Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => General Discussion => Topic started by: liveware on May 15, 2020, 05:10:45 PM
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So.
Got one of my nice ships blown up by a hostile NPR. Want to minimize this from occurring in the future.
Analyzing my event log, I see that it appears that only one out of my eight CIWS fired upon the incoming enemy missiles which destroyed the ship. NPR was flagged as hostile. Enemy missiles were arranged in 3 salvos of 21 missiles each and 1 salvo of 7 missiles. My ship had zero fire controls and one active grav sensor.
My expectation was that all 8 of my CIWS would fire. It seems that only 1 of my CIWS fired and destroyed 13 missiles in 1 salvo. The rest don't appear to have done anything. UNLESS I am misunderstanding things and ALL of my CIWS fired and just have horrible accuracy. But based on how the even log reads, I would have expected one log entry for each CIWS in this case, but I only have one log entry for one CIWS.
Is this due to a lack of dedicated fire controls or grav sensors? Or am I misunderstanding CIWS targeting?
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Couple of things:
1. Your "nice" ships should not have much if any CIWS at all. They are ok for civilian/commercial ships (cause it keeps them non-military). But one should not rely on them for true PD, especially alone. The mantra is LAYERED DEFENSE, AMM's, LR APD, MR APD, SR APD, and CIWS.
2. CIWS is 2 gauss cannon on a self-contained turret. So you having 8 meant 16 shots so killing 13/16 is pretty good. However, they are all considered under 1 FC, and in general their range is not enough to get one shot at a missile salvo.
Now if all those salvos came in the same 5 sec "tic" then they fired once in that "tic" and can't do anything more.
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Couple of things:
1. Your "nice" ships should not have much if any CIWS at all. They are ok for civilian/commercial ships (cause it keeps them non-military). But one should not rely on them for true PD, especially alone. The mantra is LAYERED DEFENSE, AMM's, LR APD, MR APD, SR APD, and CIWS.
2. CIWS is 2 gauss cannon on a self-contained turret. So you having 8 meant 16 shots so killing 13/16 is pretty good. However, they are all considered under 1 FC, and in general their range is not enough to get one shot at a missile salvo.
Now if all those salvos came in the same 5 sec "tic" then they fired once in that "tic" and can't do anything more.
1. Yes, it was an overpriced survey ship. Learned that lesson the hard way. Defense in depth...
2. So, it would seem better to design gauss turrets and custom fire controls than rely on CIWS as multiple fire controls with multiple gauss turrets could arguably target more salvos.
2*. Yes, it was all within the same 5 sec pulse, so it may not have made much difference anyway. However, in that one 'tick' I only have indication of a single CIWS firing.
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Are you sure only one fired? If you destroyed 13 missiles in a tick then you have to have fired at least 13 shots, which sounds like all of the firing to me? I'm pretty sure that Aurora now consolidates weapon fire into a single report line (rather than per weapon) so that may be confusing you.
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The rules have changed in C# so you only need one BFC set to PD mode. Each weapon/turret connected to it will then act as if it had its own PD mode BFC.
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Couple of things:
1. Your "nice" ships should not have much if any CIWS at all. They are ok for civilian/commercial ships (cause it keeps them non-military). But one should not rely on them for true PD, especially alone. The mantra is LAYERED DEFENSE, AMM's, LR APD, MR APD, SR APD, and CIWS.
2. CIWS is 2 gauss cannon on a self-contained turret. So you having 8 meant 16 shots so killing 13/16 is pretty good. However, they are all considered under 1 FC, and in general their range is not enough to get one shot at a missile salvo.
Now if all those salvos came in the same 5 sec "tic" then they fired once in that "tic" and can't do anything more.
Bit of overkill. This was my old point-defense frigate design from VB6 5.42:
Sussex class Frigate 7,800 tons 616 Crew 2244.5 BP TCS 156 TH 500 EM 600
6410 km/s Armour 4-35 Shields 20-300 Sensors 36/36/0/0 Damage Control Rating 5 PPV 64
Annual Failure Rate: 97% IFR: 1.4% Maint Capacity 899 MSP Max Repair 216 MSP Est Time: 2.43 Years
GN-125M5 APOLLO MagCon Fusion Drive (8) Power 125 Fuel Use 50% Signature 62.5 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 150,000 Litres Range 69.2 billion km (125 days at full power)
Theta R300/20 Shields (5) Total Fuel Cost 100 Litres per day
Rheinmetall R3 Quad Gauss Turret (2x12) Range 30,000km TS: 16000 km/s Power 0-0 RM 3 ROF 5 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S06 90-16000 (2) Max Range: 180,000 km TS: 16000 km/s 94 89 83 78 72 67 61 56 50 44
Sentinel 3R19 Missile Defence LADAR (1) GPS 108 Range 19.4m km Resolution 1
Artemis ALS 86-20 (1) GPS 2160 Range 86.9m km Resolution 20
Hunter PST 2.36 (1) Sensitivity 36 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 36m km
Hunter PSE 2.36 (1) Sensitivity 36 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 36m km
ECM 40
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
I think I recall experimenting with AMMs on a previous game, but found them too effective. So layered defense would definitely be overkill. I'm not sure how things are in C# (waiting for 1.10 at least), but I wanted some intermediate battle drama, not an all or nothing game. Which is why, I think, I limited myself to projectile-based area defense and CIWS.
