Aurora 4x
New Players => The Academy => Topic started by: Iestwyn on November 16, 2020, 01:22:33 PM
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I'm not 100% sure sure I understand the differences between the ground weapons. Here's what I've got:
- Personal weapons: Low everything (light, normal, improved)
- Crew-served anti-personnel: Low AP, high rate of fire (L/H)
- Anti-vehicle: High AP, low rate of fire (L/M/H)
- Autocannon: High AP, medium rate of fire (L/M/H)
- Bombardment: Special rules (L/M/LR/H)
I don't fully understand what makes autocannons different, but I really don't understand bombardment. What are the differences between the types? It looks like long-range bombardment is the same as medium bombardment... is the special thing that it can be fired from the rear echelon position? Why does that help?
Thanks in advance!
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Basically:
against soft targets, you use PW, PWI, CAP, HCAP.
against hard targets, you use LAV, MAV, HAV.
In both cases, you want the weapon as far down the line as you can afford cost & size-wise. That's because they are the most effective in doing their main job which is to either mow down a lot of targets or to penetrate enemy armour.
And this is what makes autocannons such a poor man's weapon. They are trying to do both but not as well. So their main function is for LVH as those can carry only a single slot, and might encounter both soft and hard targets. VEH and heavier should always combine HCAP and MAV (or heavier) in their slots.
Bombardment uses special rules as it can both fire during combat, as well as counter enemy bombardment. LB can only fire from the front lines, MB can fire from Support, and HB & LRB can fire from Rear. If your enemy only has LB, your MB+ are safe from counterbattery fire. If your enemy only has MB, your HB & LRB are safe.
Oh, forgot to say that lot of this depends on tech level. If your weapons tech is higher than the armour level of your enemy, autocannons will be quite useful as they can chew up infantry and tanks. If your weapons tech is lower than the armour level of your enemy, autocannons become even less useful as they have little chance of penetrating armour and might struggle against infantry too.
Super-heavy anti-vehicle is usually overkilling unless your enemy brings Super/Ultra-heavies to the battlefield, in which case you're royally screwed unless you brought your own and/or have plenty of orbital support.
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Okay, this helps a lot. I was really trying to understand what autocannons were supposed to be good for; "not much" is a good answer.
Only slightly related, but I also don't quite understand how to use fighters to support ground ops. It seems a little complex. Is FFD required in all cases? What about on the fighter design side of things?
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Personally, I use AC as the third slot weapon on heavy vehicles that are meant to be Main Battle Tanks as that way they are equally good against every possible target: (HAV+HCAP+HAC).
You need one FFD per 6 support fighters or 1 orbital bombardment ship per round (8 hours of combat).
Orbital Fighters are currently quite useless because enemy STO can target them which is a bug. NPRs and spoilers do not use them and if you bring yours, they will get shot down straight away. So might as well forget about them until Steve fixes things as you have enough things to learn!
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Each weapon has its niche, although there is definitely a way to optimize as opposed to role-playing.
PW, PWL, PWI are the weakest weapons and are pretty much only good for shooting at enemy light infantry. However, they are very light and thus you can deploy a lot of them for the cost and/or tonnage invested, meaning that they are your base infantry weapon for the "meatshield" troops protecting your more valuable CAP/AV and are essential to keeping your heavy weapons alive as long as possible. PWL are the most effective as a pure meatshield due to small size (3 tons), however PW (5 tons) are 16x more effective at killing similar-tech enemy units due to how AP and damage scaling works), thus while you cannot deploy as many PW infantry they can kill off enemy infantry more effectively than PWL infantry. Thus, PW are better against infantry (more lethal) while PWL are better against armored units (since neither weapon type is very lethal, the bigger meatshield is better). I would say that PWI is generally a waste of the extra size point in the early game, but it's useful later on when the enemy infantry has power armor as the extra AP gives you 50-60% more killing power.
