Not very rare - I have 3 active wormholes within 2 jumps of my colonies since like 2040 and expect opening wh in habitatet system anytime
Then it must be that either you are lucky or it is my selective misfortune. I have sadly still only met them once over the years of play, but I had them activated in every main game after the second and also in numerous test games.
it is highest danger and most fun TBH
I am still waiting for this to happen, because my first encounter was over relatively quickly, as it was one of those more test-ish than serious games, where I already had all technology to build some stuff that I wanted. They were fast, but could do nothing against the 30k shields of the mothership I had on explore cruise there. A wasted first experience.
If you design ships able to hunt invaders that means they will do their job vs anything else
Ok, that is a fair point, but on the other hand such a setup turns out to be somewhat uncomfortable in the rest of the game where it isn't needed to that extent. I wonder how you do the box launcher thing; do you have a carrier for 1-2 cruiser sizes behind the lines, or do you actually fly back the ship to rearm on planetary base or something? Anyway, I assume it is quite the click work after every encounter. Against NPR, and all the other threats you could fare a way more leaned back approach that spares all that and still easily be successful.
Nonetheless, the firing power is impressive, and surely much more optimized as long as your logistic skill is good. One of the reasons that makes you play a capital ship game is exactly though, that you don't want bother with too much micromanagement, like too many moving parts that need to be organized.(manually re-arm single units after every shot? horror!) I think I described that before somewhere; the capital ship fleet is the fleet of the lazy admiral.
All in one and done.
it is 1st game I mix bigger ASM with smaller ones and I find advantages of such setup so far
I puzzled why you did that when the larger missiles even have identical range, but I think I understand now. When you have much oversaturated the enemies PD-capacity already, then indeed you can start to mix in some quota of larger warheads easily to achieve greater penetration + better warhead ratio, as they will likely make it through anyway. Nice idea.
After all the tweaking about, I sort of just decided that I'll wait until reaching 200kt shipyards before making the true do-everything capitals. It seems I'm getting a more diverse spread of opinions regarding design now, so I'll have to see what I can do to reconcile some of these apparently clashing ideals.
The positions here are often presented in form of "it
should be this"/"it
should be that", but really mostly mean "
I would do this/that" and actually just represent a personal favorite of gameplay style rather than a game truth. For example the 'large fuel range or tanker' thing is purely taste matter. I might say it belongs to capital ships to be capable of large independence, including from tankers, but that is an arbitrary definition, and capital ship can mean many different things for someone else.
That is not to say that there aren't some real game mechanical truths that simply work or don't.(sometimes with some cushion realm of personal freedom around to chose from) To figure out your personalized version of the right way, I would summon what Steve recently said in another thread, that you will see what is effective via what works in the true game and battle tests. To achieve a working answer for such a new thing like capital ships, you need to test many things probably, but as long as you stay unbiased or don't start to filter for what you would like to be true, you are bound to realize what really works out eventually.
You can look for good arguments to get a direction and hopefully discover shortcuts, but the best way in truth finding is of course always to test rather than to believe. Testing(/nature) is immune to human errors and follies.
Leaving the carrier behind, I sent the two cruisers (rename to dreadnaughts?)
Class naming conventions are also one of those topics with greatly diverging valid standpoints. The real world standpoint seems to be a mere naming after size mindset ("bigger than destroyer" or something), yet many here (and much fiction, including Star Trek) seem to enjoy to name after mission type instead. I guess cruiser often means something like "a destroyer in gun matters, but also with range /independent capacity", which makes it naturally bigger than destroyers again.
This is also why it seems so destined to be the classical capital ship per se, and so the reason why I said dreadnought before is because it went of that often attributed independency path and now looks very much like a ship that was built as a pure artillery platform, just like the original dreadnoughts.(which I guess is much tighter defined through this)
However, many interpretations exist for the cruiser, and so I've seen players having much smaller cruisers than their destroyers even.
In short: If you want to name it cruiser, it is probably a cruiser.
This was a bit of a relief considering Vandermeer's comment about AMM bases being one of the only entities which could pierce my shielding.
Heyhey, I said they are the only danger to shields up to a size (unless having to go close combat with invaders), but also that your shields were already superior enough to go through all of that.