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DISCLAIMER: Please note my answers are based to the scenario described and limited to such situation. In any case you should assume my criticism on the single entry to be the rule. In the specific I do believe it is important to have both CIWS and some sort of beam weapons in larger scale conflicts and/or small skirmishes.
Couple of things:
1. Your "nice" ships should not have much if any CIWS at all. They are ok for civilian/commercial ships (cause it keeps them non-military). But one should not rely on them for true PD, especially alone. The mantra is LAYERED DEFENSE, AMM's, LR APD, MR APD, SR APD, and CIWS.
2. CIWS is 2 gauss cannon on a self-contained turret. So you having 8 meant 16 shots so killing 13/16 is pretty good. However, they are all considered under 1 FC, and in general their range is not enough to get one shot at a missile salvo.
Now if all those salvos came in the same 5 sec "tic" then they fired once in that "tic" and can't do anything more.
1. I disagree. CIWS for a commercial ship is good but you need more protection if there is only one ship (more on the second point). So the layered defence may work for them or big fleets when not all ships can waste tonnage on PD. I think CIWS is more than enough (I use sets of 4x4) in lower mid-tech.
2. You can stack CIWS. Yes, it was very good (bringing the conversation to my next point). The rules in aurora have changed so you can target as many salvos with a CIWS or a PD for instance. The final consideration is your tech VS the tech of your opponent. There are some fights you cannot win and some others that even if you have a better design you may lose because of poor design. And that is with or without CIWS or layered defence.
So.
Got one of my nice ships blown up by a hostile NPR. Want to minimize this from occurring in the future.
Analyzing my event log, I see that it appears that only one out of my eight CIWS fired upon the incoming enemy missiles which destroyed the ship. NPR was flagged as hostile. Enemy missiles were arranged in 3 salvos of 21 missiles each and 1 salvo of 7 missiles. My ship had zero fire controls and one active grav sensor.
My expectation was that all 8 of my CIWS would fire. It seems that only 1 of my CIWS fired and destroyed 13 missiles in 1 salvo. The rest don't appear to have done anything. UNLESS I am misunderstanding things and ALL of my CIWS fired and just have horrible accuracy. But based on how the even log reads, I would have expected one log entry for each CIWS in this case, but I only have one log entry for one CIWS.
Is this due to a lack of dedicated fire controls or grav sensors? Or am I misunderstanding CIWS targeting?
I think the reason you died was simple: 1 ship against enemy multiple ships and or too many batteries to face. If you had 4 destroyers or scouts all equipped with CIWS your enemy would have scattered the salvos between your ships rather than targeting only one. This would have made the salvos manageable for your CIWS (as you saw you could shot 13 just with one).
In my last game, my simple patrol of 1 leader destroyer and 4 missile destroyers all equipped with 5 launchers each and a magazine of 200 missiles could manage to hold off 7 NPR ships with tech just a bit below mine. There were salvos of 8 missiles per ship, probably 10 or 12 of them and not a single hit thanks to my CIWS 4x4 12,000km/s tracking. And that is a tier 3 CIWS, imagine at higher levels.
Now if you were fighting a bigger enemy (say 9 or 10 ships, one of which a carrier) then you would have been in serious trouble because a 2:1 ratio will be hard to manage only with CIWS.
Also if you were facing 24000km/s missiles you definitely would have required some PD to take advantage of the bonus in tracking and be more effective, then maybe calibre your CIWS to a 25,000km/s tracking for the future.
Bottom line, based on your description of the events, another battery of CIWS would suffice to get away of that fight and if you were approaching them, let's say with 3 ships, I wouldn't be worried too much unless they have other surprises waiting for you. Then it would be your call if said ships are meant to explore or to attack.
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Excellent, many interesting points brought up here.
First, I was certainly overwhelmed on a numerical ship to ship basis. My one (scout) ship could not hope to defeat the 8-10 hostiles I stumbled upon, I merely wished to escape. This has led to a reevaluation of my scout design philosophy. Namely, better sensors and higher engine mass efficiency are required for future designs.
Second, it seems likely that all of my CIWS did fire based on what others have said and what I observed. The velocity disparity between my CIWS tracking and the incoming missiles was about 8/35 = 0.22 which is close to my observed accuracy and when taking crew grade and the ship commander bonus into account, is probably spot on for chance to hit.
