My first attempt at planetary assault

[Zeebie (OP)]

I finally began my first planetary invasion.  I've been blockading their jump point for about a decade, I finally get my fleet into shape and jump into their system.  I sweep their fleet away from the point, the rest of their warships run, and I head for their home planet. Only five PDCs stand in my way.

Suddenly, there are gigantic volleys of size 1 missiles.  Before any of them hit, there are six thousand missiles in the air.  My AMMs do a commendable job, but I just don't have enough in my magazines. All my offensive missiles are easily shot down.  I'm out of missiles, and they don't have a scratch on them.  Their AMMs tear apart my fleet.

I think the most frustrating thing was simply being unable to keep track of what was going on - it wasn't unusual to have 5 or 6 hundred events for every 5 second interval, which made it impossible to have any situational awareness. And of course the system map was a solid wall of red.

How does one successfully get past this sort of defense?  Do you just have to get a massive tech advantage (I'm already a tier above them)? Have a hundred ships? Build giant 100,000 ton warships?  Are there specific strategies for this sort of thing?

[MarcAFK]

Theres really 3 options, option one is to just keep throwing ships at them untill they run out of missiles, this obviously isn't the best option, but it's the strategy usually employed by NPRs, option 2 is to make sure your own missiles significantly outrange their defences so your armada can bombard from range with impunity, you still need a huge quantity of missiles to get through the AMM spam though, and option 3 which is rather an exploit is to have a small handful of ships fire many small salvos in an attempt to get the NPR to waste all their AMM in interception, ideally I think you would put a small active sensor on your missiles so your ships could zoom into range, fire, then zip out again to reload or dodge any incoming defensive ASMs. The active sensor would allow the firing ship to leave fire control range without the missiles fired self destructing.

Ideally you want the enemy to waste his AMMs by firing them at your AMMS, if it takes several of his to shoot down one of yours then you have succeeded.

[Five]

Lots of different options depending on how you want to play it, your style. You could go with energy weapons sitting at their missile range and just pick them off, granted they would need a lot of them. I have also read of people putting commercial freighters(huge tonnage) in their fleet with like 20 armor(or more) and putting an active sensor on it with a ton of CIWS on them. NPRs shoot at either the largest ship or the one with the sensor. So they would use the freighter as a tank to absorb the blows and shoot down what they can while the rest of your fleet does what you want them too, kill the bad guys.


-Five

[alex_brunius]

Lots of different options depending on how you want to play it, your style. You could go with energy weapons sitting at their missile range and just pick them off, granted they would need a lot of them. I have also read of people putting commercial freighters(huge tonnage) in their fleet with like 20 armor(or more) and putting an active sensor on it with a ton of CIWS on them. NPRs shoot at either the largest ship or the one with the sensor. So they would use the freighter as a tank to absorb the blows and shoot down what they can while the rest of your fleet does what you want them too, kill the bad guys.

I did a variant of this that I thought was pretty cool. My invasion troop transports were built big enough to hold one division each and equipped with lots of CIWS and 15 layers of armor. Their job was to draw fire and go head first into the invasion. To escort them was lots of small PD escorts and further back the dedicated AEGIS/AMM Cruisers.

[Panopticon]

A high level of ECM will help close the distance too, assuming the NPR hasn't overengineered their fire controls.

[Jorgen_CAB]

My advice is to rely more on beam PD over all. It lessens your logistical headache and spare your industry and resources. In general I build my fleets with about 60% reliance on beam PD and 40% on missile PD, or something like that. If you intend to engage a hostile planet I just attach more beam oriented PD escorts. I might even build drone PD in the form of singe gauss turrets on an engine less platform and house them in my ships hangars instead of fighters. My ships would get into range and deploy the PD screen and just wait and watch the fireworks. 

You could as previously suggested and build dedicated assault carriers with good armour and heavy point defences and just rush the planet and hope they can take the onslaught.

Beam PD are pretty good at swatting down AMM missiles since it doesn't care if they come at you with a 5sec interval.

I personally avoid what I consider to be gamey tactics (although they are valid if you like) such as building a commercial tank with lot's of CIWS. A real adversary would not be so dumb to shot more than once (or all their ordnance at one target) on it after they figure out what it is. If you like to exploit the weakness of the AI there are other ways that is even easier. Find out what their maximum range is and just dash ships into range and then out again when you see the missiles head towards you. Then you just kill the missiles in one fell swoop when you are outside their FC range. This works for both ASM and AMM. The AI will generally not wait and shoot once it is too late for you to turn around and escape.

[ZimRathbone]

I did a variant of this that I thought was pretty cool. My invasion troop transports were built big enough to hold one division each and equipped with lots of CIWS and 15 layers of armor. Their job was to draw fire and go head first into the invasion. To escort them was lots of small PD escorts and further back the dedicated AEGIS/AMM Cruisers.

