I had captured a planet from the Mutunda Corporation,
this planet was meant to be a stepping stone to capturing a larger planet/base in the system owned by the MC.
After building up the captured planet, adding some construction facilities, fighter factories etc. and transporting a large contingent of troops on the planet, I started building some fast troop drop FACs capable of dropping a battalion each.
while these were being constructed, I decided to start probing the more heavily defended planet in the system.
I moved my main fleet a bit closer so the PDC on the captured planet could see and target enemy ships, bases etc. an oversight of not having an active scanner on the PDC to be rectified at a later date.
I had a size10 missile that I wanted to try. it was slow, but had two submunitions that had sensors. due to being unable to find how submunitions and sensors on missiles worked this was a bit of a test to see what would happen to it.
I fired the missile, and instantly started getting errors. I'd previously fired this missile at a ship to see what would happen, but got the same errors, I figured this was due to the intercept point being way out of the map, since the ship was moving. this time I was firing at a planet, so it should be able to intersept fine, but nope still errors.
I then killed the active sensors on the fleet which had moved closer to the target planet, just to see what would happen to the missile. would it fire it's subunitions, keep going, or just die?
it died when it couldnt see the target any more, and didn't seem to launch the subs. ok. I now know I need sensors on the first stage if I want it to keep going without a target.
I keeped playing, got distracted by a few things, and suddenly I was getting attacked!
what!? where!? the captured planet, and the ships stationed around it were taking fire, I'd forgotten to move the fleet back to the planet, and forgotten to turn the active sensors back on. the planet had a missile destroyer and a missile PD frigate TG at the planet, but since these were new ships I'd forgotten to turn the actives on these ships on as well!
I quickly turned the active sensors on, and ordered the previous fleet towards the planet, then advanced by 5s
two 15k missile destroyers showed up on sensors. the ships that the MC field are far bigger than any of my warships, however my missiles outrange his by a huge amount, do more damage and my ships are a fair bit faster. my destroyers weigh in at 6kton they have reduced size launchers but have only a small magazine. still, one destroyer should be a match for two of these ships. I was also curious to see how my PD frigate faired, this new destroyer also had two more PD missile launchers than the previous design. I also launched a squadron of new fighters that had just recently been dropped at the planet. I set up the PD missile launchers to fire automaticaly and, since my fighters were still to far away to attack the ships, set them on area defence, most of these fighters had Railguns with a 30k range, my targeting speed however was well behind and being researched as top priority.
I started incrementing the time, and realised the fighters were not firing. messed around with the combat overview screen again, and eventually they started up (seriously this is confusing, I'm still unsure the correct order to click what buttons to get the fire control to do what I expect, it seems in this case I'd left them on autofire which reset the PD area defence mod I'd previously set).
the incoming missiles were coming at me in salvoes of 15. and my PD missiles were not doing as well against them as they should, the missile stockpile at this planet was a tad old, and it appeared that the enemy missiles were now faster than they used to be as well. half of the missiles were getting through. my fighters were pretty damn fast, however they were not well trained, so they were "Awaiting orders" far too long, otherwise I'd have attempted to get them to chase and follow the salvoes in, they might have been able to help if that were the case. instead I just had them follow the enemy destroyers, hoping that the increments would have the missiles fall into the range of the cannon. this happened once, and I think I managed to take out 5 missiles from the salvo. from memory they were getting a 23% chance to hit, hampered by the firecontrol speed.
not to worry, I had enough missiles outgoing now. the PDC had fired a pair of Warhammer IV, the destroyer TG at the planet had fired a salvo of 6, the larger fleet off the planet had fired two salvoes of 6 Warhammer II, and my 16 fighters were on the way.
time advanced and my ships and planet were getting pounded by the missiles slipping past my point defence, I lost the PDC, which caused the two Warhammer IVs to loose target and self destruct. pitty, I wanted to see how well these new missiles did. not to worry, the small destroyer group at the planet had fired another salvo of 6 by this stage. I was confident I'd take out the enemy destroyers, just not sure how much damaged they'd do to me.
the missiles were still incoming, when would he run out? I was loosing facilities left, right and center. I checked on my troops. they seemed fine. I hadn't lost any battalions. so far so good. my ships were taking damage, but I still hadn't lost any yet. I considered moving some of the non combatant ships off the planet, but decided that they were better at soaking up fire. the enemy destroyers seemed to be switching from one target to another.
Then all of a sudden a bad situation got infinitely worse.
some how the planet converted back over to the MC. along with the ships orbiting it. I just lost a brand spanking new destroyer and frigate, along with some troop transports and a couple of other smaller misc ships. the MC did not have any troops on the planet, perhaps it was due to the population being MC? I don't remember the political status. I did have a large number of troops on the planet, and didn't notice any notifications about them getting hit.
at this point I ragequit and went to bed.
later, I picked up the game again, eventually the two salvoes of six missiles from the destroyer at the planet got to the two destroyers, (despite the destroyer now belonging to the MC) hit, and did damage, then my fighters got in knife range and picked them to bits before the salvoes from the larger fleet got in. however I seem to be stuck in 5 min increments.
the enemy destroyers have been taken out, my fighters are heading to the warp point to meet up with a transport carrier, and the fleet is also heading to the warp point.
no missiles incoming or outgoing.
anyone have any ideas? I guess it's possible there's a battle going on somewhere else that I don't know about, though that it happened at the same time as mine seems a bit close to coincidence. and it's been going on for a long time now.