I'm still on the fence about whether CIWS or customized gauss turrets would be better. Seems like gauss has the potential to outperform CIWS but without rigourous testing on this I'm flying blind in gauss territory, so CIWS is more appealing for now. However with more testing gauss may prove the superior choice.
With my existing missile tech, I don't think AMM will be viable, but I will probably play around with this some more before writing it off entirely.
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The rules have changed in C# so you only need one BFC set to PD mode. Each weapon/turret connected to it will then act as if it had its own PD mode BFC.
But will it be able to target multiple salvos? I was under impression that you can attach any number to guns/turrets to one BFC but in PD mode that will mean they all will target only one salvo of incoming missiles.
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To try clearing up confusion preexisting and created here. Let's all make sure we understand what is happening.
1. CIWS and in fact all PD weapons which are set to Final Defensive Fire (self or not) only engage missiles when they hit (or in the increment they would hit) 10,000 km from the platform. So they only get to have one firing chance. This means unless your ships are within 10,000 km (on top of each other as far as the game is concerned) it is very difficult for ships to provide supporting fire to their squadron mates using these settings. For all practical purposes, they only protect the ship itself. Area Defensive Fire is superior in every means for ships not travelling alone.
2. You only see summary information, not individual weapon results.
Therefore, C# Aurora uses a condensed system where you no longer see each individual weapon firing, or the damage from individual hits. Instead weapon fire and any resulting damage are shown in a summary format.
3. MFC and BFC work differently in PD roles. MFC targets a single salvo per MFC per 5 seconds, meaning multiple PD-MFC's are required to engage multiple salvos in the same 5 second tic. BFC's works differently, each gun under a PDBFC can engage a single salvo in the 5 second tic, however the BFC allocates them to the largest, fastest, nearest salvo as determined at the beginning of the 5 second tic, in that order. So if there are 4 CIWS targeted to defend against 3 salvos of equal size and speed, whichever salvo they choose to fire upon will have to be destroyed before the next unit will target another salvo. This is done by the gun, not the turret. So 4 shots per gun versus a 5 missile salvo will require a minimum of 2 guns firing to destroy the salvo.
4. Given the above, and the fact that CIWS is a self contained unit, that means for each CIWS you get 2 guns and a PDBFC, in theory, that means each CIWS could/should engage a different salvo each. However, that is not the way it works in practice, because the PDBFC's all use the same methodology of targeting, so in essence, they will ALL target the same salvo in order, which means the possibility of overkill per gun ( 4 CIWS is 8 guns, but it would be treated as two sets of 4 each firing ROF each)
5. CIWS are nice on commercial ships because they are their only weapon option for defense. On military ships they are last ditch defense, and should not be used in isolation, they are the back-up to your AMM and Area PD defense against leakers.
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IMO CIWS is good when you have like 1 - 5 ships and making Gauss turrets is better when you can put them on more than just a few ships (or just have a lot on 1 ship) as it protects all the ships while CIWS only protects 1 ship.
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CIWS should really be left for ships operating alone/in pairs at most. Like carriers meant to be FAR away from the main fleet, or lone scouts meant to be spread alone in hot systems and never inside a fleet. And civilians. In any other situations, it's better to have normal PD if you can.
You never know how you might need to divide your fleets, what will happen in a battle, which ships in a fleet you will lose etc. But normal PD, be it gauss or even lasers or railgun, is preferrable because you will usually have moderate to large number of ships in a fleet and the number of PD guns tend to add up.
For a normal military ship, it's safe to assume it will operate inside a fleet most of the time, so CIWS are sub-optimal in using space compared to proper PD set to final defensive fire.
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The rules have changed in C# so you only need one BFC set to PD mode. Each weapon/turret connected to it will then act as if it had its own PD mode BFC.
But will it be able to target multiple salvos? I was under impression that you can attach any number to guns/turrets to one BFC but in PD mode that will mean they all will target only one salvo of incoming missiles.
That was how it worked in VB. Steve has changed the rules in C#. Any individual weapon or turret can still only target one incoming salvo, but multiple weapons linked to a single PD mode BFC can now each target a different salvo.
1. CIWS and in fact all PD weapons which are set to Final Defensive Fire (self or not) only engage missiles when they hit (or in the increment they would hit) 10,000 km from the platform. So they only get to have one firing chance. This means unless your ships are within 10,000 km (on top of each other as far as the game is concerned) it is very difficult for ships to provide supporting fire to their squadron mates using these settings. For all practical purposes, they only protect the ship itself. Area Defensive Fire is superior in every means for ships not travelling alone.
While FDF(self) only protects the ship it is mounted on, regular FDF protects any ship in the same task force. It is supposed to protect any ship at the same location whether or not they are part of the same group, but I don't know if that bug has been fixed yet. The last comment I remember about it was for VB.