CAP/HCAP is a pure anti-infantry weapon, nothing is better to mow down the enemy legions. As above, CAP is usually fine early on but once you get up in tech and regularly face power armor infantry HCAP has more than double the kill rate and is worth the tonnage.
Anti-Vehicle similarly is a purely anti-armor weapon but with only one shot does poorly against infantry (hence, meatshields). The calculus here can actually be rather complex as you don't gain anything from overmatching the enemy with your AP/damage - for example, if you face equal-tech VEH or STA then MAV will perform just as well as HAV for a lower cost and tonnage; however if you face HVH then HAV is clearly superior. Of course, without prior knowledge of enemy tech and doctrine you don't know what you're facing, my point is just that bigger is not always better.
Autocannons are the medium point between CAP and AV, and can do both roles adequately but excels at neither. General advice that you'll see will be to avoid using AC and preferring CAP+AV instead, however there are a few situations where AC is a good choice. The most obvious is as a defensive weapon on your CON/GEO/XEN vehicles if you choose to give them defensive armaments, since these often operate separately from your main forces and specializing only against infantry or armor is risky (note, however, that many people choose not to arm these vehicles and just give 2x of the special component). Less well-known, AC performs well against lightly-armored, low-HP units which HCAP lacks the AP/damage to reliably OHKO but AV overmatches. This mostly means infantry with multiple levels of power armor + HP mods as well as light vehicles.
Personally, I use AC as the third slot weapon on heavy vehicles that are meant to be Main Battle Tanks as that way they are equally good against every possible target: (HAV+HCAP+HAC).
I differ in opinion here, as I think generally the performance of 1xCAP + 1xAV > 2xAC in most cases where you'd want CAP in the first place. Thus you'd get better results from having a mix of HAV/HCAP/HCAP and HAV/HAV/HCAP vehicles, although this does require a little bit of extra research and micromanagement. However as mentioned AC does well dealing with heavier infantry so it may be preferable.
Bombardment weapons have the ability to offer supporting fire. For LB this is basically a useless ability (note: a lot of people use LB to model mortars, which they are okay at doing but ultimately don't contribute much that HCAP doesn't do much better in most cases. If you want to optimize, avoid using LB), for MB and larger this is very useful as they can fire from support or rear echelons without much risk of being attacked by the enemy front line. MB can fire from the support echelon, MBL/HB can fire from the rear echelon which is even safer. Since the main usage of bombardment is in a generic artillery role, the exact stats are usually not discussed much; however, it's worth noting that at equal tech levels bombardment weapons are usually the strongest killers of static units, particularly HB which will outperform AV against any static armor level.
Also relevant are AA and FFD components, both of which function best in a rear echelon formation although AA can be used for direct fire in a pinch. Note that FFD does not have any relation to the artillery role, and instead is only used to enable orbit-to-surface fire support and bombardment (this is common confusion not helped by the name, which should be orbital fire direction/OFD instead, or better tactical air control/TAC to match modern military terminology...but I digress).
So, best practices for optimal formation design: in the front lines, you want a mix of CAP and AV in most cases to have a balanced ability to counter both infantry and armor elements. Some people will have CAP-heavy formations that fight the initial engagement to clear out enemy infantry before bringing up the AV formation, to avoid wasting expensive AV shots against cheap infantry units. In the support echelon you usually just want MB formations to support the front lines. The rear echelon holds everything else: HB/MBL, AA, FFD, HQ, LOG, and so on.
Offensive and defensive formations differ: on the offensive, you usually need to maximize firepower per transport ton since you will be performing a combat drop, while on the defensive you need to maximize combat power per build point since transportation is not a concern. This means for example that on the offensive you want your meatshield infantry to pack as much bang for the buck as possible - PW/PWI, max HP, max power armor, and so on - while on the defensive you just want as many infantry as possible getting in the way of the enemy tanks while you shoot them with big guns - PWL, no HP mods or armor to keep the costs down. Philosophies differ, but this is how I tend to look at things.
