Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: September 17, 2022, 04:26:08 PM »Usually the best way to get area PD to work, possibly even the only efficient way in many cases, is to use smaller ships under the enemy sensor resolution and deploy them ~1.4m km (scaled for tech level, of course) from the main fleet. Then they can take a shot as the missiles come in and another shot as the missiles pass through the advanced formation.
The trouble being that this is rarely going to be more effective than just mounting two smaller weapons in final fire mode in the main fleet ball, if ever - and of course those detached PD ships will be vulnerable if the enemy is able to target them while they are outside of the main fleet final fire umbrella. Maybe an interesting tactical situation would be deploying area defense ships even further forward to intercept slow MIRV missiles but I think even in multiple player faction games this is an uncommon edge case, as MIRVS simply don't do much that box launchers or fighters, depending on use case, don't do better.
The thing is, that this is just the way you can split large salvoes into smaller chunks... as long as you have good sensor coverage to detect incoming missiles. Done through smaller scouts. This is also why you can deploy escorts further forward to, to entice the opponent to split their fire. One single ball of ships are very vulnerable to large box launched salvoes and or fighter attacks.
I have experimented allot with this in my campaigns and it is allot harder to target these escorts, even if they are large, than what you think... you usually have time to do significant manoeuvring of the escort, split the main force etc. Unless the opponent don't target all their missiles against one ship (which happens sometimes on a high value target) there are good strategies for dealing with large salvoes this way.
I do have some restrictions on box launchers in my games though on normal ships... so I can't spam huge amount of them in larger ships. But large salvoes are still the primary way to deal with ships using missiles... small missile salvoes are just too inefficient.
In one game I also had a few small beam FAC that was used for protection of fighter squadrons but could also be deployed in forward position to act as area PD. These FAC had either 12cm or 15cm lasers. As they were really fast... almost as fast as my fire-controls they could fire ALLOT on incoming missiles as they would move towards the fleet (chasing the missiles) and keep shooting every five seconds on every missile. As their speed was so high the missiles where in their envelope for a very long time. This was not the fleets main PD effort, but just one additional job for these FAC. Escort PD do the same thing... they start chasing the missiles thus keeping them in their envelope for longer time.