ADF attacks any hostile missile within range, regardless of target, but it has never worked well. It does not fire during the FDF phase, so not only does it take range penalties when it does fire, it can't defend against missiles that are fast enough to cross its firing envelope in a single tick. It also completely ignores attacking missiles that are marked as neutral. ADF's multiple attacks are only worth it if you have a major tech advantage, and even then they only apply to the first salvo of a barrage in most cases.
TL;DR Beam PD is very short range to start with and ADF takes range penalties on top of that, so if your task forces are close enough together for them to protect each other at all then you are better off co-locating and using FDF mode.
This is done by the gun, not the turret.
Incorrect. A turret or CIWS mount counts as a single weapon, so can only attack a single volley.
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CIWS should really be left for ships operating alone/in pairs at most. Like carriers meant to be FAR away from the main fleet, or lone scouts meant to be spread alone in hot systems and never inside a fleet. And civilians. In any other situations, it's better to have normal PD if you can.
You never know how you might need to divide your fleets, what will happen in a battle, which ships in a fleet you will lose etc. But normal PD, be it gauss or even lasers or railgun, is preferrable because you will usually have moderate to large number of ships in a fleet and the number of PD guns tend to add up.
For a normal military ship, it's safe to assume it will operate inside a fleet most of the time, so CIWS are sub-optimal in using space compared to proper PD set to final defensive fire.
CIWS are more compact than any PD turret that you can build yourself, and (once the bug is fixed. 1.10?) work even when your sensors are down and during jump-shock, so they may still be worth it on high value warships.
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So it seems to me that there exist two fundamentally different missile defense situations, not counting stationary targets like stations or planets.
First situation is that of a lone ship defending itself long enough to escape. In this situation the ship must reliably defeat as many missile salvos as might be expected given the strategic role of the ship. A scout, for example, would probably be a small and fast ship which should be able to outrun whatever hostile ships it encounters. In this case, the ship would only need to defend against a 'few' missile salvos while it runs away to beyond missile range. In this case I would expect that a CIWS system would be the way to go since there will be no supporting ships to assist with defense. However I would still be interested in doing a side by side CIWS vs gauss turret test for this use case in order to better quantify the differences between these two weapon systems.
Second situation would be that of a group of ships, with the ability to mutually support one another, attempting to close with an enemy in order to destroy it. Here is where I expect that gauss turrets would gain an advantage as a great many ships would be able to support a larger number of turrets, or alternatively a single dedicated missile defense ship could support the rest of the fleet. Obviously it would be important to keep the fleet tightly clustered for this to work, but this would allow for a larger volume of anti missile fire and presumably would be more successful than the lone small ship concept. More ships also means more targets for the enemy to shoot at which could lead to smaller individual salvos directed at each ship which should further improve the success of any antimissile fire.
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CIWS are more compact than any PD turret that you can build yourself, and (once the bug is fixed. 1.10?) work even when your sensors are down and during jump-shock, so they may still be worth it on high value warships.
Fair point about the jump shock, CIWS can have value for that specific situation. Worth considering.
About them being more compact, that is true but in general I would still not consider that enough of a motivation to use them, because in the end there is no guarantee that the ship they're on is going to be the one targeted if the fleet is sufficiently large. And if I have 20 ships with 1k tons of space dedicated to PD on each ship, 20k ton of FDF gauss or laser PD is obviously a lot better than 1K ton of CIWS. However...
Since you spoke of high value warships, a very edge case comes to mind where there is good reason to use them CIWS. Say you have a fleet with two 100k tons battleships/carriers and 30 or so 5k escorts of various kind. In this situation the escorts are expendable, and it makes a lot of sense to add CIWS to the 100k tons ships since they each have more value than ten of the escorts.
I don't generally build fleets which such large disparity between ships, but if one does, then indeed extra CIWS of the large ships can be worth it in order to protect the only ships of real value you have.
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Since you spoke of high value warships, a very edge case comes to mind where there is good reason to use them CIWS. Say you have a fleet with two 100k tons battleships/carriers and 30 or so 5k escorts of various kind. In this situation the escorts are expendable, and it makes a lot of sense to add CIWS to the 100k tons ships since they each have more value than ten of the escorts.
I don't generally build fleets which such large disparity between ships, but if one does, then indeed extra CIWS of the large ships can be worth it in order to protect the only ships of real value you have.
Are NPRs more likely to target larger ships? This would affect my missile defense strategy.
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@spikethehobbitmage
Thanks on correction on guns/turrets...
However, there is no practical difference between the Final Defense PD commands:
Final Defensive Fire
Final defense occurs at the end of the last movement segment, when the missile intercepts any ship in this task group. Range to the missile is 10,000 km, the smallest unit of distance in Aurora, thus assuring maximum hit chances at point-blank range.