APPENDIX: damage mechanics:
Both damage and armor-piercing work based on the square of the ratio between the weapon damage/AP and the target HP/armor, with overmatch capped at 100% effect for both quantities. This means you can calculate the total expected kill rate for a weapon against a unit base type, given racial weapon and armor tech levels, as:
Kill Rate = number of shots * (weapon damage * racial damage / enemy unit HP / enemy racial armor)^2 * (weapon AP * racial damage / enemy unit armor / enemy racial armor)^2
This is how I calculate which weapon types are best against certain enemy unit types above. Note the corollary here - kill rate scales to the fourth power of racial damage and enemy racial armor, i.e. tech levels. Thus, a difference in tech levels tends to have a much larger overall impact on combat results than how optimized your choice of weapons is.
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Super-heavy anti-vehicle is usually overkilling unless your enemy brings Super/Ultra-heavies to the battlefield, in which case you're royally screwed unless you brought your own and/or have plenty of orbital support.
Orbital support is so ineffective it's gotta be bugged.
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Super-heavy anti-vehicle is usually overkilling unless your enemy brings Super/Ultra-heavies to the battlefield, in which case you're royally screwed unless you brought your own and/or have plenty of orbital support.
Orbital support is so ineffective it's gotta be bugged.
The problem for me isn't actually lethality, its the amount of dust that OBS kicks up. I have had good success using 30cm railgun bombardment ships especially against STOs.
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The problem for me isn't actually lethality, its the amount of dust that OBS kicks up. I have had good success using 30cm railgun bombardment ships especially against STOs.
STO's become visible when they shoot at you se they're easily targetted. The issue with regular ground units is that when you get them they're almost always going to be at max fortification, which if they're on a tough planet type like mountain or jungle they're really hard to hit.
Though, if you don't care about the dust or collateral lamage you can go to town with your ships and blow them all up eventually. You'll just be left with a scoured bare cratered frozen dustball afterwards.
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The problem for me isn't actually lethality, its the amount of dust that OBS kicks up. I have had good success using 30cm railgun bombardment ships especially against STOs.
STO's become visible when they shoot at you se they're easily targetted. The issue with regular ground units is that when you get them they're almost always going to be at max fortification, which if they're on a tough planet type like mountain or jungle they're really hard to hit.
Though, if you don't care about the dust or collateral lamage you can go to town with your ships and blow them all up eventually. You'll just be left with a scoured bare cratered frozen dustball afterwards.
I honestly think that Beam based dust should be reduced. However I do not mind that missiles cause mass destruction - it'd be too easy otherwise.
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Didn't even know beam bombardment kicks up dust. That's interesting...
And Nuclear Slurpee, THANK YOU. That is way more info than I expected. Now all I need is Iceranger to pop up with some of his magic math. ;)
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Super-heavy anti-vehicle is usually overkilling unless your enemy brings Super/Ultra-heavies to the battlefield, in which case you're royally screwed unless you brought your own and/or have plenty of orbital support.
Orbital support is so ineffective it's gotta be bugged.
The problem for me isn't actually lethality, its the amount of dust that OBS kicks up. I have had good success using 30cm railgun bombardment ships especially against STOs.
I have no trouble hitting STO's. I have found orbital fire support worthless against ground forces. I don't think I've ever seen anything other than infantry get destroyed by orbital support. I have seen precursor mechs survive 37.5cm spinal laser hits.
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I just posted in the 1.12 bug thread about this, but orbital bombardment accuracy IS bugged. The to hit chances are something like 10x lower than the C# changes thread say they should be (the hit chance is reported in the event log).
This is for shooting generic ground forces, not revealed STO. I agree that shooting revealed STO seems to work ok.
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http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg109786#msg109786
^ A link to word of Steve...
Support and Rear Echelon formations that contain formation elements with bombardment weapons can be assigned to support front line formations that are part of the same organization. Formations in a support position with light bombardment weapons will fire with the front line formations (see next paragraph). Formations in a support position with medium/heavy bombardment weapons or formations in a rear echelon position with heavy bombardment weapons will fire in a subsequent phase - see below.