Here:
You did designate quite a lot to shields. I know that is the core strength of large ships and you reduced it in the revision already, but it is still about 15% of the hull, so maybe 30% or more of the available mission tonnage. As center ship of a larger fleet I would say it is great, but for a ship of the line combatant I think it is too wasteful. Even the 300kt cruiser which managed to survive that whole big NPR war in my thread unscratched, despite close combat and such, had only 900 shields at the time.(though it should have been a bit more here)
Though I have to agree that no matter if you rebalance or not, the first current layout will most likely be able to conquer all but heavily fortified NPR worlds.(and Invaders ofc.) My first 120kt and partially 180kt ships couldn't shield wise stand against spoiler amm PDCs alone, but I guess that was because of the heavy cuts that maintenance takes when activated.
It seems I have more than enough shielding, so I could try redistributing some weight dedicated to shields to other areas.
Yes! See, there is some verification through praxis right there already.
I did try sending a wing of bombers to pursue the fleeing ship at the beginning, but they started taking AMM fire before they could get in range so I recalled them. Should I have sent them with the beam fighters to protect against missile threats, or do I need to invest further into thermal reduction?
Yes and no, depending on what you faced. You have 80 fighters to equal proportions beam and bomber you say? That should be easily enough to deal with many small to maybe even mid sized formations and their counter fire.(though your bombers don't have the option to expend main fire to emergency aid in pd as a buffer if needed, so be careful not to overestimate)
I think you also had problems with the thermal reduction here, right? I found that even my 10m+ km range bombers were spotted just before they could fire and received counter missiles, so they had to retreat. That was at a thermal of 250, so for your shell's range you need to get it under 100 I would say to be able to make safe approaches.
..Of course that does nothing if the enemy already has actives on, but often enough they won't (or only activate ship search ones), and it would be a shame to waste those good opportunities.
For reference on the escort fighters: I had a (yet undocumented) NPR war in the Astral game featuring the new heavy cruiser that houses 20 beam fighters and 20 bombers. The fighters and bombers together completely took the enemies fleet apart by themselves, without the capital ship needing to fire or even leave its course to their home planet. This time the enemy was (maybe coincidentally) smart enough to even assemble most of his ships in a tighter protected formation, but the combined fighters and bombers managed to fend the incoming asm's off and systematically destroyed the ships in a couple of runs.(some of which still successful surprise attacks because of thermal reduction btw.)
I had 3 tech levels engine advantage though, which makes enemy missiles relatively puny here.(fighters had far over 100% chance, and even the shells hit over 100% despite only being emergency amm)
On same tech level you can only expect about 50-66% from your fighters. Probing in advance what salvo an enemy is capable of and comparing that to the escort pd expectations might sometimes be crucial to the survival of already flagged bombers.
The journey out to the system in question left my fleet on around 60% fuel (22bkm from Sol). I'm not too happy with this number so I will be looking into improving the range for the next set of designs.
So you did want them to work without tanker or station like I thought? In that case I can recommend either 200-300b as a mark, or the two years flight time provision I mentioned before. Speed grows faster than range though, so maybe the second is not the best measurement in very early or very late game stages.
Unless you are using a truely superior # of escort fighters, its unlikely they'll prove effective in abating AMM fire. Thermal reduction won't work either, assuming the active sensor is on. Longer range fire controls are generally the most effective way to keep your bombers safe.
If you use larger than size-1 missiles (or maybe even 2 or 3), I would fully agree. Rather make the missile range and fire control larger, and you could probably completely give up on the escort fighter concept.(except leaving one for civil ship hunt) If it lies in your tech potential to shoot from outside the enemies (fighter-)sensor range, then you should always go for that.
Otherwise, when using really small missiles for maximum damage per magazine ratios, I have to say escort fighters are effective.
Calculation example: A 30kt missile ship can hold about 24 unreduced size-5 launchers. A fighter on same tech lever hits those with approx. 50-66%, so you need 750t-1kt fighter mass per missile (likely only point blank will do), so with a 50-50 fighter-bomber ratio, you would have 15-20 secure counter shots when you approach with equal mass. This ratio is better than even a specialized PD ship of same size despite that only half the mass was PD for the fighter squadron. ( The combination of naturally amazing targeting speed and the special fighter combat pilot bonus return unparalleled Pd per mass)
Mind you I imagined only meson or laser pd fighters, were actually railgun or gauss would make even better PD weapons.(style choice, but useless unless you can really swarm an enemy with them)
The reason fighters are perceived to be somewhat inferior in pd still, is just caused by that you rarely have an equal mass of them available to face an enemy, and while overwhelmed they will as any other ship of course perform sub-optimal. Technically they are better, and a fully specialized carrier fleet would probably come to see those benefits.(I have not yet tested this in praxis though)