Final Defensive Fire (self only)
Like above, but only if the missile attacks the ship carrying the fire control and not a different ship in this task group. Use this when you want to reserve this weapon to protect the high-value ship it is mounted on.
The confusion on Area Defence most likely comes from it targets at the beginning of the movement segment versus the end.
Area Defense
Area defense occurs during the normal weapons fire segment of a 5-second increment. If a missile crosses the engagement range of a weapon set to Area Defense during a single movement then it will not be engaged.
Example: a laser turret has its mode set to "(Area PD Mode 19)", i.e. automatically fire at anything within a range of 190,000 km. If a missile moving at 45,000 km/s (thus traveling 225,000 km per 5-second turn) begins the turn 210,000 km away, just outside that range, it will never "stop" inside the weapon's range and will not be fired at before impact.
combined with
Fire controls set to Area Mode or for AMMs will only fire defensively when that fire control is set to 'Open Fire'.
Modern maritime spacing is 1 km on the breadth and 2 km on the beam for safety spacing minimums. (Naval vessels tend to use time at speed differences for minimum spacing) So having a fleet all within 10,000 km of each other does not seem realistic even at "slow speeds" of 1000 km/s...
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Second situation would be that of a group of ships, with the ability to mutually support one another, attempting to close with an enemy in order to destroy it. Here is where I expect that gauss turrets would gain an advantage as a great many ships would be able to support a larger number of turrets, or alternatively a single dedicated missile defense ship could support the rest of the fleet. Obviously it would be important to keep the fleet tightly clustered for this to work, but this would allow for a larger volume of anti missile fire and presumably would be more successful than the lone small ship concept. More ships also means more targets for the enemy to shoot at which could lead to smaller individual salvos directed at each ship which should further improve the success of any antimissile fire.
Are NPRs more likely to target larger ships? This would affect my missile defense strategy.
I have still not been in a large missile fight in c# aurora. It's been some hectic weeks for me. If it has changed and I'm wrong with this, I hope someone will correct me and you can ignore this specific post, I will write this post assuming it has not. I only had very small engagements up to now in C# Aurora.
I do not know exactly how the AI chooses its target. I assume it does decide based on a criteria. However the problem here is not that, but rather how it allocates missile launchers.
Say that the enemy fleet has 80 missile launchers, all with the same timing. The AI will not split them between enemy targets, no. It will shoot all 80 missiles at ONE enemy ship, in order to overwhelm the defenses and destroy it. Then once they're ready to shoot again, it will aim them at a newly selected ship, or at the same one. This might work differently for truly massive fleets, if it has enormous amount of launchers (say 2000?), but I don't recall ever seeing that.
This means that no matter how many ships you have in a fleet, ONE ship will have 80 incoming missiles targeting it. This is precisely why CIWS are inferior in a sufficiently large fleet. Say you have CIWS on all 20 ships, only the CIWS on the targeted ship will fire, all the others will stay silent and useless, while FDF PD gauss or laser will always react to any incoming missiles no matter which ship in the fleet is targeted.
In the edge case I posted about the two huge battleships and thirty escorts, you may want to put CIWS on the battleships in consideration of the fact you don't really care if you lose one escort while you really don't want to lose those battleships. So in case a battleship is targeted, you have extra defense. In my opinion only worth it if there's a really HUGE difference in size and value between ships though... And as said it had not occured to me because I don't build that way personally.
For lone ships, since CIWS are more compact, they are a valid solution but you should probably only use them if you're sure the ship is intended for solo deployment
For civilian ships... well, CIWS are the only thing they can use. Let me say though that unless you have a lot of ciws and the attacking fleet is small, the civilian ship will likely die quickly anyway. A couple of missiles can be enough to kill civilians because they have 1 armor and no shields...
Modern maritime spacing is 1 km on the breadth and 2 km on the beam for safety spacing minimums. (Naval vessels tend to use time at speed differences for minimum spacing) So having a fleet all within 10,000 km of each other does not seem realistic even at "slow speeds" of 1000 km/s...
While I respect your point of view, what you said is roleplay. In Aurora, a fleet is modeled as many ships considered in the exactly same location. As such, final defensive fire WILL defend all the ships in the fleet and is superior to Area defense unless the Area defense weapons have enough range to shoot at incoming missiles at least twice.
If you want to roleplay ships not being in the exact same point, you will need to make a fleet out of each single ship, and manually space them. In this situation of course you would need area defense, but it's not how the game normally works. And my respect to you if you do play this way, cause having a single fleet for every ship would drive me nuts ;D
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I do not know exactly how the AI chooses its target. I assume it does decide based on a criteria. However the problem here is not that, but rather how it allocates missile launchers.