Once a front line formation (or a light bombardment element in the Support position) has been matched against a hostile formation, each friendly individual unit (a soldier or vehicle) in that formation engages a random element in the hostile formation, with the randomization based on the relative size of the hostile formation elements. The targeting on an individual unit level represents that the different elements in a front line formation will generally be attacking in conjunction (infantry supporting tanks, etc.).
- I kept reading people saying that LB doesn't work from the support position, and i was like, "That's horse manure..." so I went to go see if it was true. Nope, they fire with the Front Line units when assigned to support. :)
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http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg109786#msg109786
^ A link to word of Steve...
Support and Rear Echelon formations that contain formation elements with bombardment weapons can be assigned to support front line formations that are part of the same organization. Formations in a support position with light bombardment weapons will fire with the front line formations (see next paragraph). Formations in a support position with medium/heavy bombardment weapons or formations in a rear echelon position with heavy bombardment weapons will fire in a subsequent phase - see below.
Once a front line formation (or a light bombardment element in the Support position) has been matched against a hostile formation, each friendly individual unit (a soldier or vehicle) in that formation engages a random element in the hostile formation, with the randomization based on the relative size of the hostile formation elements. The targeting on an individual unit level represents that the different elements in a front line formation will generally be attacking in conjunction (infantry supporting tanks, etc.).
- I kept reading people saying that LB doesn't work from the support position, and i was like, "That's horse manure..." so I went to go see if it was true. Nope, they fire with the Front Line units when assigned to support. :)
LB does work, albeit in a weird and not entirely intuitive way. The question is why would you use it over MB or HB once you have those in the field - sure, LB fires one phase earlier, but that has a fairly minimal impact compared to firing in the usual bombardment phase (does not prevent taking any damage from the front-line combat phase, but may occasionally allow a breakthrough attack). Otherwise, MB is far more effective in terms of actual kill rate against anything except light infantry, for which we have CAP.
That said, usually what I see people doing is sticking LB into a front-line infantry company or battalion to model mortars, which seems like the obvious usage but in practice means spending 20 tons/0.4 BP on a broadly inferior weapon as both CAP and LAV are cheaper and more effective at their particular jobs. It's not completely useless (works well against HP-modded infantry for example) and doing this won't be a major reason why you win or lose a battle, but it's not optimal in any case I can think of.
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Anyone have any advice as to where to put your fire controllers? I model down to the company and was thinking of putting one fire-controller in every one, but it might be better to put it in the rear-echelon battalion HQ that commands 4 companies.
Also, I know it isn't working properly but does anyone else think its better to rely on orbital bombardment or orbital fighters to deal with real heavy units instead of dedicated AV ground units? I suppose I see things the same way America did during WW2 in that its better to rely on air power to take out heavily armored vehicles rather than make your own in the hopes of countering it.
I wish that there was a reason to make your artillery mobile. I don't believe that rear-echelon bombardment units benefit from maneuverability on the attack same as front-line units. Using heavy, static guns like its WWI seems wrong so far into the future.
Power armor should add weight to infantry so you have to actually think about who you give it to instead of switching everyone over once you have enough resources.
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Anyone have any advice as to where to put your fire controllers?
I model down to the company and was thinking of putting one fire-controller in every one, but it might be better to put it in the rear-echelon battalion HQ that commands 4 companies.
Rear echelon is best. FFD only affects how many orbital bombardments and/or fighters (6x per FFD) you can involve in the ground combat, there is not targeting effect. Thus it is best to keep them away from the front lines, not only to keep them alive but also to put more combat troops in the front line in their place.
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You know, that leads to another question I had. I don't understand the Static base type that well. I understand that in-world it refers to units that can't move on their own, but I'm not sure how that lack of mobility translates in-game, since they're often required to move around with formations anyway.
Why would you use static units? Where on the battlefield would you recommend they be, and what components would be best on static units?