 I use a similar force - at the moment each Rodger Young Divisional TT (80-100kt) with 22 battallions (1x Div HQ, 4x Bde HQ, 16xCombat Btn, 1xReplacement Btn) is escorted by 2x Armour DE (10kt) with a pair of quadmount GC turrets and 4 x Guardian CT(E) (5kt) with a single pairmount GC turrret and backed up with an Archangel AMM armed CLE (20kt).  They are accompanied (out of range) by the  carriers with the actual assault ships (1000t dropship boats carrying 1 combat ready battalion,  either 3 or 9 per carrier replacing the regular strikegroup), and usually additional fleet elements to reduce defences such as orbitals.  Usually the GC escorts are sufficient on their own, as each of these groupings is capable of handling up to 112 inbounds per 5 sec turn, and usually there are at least two DivTTs assigned (sometimes more).  If not the CLE can be used to divert some of the AMM fire.

[Zeebie (OP)]

So I discovered that my fire control range was just a tad longer than theirs, so I sat just outside their range and fired off volleys of missiles.  I observed the following strange behavior:
- If I fired a synchronized volley, all the missiles went straight in and hit without any AMM intercepts.
- However, the following volley (from just leaving my weapons firing) would be intercepted by AMMs.
- If I waited ~5 minutes between volleys, there would be no AMM intercepts.

Why would they never intercept the first volley?

[sloanjh]

Why would they never intercept the first volley?

Nap time for the operators?

Seriously, the two things I can think of are:

1)  Some sort of bug in the AI (not unlikely)
2)  How long are their AMMs in the "air"?  If it's only 5s, then they might be running into the effect where, due to the sequence of events within a time-step, you can't detect an incoming missile, fire an AMM, and hit it all in the same 5s increment.  This doesn't explain why the AMMs would then pick up the second salvo though, unless their AMMs had really good on-board sensors (which I doubt).

John

[sublight]

Why would they never intercept the first volley?

Poor AI logic.

Best I can tell the AI defaults toward 'sneaky' by turning active sensors off unless they know a target is in range or unless they have suffered recent attack. This works well at keeping high-resolution noisy sensors silent until they are ready to ambush your survey craft. Unfortunately, the same apparent logic causes them to leave the Res-1 anti-missile scanners turned off until after the first wave of inbound missiles have already detonated. At this point any Res-1 active scanners flicks on, and any other inbound missiles get spotted and targeted.

Edit: Nevermind. Any AI planet with a DSTC should see the thermal contacts of incoming missiles early enough to turn an active scanner on. I'm not sure what is happening. At least, in theory they should. I don't yet have a large enough sample size of conquered aliens to know if this is true in practice.

[ollobrains]

simply sounds like they need to have some ability to react in two ways with the active sensors on or off

[Steve Walmsley]

Poor AI logic.

Best I can tell the AI defaults toward 'sneaky' by turning active sensors off unless they know a target is in range or unless they have suffered recent attack. This works well at keeping high-resolution noisy sensors silent until they are ready to ambush your survey craft. Unfortunately, the same apparent logic causes them to leave the Res-1 anti-missile scanners turned off until after the first wave of inbound missiles have already detonated. At this point any Res-1 active scanners flicks on, and any other inbound missiles get spotted and targeted.

Edit: Nevermind. Any AI planet with a DSTC should see the thermal contacts of incoming missiles early enough to turn an active scanner on. I'm not sure what is happening. At least, in theory they should. I don't yet have a large enough sample size of conquered aliens to know if this is true in practice.

This used to be the case. In recent versions NPRs keep their res-1 sensors active due to their low emissions. Sometimes an NPR ship is hit because the time increment is long enough for the missiles to cross their detection threshold and hit during a single sub-pulse. This shouldn't happen because the program is supposed to check ahead of time if this is likely to happen and adjust the increment length before the increment begins. Unfortunately that doesn't always work and I need to take another look at the code in this area at some point. Too many things on my list and not enough time at the moment

[Barkhorn]

I really like the civilian ship for tanking fire.   But how about this idea.

A military ship, composed mostly of armor and CIWS, and most importantly, box launchers filled with bombs.   Not missiles, bombs.

You tank your way through the AMM spam, then nuke the PDC from low orbit.   You could also time a missile launch from your main fleet with your bombs so the AMM will be reloading when you drop the bombs, meaning no hope of intercepting them.   I'd also make a variant of the Assault ship that swapped the missiles for combat drop modules.   Drop the troops immediately after the bombs for that killer one-two punch.

[sneer]

you underestimate distance and time needed to cross field of fire even small range missles
assuming planetary magazines are close to depletion this simply has no right to succeed