Say that the enemy fleet has 80 missile launchers, all with the same timing. The AI will not split them between enemy targets, no. It will shoot all 80 missiles at ONE enemy ship, in order to overwhelm the defenses and destroy it. Then once they're ready to shoot again, it will aim them at a newly selected ship, or at the same one. This might work differently for truly massive fleets, if it has enormous amount of launchers (say 2000?), but I don't recall ever seeing that.
This means that no matter how many ships you have in a fleet, ONE ship will have 80 incoming missiles targeting it. This is precisely why CIWS are inferior in a sufficiently large fleet. Say you have CIWS on all 20 ships, only the CIWS on the targeted ship will fire, all the others will stay silent and useless, while FDF PD gauss or laser will always react to any incoming missiles no matter which ship in the fleet is targeted.
This is not the behaviour I noticed so far. But I haven't participated in many combats. So far only 5 or 6, won 5 of them with patrols but lost the scout.
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CIWS are more compact than any PD turret that you can build yourself, and (once the bug is fixed. 1.10?) work even when your sensors are down and during jump-shock, so they may still be worth it on high value warships.
Fair point about the jump shock, CIWS can have value for that specific situation. Worth considering.
About them being more compact, that is true but in general I would still not consider that enough of a motivation to use them, because in the end there is no guarantee that the ship they're on is going to be the one targeted if the fleet is sufficiently large. And if I have 20 ships with 1k tons of space dedicated to PD on each ship, 20k ton of FDF gauss or laser PD is obviously a lot better than 1K ton of CIWS. However...
Since you spoke of high value warships, a very edge case comes to mind where there is good reason to use them CIWS. Say you have a fleet with two 100k tons battleships/carriers and 30 or so 5k escorts of various kind. In this situation the escorts are expendable, and it makes a lot of sense to add CIWS to the 100k tons ships since they each have more value than ten of the escorts.
I don't generally build fleets which such large disparity between ships, but if one does, then indeed extra CIWS of the large ships can be worth it in order to protect the only ships of real value you have.
Even if the fleet are evenly sized, whichever ships carry the long range sensors and/or the Admiral (usually the same ship) get a couple of CIWS in my navy. Brass has its privileges. :)
Are NPRs more likely to target larger ships? This would affect my missile defense strategy.
Smaller ships are harder to see at long range, and they can't target what they can't see. Beyond that I have no idea how the AI selects targets.
@spikethehobbitmage
Thanks on correction on guns/turrets...
However, there is no practical difference between the Final Defense PD commands:
Final Defensive Fire
Final defense occurs at the end of the last movement segment, when the missile intercepts any ship in this task group. Range to the missile is 10,000 km, the smallest unit of distance in Aurora, thus assuring maximum hit chances at point-blank range.
Final Defensive Fire (self only)
Like above, but only if the missile attacks the ship carrying the fire control and not a different ship in this task group. Use this when you want to reserve this weapon to protect the high-value ship it is mounted on.
The confusion on Area Defence most likely comes from it targets at the beginning of the movement segment versus the end.
Area Defense
Area defense occurs during the normal weapons fire segment of a 5-second increment. If a missile crosses the engagement range of a weapon set to Area Defense during a single movement then it will not be engaged.
Example: a laser turret has its mode set to "(Area PD Mode 19)", i.e. automatically fire at anything within a range of 190,000 km. If a missile moving at 45,000 km/s (thus traveling 225,000 km per 5-second turn) begins the turn 210,000 km away, just outside that range, it will never "stop" inside the weapon's range and will not be fired at before impact.
combined with
Fire controls set to Area Mode or for AMMs will only fire defensively when that fire control is set to 'Open Fire'.
Modern maritime spacing is 1 km on the breadth and 2 km on the beam for safety spacing minimums. (Naval vessels tend to use time at speed differences for minimum spacing) So having a fleet all within 10,000 km of each other does not seem realistic even at "slow speeds" of 1000 km/s...
I'm not certain that I understand your argument. If you have two or more ships in the same task group then they are within 10,000 km of each other and will protect each other in normal FDF mode, but not in FDF(self) mode. ADF mode will always give inferior results in this case because it will always* attack at greater than 10,000 km and thus incur a higher range penalty. Unless you have a need to spread out for other reasons, bunching up is always the best defensive strategy.
*ADF can only attack at 10k if the missiles were headed somewhere else and just happened to pass that close that tick. This situation is very hard to engineer and incredibly rare by chance.
@Zincat Due to sensor costs I tend to only have one AWACS/flag ship in a fleet. While my PD escorts carry backup sensors they simply don't have the range to support offensive action, so losing the flagship tends to be a mission-kill. While they can't be shielded, commercial ships can be armoured and critical tenders such as colliers tend to be worth the cost of a CIWS or two.
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I get the impression the AI targets the first ship it detects first, however if a new ship appears closer than the originally detected ship, it will shift targeting to the new closest ship.
