started showing up on the scanners. Much ickyness followed, with all my cruisers taking major armor damage and internals before we limped away from the Sandblaster planet.

Ironically enough, the Precursor cruiser bought the farm on the first salvo of missiles, but ALL my remaining birds were annihilated by the Precursor AMM. And I cant get close enough to the planet to even begin doing damage to the PDC's there.

I have a pretty good idea what the AMM range is (5.5M K/m!!), so I may try to dance around at the limit and try and bleed the mags dry. If its like the last precursor planet I took though, there were THOUSANDS of missiles in the stockpiles....

Bloody annoying not being able to take perfectly habitable world due to a PDC with BB guns.....

[blue emu]

In my Forum game on the Paradox board (over 100 forum members took part!) we ended up in a similar situation, besieging a planet defended by Precursor PDCs... and we eventually cracked it by designing a new line of bombardment ships and special long-range missiles.

One very useful tactic was to design several different marks of missile for each size, with different speeds. Then we could sit way back (95 m-km away, in our case) and fire some volleys of the slowest type of missile, then some volleys of a faster type, then some volleys of a still faster type... and during the run-in to target, the faster ones would over-take the slower ones so that all of our missiles arrived on-target at roughly the same time; thus creating a huge time-on-target cluster of salvos that overwhelmed the opponent's PD defenses, since each opposing PD Fire Control can only shoot at a single incoming salvo per impulse.