Getting Clobbered

[DuraniumCowboy (OP)]

Well, I have been reading Steve's fiction and am getting better at combat, but still getting hammered.  I am fighting an NPR with super heavy, super long range (but slow missiles).  I can see pretty clear when they launch, as they turn away, but the flight times are 1+ hours.  As I try to speed things along as I either try to close with fighters or wait for my defences to receive the strike, I start playing with different length turns.  What is happening is the first wave is practically right on top of me when I click a turn that's too long and my defenses suck.

So my question is, what is the best way to run out a long missile engagement?  I am think maybe go auto turns, and with computer determined pulse lengths, and then 30 or 5 sec turn click?  I just keep getting worried that auto turn won't turn off when the missile pop up, but that is the way its supposed to work, correct?

Also, just curious about using laser turrets for area defense.  Should I set the area defense to my weapon max range?  I has 18 twin turrets defending with area defense set to 4.8, much less than their max range.  When an enemy salvo seemed to stop just out of range, the engagement on the subsequent turn seemed to go badly and I had a lot of leakers.  I was setting area defense at a lower range, but it seems to me that higher would work better, although I am not sure if there are any hidden effects.  Thanks for any confirmation.  I am playing with these concepts myself in my current war, but it it will take a while to figure this out.  Later - DC

[Brian Neumann]

There is a big difference between area defense and final defense.  Area defense fires on your usual sequence of shots after movement has taken place if the missiles are within the distance you specified.  Final defense takes a shot when the missiles are 10,000 km away and about to hit.  This takes place during the movement segment.  The trick here is that with beam weapons your accuracy drops off with range.  At 10k km you have the best chance of each weapon scoring a hit.  At 48k you are probably down around 50% of that.  Unless you are going to get 3 shots (15 seconds at a 5 second recharge rate) you probably will get more missiles shot down with the final fire option. 

Area defense is good if you are going to have multiple forces moving around near each other.  It allows a task force to protect other task forces that the missiles might be targeted at.  For example a freighter is being shot at and you have a warship in between the firing ship and your freighter.  With area defense your warship will try to shoot down the missiles as they fly over.  With final fire as the warship is not in the taskforce that was targeted it would not fire at the missiles when they fly over heading towards the freighter.

Brian

[DrGast32]

In my modest experience, setting some long-range high-rate lasers to area defense plus gauss/railguns for final PD is the best combo for missile defense.   I usually set the PD distance depending on the missile velocity, with the aim being to get 2 shots at the missile salvo before it crashes into the final PD net. 

Though, if the missiles are too fast for that, or the hit chances go too low at the needed distance (for me too low would mean <25%), by all means, go full final PD.   It's also good when you're getting clovered with endless salvos and can't give each one the fire time it deserves, i.  e.   against fast anti-missile missile hail. 

[Arwyn]

You may also want to move escorts out in front of your main fleet. You can detach units from your main fleet and put them into an escort along the axis of the incoming attack.

This works best for beam/gun escorts. They tend not to get shot at (they are smaller) by the NPR AI, so putting them out in advance means that get a few more opportunities to shoot at missiles closing, then passing them by for the the main fleet.

Put the escorts out and put them on area fire, see if that doesnt help. Researching the +% to track missiles tech helps alot with this as well.

Put the main fleet on Final Defensive fire, and you should see a marked improvement in anti-missile performance.

Anti-Missile defense is about layers;
Long range--- AMM's
Medium Range--- Lasers
Close range--- Rail/Gauss

The longer the range you can SEE the incoming missiles, the better. This combined with +% to track, and crew bonus makes a huge difference in anti-missile performance.

Early on AMM's kind of stink, and Gauss isnt really great until you get the rate of fire up. 10cm Railguns work pretty well though, and lasers are solid. As the tech level improves, work on filling the layers for your missile defense.

[DuraniumCowboy (OP)]

Thanks, my issue wasn't so much defensive design, rather, how to manage time so a missile engagement happens at a reasonable pace.  I had turned automatic sub pulses off, so with forced sub pulses (of like 2 mins), enemy missiles where moving all the way to the end of the pulse, instead of the pulse being interrupted when the missiles got close right at the edge of detection range.  Moving back to auto sub pulses, while using auto-turns and moderate sized increment seems to work fine.