This is based on my extremely limited C# combat experience, where I had a carrier get ambushed near a jump point. In order to try and save it, I launched a couple of fighters to draw away the enemy ships. This did appear to work, however it didn't buy enough time and I still lost the carrier.
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One of the improvements C# Aurora is supposed to include -- as part of differing NPR design philosophies -- is how and why they split up targets for attacks. In VB Aurora they would pretty much only go for the largest target(s) first, on the theory that jump ships couldn't move anything larger than themselves, so the biggest ship(s) had to be (or, at least, include) the jump ship. They would also prioritise the ship with the strongest active sensor they could see, in hopes of blinding the enemy fleet.
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. . .However I would still be interested in doing a side by side CIWS vs gauss turret test for this use case in order to better quantify the differences between these two weapon systems.
These aren't two different weapon systems. CIWS is a "gauss turret" -- specifically, a turret containing two 50% accuracy (half-size) GC of your empire's tech (at 250 tons instead of 300), a reduced-size beam fire control and a small sensor.
At very low tech levels, CIWS will be slightly worse than a regular twin-50% turret. As tech goes up, the BFC & sensor will get smaller; when their combined size drops below 50 tons the CIWS becomes more efficient than the regular turret.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1691.0 (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1691.0)
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Say that the enemy fleet has 80 missile launchers, all with the same timing. The AI will not split them between enemy targets, no. It will shoot all 80 missiles at ONE enemy ship, in order to overwhelm the defenses and destroy it. Then once they're ready to shoot again, it will aim them at a newly selected ship, or at the same one. This might work differently for truly massive fleets, if it has enormous amount of launchers (say 2000?), but I don't recall ever seeing that.
This means that no matter how many ships you have in a fleet, ONE ship will have 80 incoming missiles targeting it. This is precisely why CIWS are inferior in a sufficiently large fleet. Say you have CIWS on all 20 ships, only the CIWS on the targeted ship will fire, all the others will stay silent and useless, while FDF PD gauss or laser will always react to any incoming missiles no matter which ship in the fleet is targeted.
I can confirm this targeting behaviour as I faced against 300+ missile salvos in C#. And because I made lots of testing on the situation, I can safely say FDF %17 quad rof4+ gauss turrets are excellent. I try to put one or two %100 quad gauss turrets as safety measurements. Which I still need to try is Laser turrets. I have x-ray turrets and 600k BFCs. I wasn't aware I should turn them on for ADF so gausses did the work. I wonder what their performances will be.
Edit: Main and decisive disadvantage of the CIWS is they are self defence weapons. As many pointed out, in a fleet, custom turrets will cover way more than CIWS can because of stacking.
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. . .However I would still be interested in doing a side by side CIWS vs gauss turret test for this use case in order to better quantify the differences between these two weapon systems.
These aren't two different weapon systems. CIWS is a "gauss turret" -- specifically, a turret containing two 50% accuracy (half-size) GC of your empire's tech (at 250 tons instead of 300), a reduced-size beam fire control and a small sensor.
At very low tech levels, CIWS will be slightly worse than a regular twin-50% turret. As tech goes up, the BFC & sensor will get smaller; when their combined size drops below 50 tons the CIWS becomes more efficient than the regular turret.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1691.0 (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1691.0)
Just had a test. So at the moment it works like this:
The AI still target only one ship mostly and then reserves a salvo for other ships.
However this behaviour is per fleet.
So I had 5 fleets each fleet had one ship taking most of the salvos and the others taking only 1 sometimes 2.
Interesting fact: After I jumped in with my fleet and found the aliens waiting for me I managed to kick them out with my superior batteries. While moving away they kept launching missiles at me. After the second salvo hit me I had the idea of jumping 4 fleets back so that missiles would get lost and then jump back into the system. I also sent one fleet after a slower ship. As soon as I jumped the surprise.
All enemy salvos redirected to my fleet still in the system. NPR had built active sensor missiles!
The interesting part is that I could test rerouting of missiles on both ends and verify (as I suspected) that despite many bugs report the rerouting works quite well!
At least in that combat.
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Which I still need to try is Laser turrets. I have x-ray turrets and 600k BFCs. I wasn't aware I should turn them on for ADF so gausses did the work. I wonder what their performances will be.
Regarding lasers, you should use them in ADF only if they have enough range to shoot at least twice before the enemy missiles hit you. To make an example, if your laser 10cm turrets have 210k km range, but the enemy missiles have a speed of 30k kms, final defensive fire is still the best solution as you cannot be sure you'll shoot at them twice, and final defensive fire by its own nature has much higher chance to hit because it targets the enemy missiles at 10k km.
Regarding gauss vs lasers, as soon as you research a couple of gauss tech levels gauss are strictly better than laser in a anti-missile situation. And the more you research gauss, the wider the gap becomes. But gauss are a strictly anti-missile weapon, while lasers are not.