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You know, that leads to another question I had. I don't understand the Static base type that well. I understand that in-world it refers to units that can't move on their own, but I'm not sure how that lack of mobility translates in-game, since they're often required to move around with formations anyway.
Why would you use static units? Where on the battlefield would you recommend they be, and what components would be best on static units?
Steve's updates in the changes thread are definitely your friend here for the basic mechanics.
To summarize, static units can self fortify to level 3 and to level 6 with construction vehicles, just like infantry. However, they get heavier armor than infantry and can use bigger weapons (like Medium Anti vehicle). In exchange, they get no "evasion" bonus. When a unit is set to front line attack, it loses all fortification but in exchange gets a fixed to be hit modifier. Infantry and medium vehicles are .6, light vehicles get .4.
So you use static exclusively in the defensive role, to support your infantry with heavy weapons or protect high value stuff like big command posts (since the static unit gets more armor and HP than the infantry version). But they are (even worse) on the attack than infantry are.
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Thanks again! Sorry I'm asking questions that were answered in the changes thread; I was only made aware of that a little bit ago. I may keep asking questions about how to interpret and use the mechanics.
For example, it's good to know that static is best used in the rear for HQs, bombardment, anti-aircraft, and STO. Is that accurate?
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Don't worry; pretty sure I was the one who pointed you to it. And the how to use it stuff is definitely NOT found in that thread.
Not really an expert on C# ground combat. Some people have done a huge amount of testing to figure out what works well.
What you said is accurate, especially the STO thing since only static units can have STO weapons. I think the testing consensus, though, was that statics ALSO have a place in the front-line defense role. Basically, you build a bunch of cheap infantry to surround statics with HCAP and MAV. The HCAPs and MAVs do all the killing, since they are way more effective than the CAP and LAV that you can give your infantry. But the cheap infantry soak shots from the enemy, since targeting is randomized based on tonnage. This keeps your heavier weapons alive longer, scoring more kills at lower cost. But you lose a lot of infantry.
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Infantry and static get the most benefit from fortification. Since fortification is lost when a unit is moved or put on front line attack, this makes them ideal (IMHO) as garrison units. Drop a formation of infantry and static with a few construction vehicles to add fortification on a colony planet, let it sit around building up fortification for years, and if that planet ever gets invaded they're going to be much tougher than they would normally be for their cost.
If you just drop troops on a planet, though, they have no fortification. This is dangerous for infantry (with 60% hit modifier) and suicidal for static (with 100%). Vehicles, on the other hand, have decent hit modifiers but lower maximum fortification, which makes them decent on the offense.
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Interesting... All of this is good to know. To practice all this, I'm recreating the UNSC marines from the Halo universe. Some of the features aren't the most effective in Aurora, but it's a starting point at least. I'll post in the Bureau of Design when I'm done to get some feedback.
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Interesting... All of this is good to know. To practice all this, I'm recreating the UNSC marines from the Halo universe. Some of the features aren't the most effective in Aurora, but it's a starting point at least. I'll post in the Bureau of Design when I'm done to get some feedback.
As a general rule, anything that leans into roleplay is almost never going to be optimal. And that's all perfectly fine, since battles are mainly decided based on tech levels more than the details of unit composition (unless you drop 50,000 tons of CAP onto an armored division, then may the RNG have mercy on you because God sure won't). As long as you're happy with the flavor of your unit designs, all is well. ;D
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Interesting... All of this is good to know. To practice all this, I'm recreating the UNSC marines from the Halo universe. Some of the features aren't the most effective in Aurora, but it's a starting point at least. I'll post in the Bureau of Design when I'm done to get some feedback.
As a general rule, anything that leans into roleplay is almost never going to be optimal. And that's all perfectly fine, since battles are mainly decided based on tech levels more than the details of unit composition (unless you drop 50,000 tons of CAP onto an armored division, then may the RNG have mercy on you because God sure won't). As long as you're happy with the flavor of your unit designs, all is well. ;D
I have to say, trying to make this work with the units of the actual UNSC marines is creating a bit of a nightmare. Should be posted later today.