A 10cm laser turret can be used with profit against enemy fighters and even against enemy capital ships if they are in range, while gauss will be limited to anti-missile situations barring rare occasions. As such, the question then becomes what your fleet is supposed to do. If you are using a missile fleet, are confident you can keep the enemy at range and you know the enemy is not heavy on fighters or FACs, then you don't really need laser turrets and gauss turrets are better against missiles.
If you are instead using a beam fleet or your enemy uses beam fleets and/or you are not confident you can keep at range and/or the enemy uses a lot of fighters/Facs, laser turrets can be a good idea as they can be used in multiple situations. They are basically the most versatile thing you can have... You can also opt for a mix of gauss and lasers in this situation.
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. . . However I would still be interested in doing a side by side CIWS vs gauss turret test for this use case in order to better quantify the differences between these two weapon systems.
These aren't two different weapon systems. CIWS is a "gauss turret" -- specifically, a turret containing two 50% accuracy (half-size) GC of your empire's tech (at 250 tons instead of 300), a reduced-size beam fire control and a small sensor.
At very low tech levels, CIWS will be slightly worse than a regular twin-50% turret. As tech goes up, the BFC & sensor will get smaller; when their combined size drops below 50 tons the CIWS becomes more efficient than the regular turret.
hxxp: aurora2. pentarch. org/index. php?topic=1691. 0
It might suffer on performance against ECM missiles, if that post's statement about CIWS ECCM being only half-effective still holds.
Also, note that you now get some savings from building larger turrets - a quad turret requires less gear and crew than two dual turrets. Not sure under what circumstances that could make up for saving 1/6th of the weapon system weight due to the CIWS gun shrinkage though.
Obviously using non-CIWS turrets opens the option of using your gauss battery to buzz-saw enemy ships at point-blank range, but however marginally helpful that may be for warships it's probably of no use at all to a survey ship that wants to flee from all hostile contact.
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Regarding gauss vs lasers, as soon as you research a couple of gauss tech levels gauss are strictly better than laser in a anti-missile situation. And the more you research gauss, the wider the gap becomes. But gauss are a strictly anti-missile weapon, while lasers are not.
If by "a couple" you mean that Gauss ROF 2 beats anything not a Railgun for missile PD, then this post is exactly correct.
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. . .However I would still be interested in doing a side by side CIWS vs gauss turret test for this use case in order to better quantify the differences between these two weapon systems.
These aren't two different weapon systems. CIWS is a "gauss turret" -- specifically, a turret containing two 50% accuracy (half-size) GC of your empire's tech (at 250 tons instead of 300), a reduced-size beam fire control and a small sensor.
At very low tech levels, CIWS will be slightly worse than a regular twin-50% turret. As tech goes up, the BFC & sensor will get smaller; when their combined size drops below 50 tons the CIWS becomes more efficient than the regular turret.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1691.0 (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1691.0)
In the interest of splitting the finest of hairs, I must disagree.
A CIWS as implemented in Aurora appears (to me) to utilize PR gauss technology (a weapon, but not a weapon system), along with some other magic (sensors and a beam fire control? why aren't these the same thing?).
A gauss turret comprises of a single turret with 1 or more guass weapons mounted on it. Fire controls notwithstanding (they could arguably be mounted on a different ship).
So I think there is some ambiguity in terminology that should be cleared up for more precise discussion. I am confident the game implementor(s) considered these details for it seems to be practically relevant.
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Would having a CWS turret (or more than one) on a buoy be effective supporting regular mines in orbital missions?
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I suppose that would depend rather heavily upon the purpose of one's CIWS.
In my case I desire my CIWS to destroy inbound hostile missiles.
Other missions might diverge considerably from my own objectives.
Edit: I think that we are on the border of discussing the relative merits of gauss cannons and other weapon platforms, rather than CIWS.
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Would having a CWS turret (or more than one) on a buoy be effective supporting regular mines in orbital missions?
I wouldn't think so? CIWS can only fire against missiles that are attacking the vessel that the CIWS is on. They can't attach enemy ships or missiles attacking any other ship, so supporting isn't really an option. Except indirectly by enabling their vessel to survive longer as missile bait, I guess.
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Can't put CIWS on buoys in the first place. Would be a very small station...
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Would having a CWS turret (or more than one) on a buoy be effective supporting regular mines in orbital missions?
No. Regardless of what you mean by "buoy" (missile or fighter or something else), a CIWS unit can only fire on missiles, and only in defense of itself. If the buoy does not also include offensive weapons, there is not reason to fire on it (and at minefield ranges, very little reason to fire missiles at it instead of beam weapons).
The only way it would work is if your "buoy" was a full-fledged structural shell, ship, or fighter (with or without engines).