Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Aurora Chat => Topic started by: Redshirt on August 07, 2012, 01:28:08 PM
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I was thinking about my lastest tactical blunder- accidentally pressing "5 Days" instead of "Event Log" and ending up with 90 enemy FAC a mere 10k away from my fleet, rather than the 50m I was intending.
Pretty bad and (as Theokrat mentioned in the initial thread) only attributable to a massive computer failure or rogue AI RP-wise. Nevertheless, the doomed fleet managed to pull through...
As soon as the hostiles were spotted, the carrier group immediately launched all remaining fighters, who split into small wings and activated onboard sensors. The carriers and accompanying collier then began a transition through the jump gate.
Meanwhile, the destroyer group began targetting the FAC, while heading away from the jump point as quickly as possible.
It was only seconds later that the enemy, the Sian Republic- a race of hyperintelligent, meter long caterpillars- turned on their active sensors and fired on the fleet- but by then, the carriers were out of the system. Half the Sian's missiles self-destructed, lacking a target. The remainer destroyed half of the fighter wings, but with so many targets, they neglected the destroyers.
This was a big mistake- if they had been beam FAC, the Terran fleet would have been doomed. As it were, they were armed with missiles- and only had one shot before they needed to head back and reload. The destroyer group, nearly as fast as these FAC, began using the extreme close range to take all the time they needed to hunt down and destroy the enemy ships.
A salvage craft is now en-route. Recovery of the wrecks (and their crew, by the carrier group) promises to be a very rewarding endeavor.
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soooo many:
- I thought my missiles had a range of 30 million kilometers when in fact they had a range of 25. Fired 4 destroyers dry, then wept as the barrage of missiles flamed out before the target even saw them. Fortunately, I had also fired a batch of ultra-long ranged drones from a distant command ship, which were set to drop their payload at the same time. This did enough damage to slow the enemy fleet and ultimately, I prevailed. Still, a colossal waste.
- sent a squadron of archangel class stealth bombers into battle. Their mission was to covertly blast a slumbering precursor ship apart. Trouble was, two of the fighters had active sensors on...they were shot down before they had a chance to engage their target.
- sent an entire battlefleet of perhaps 30 ships from one star to its companion, on a mission to fight the attractive amazonian women that I suspected were waiting there. The trouble was that the distance between these stars was utterly immense...200 days later, the entire fleet ran out of fuel and this was the first time I realized the distance. Now I have a significant portion of my entire space navy stranded a little less than halfway between two distant stars.
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As seen in my story, I forgot that I'd installed backup PD sensors on all my PD ships, because I tend to be rather cheap on how many command ships I build. Of course, by the time they go into battle I've forgotten this, leave my main sensors on, get that ship taken out, and only remember the backup sensors after I lose three more ships. About 6 ships made it home, but it was still 2-3 years before the fleet was ready for a rematch.
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Forgetting to put power plants on my X-ray laser warships and sending them off to fight a few precursors. Forutnately they were fast, heavily armored and had gauss cannons for point defense. I flew right up to the three enemy ships and sandpapered them to death.
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And then there's the days you just want to bang your head on the command console:
Task Group Captain Mitchell Glover, of the DEJ Blackjack: "Thank God, we finally destroyed the last of those enemy missile boats. That was so tedious- all 90 of them? It seemed to take forever. Don't know what we would have done without those Active Sensor groupkiller missiles. Well, let's slog on over to their homeworld and see if we can't take out their shipyards before they build more. Have the Hellcat missile destroyers dump their active sensor missiles into the colliers and restock on the Valkyrie Long Range ASM's."
Some time later-
"Sir, the Hellcats have finished resupplying."
Cpt. Glover- "Good, send the colliers back through the jump gate, and proceed to June B-II."
A short time after that-
"Sir, the colliers have transited and are well on their way back to Sol system."
"Sir, we've detected another large group of enemy ships approaching... Tonnages vary from 6000 to 20,000 tonnes. Estimated numbers are greater than 100."
Cpt. Glover "... Ensign... Recall the colliers..." (softly sobbing.)
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I had to call off an assault on a home system recently because I accidentally jumped all 4 jump cruisers through without of the ships they were supposed to bring along. Fleet Command dubbed it a successful reconnaissance force with lower than projected casualties, which should greatly improve the chances of our planned assault... in a couple years.
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Had my destroyer and cruiser squadrons jump into a spoiler held system, picked up the ships on actives, painted them, hit fire.......... aaaand i forgot to load my ships ordanance.
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Encounter with (I think) Precursors. 5 ASM ships, 2 AMM ships survived a point-blank, post warp tousle with a beam-armed warship. ASMs had their sensors on. AMMs, as it turns out, did NOT. I only found this out when one of my ASMs exploded from a missile volley from a heretofore undetected missile frigate.
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"What do you mean, there is no jump gate on THIS side?"
(pause)
"Canned ravioli for 18 months? For the entire fleet?"
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@Zook: I think every new player has done that one at least once. lol
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forgot (again) that posted missile sensor range is not the same as the detection range of your average size 4 AS missile.
point blank AMM doesn't work that good.
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Hey, atleast while they are waiting for that gate to be build you can keep sending in supply ships with new flavours of ravioli. ;)
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Discovered the hard way last night than when firing my very expensive size 16 multi war head missiles at fleeing precursors they were fast enough to out range the stage 2 missiles that are set for close to extreme range on their separation distance. Sob.
Also discovered that it's a very bad idea to send warships with first generation AMMS on board....
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I've had my share of tactical blunders, including things like orbital planet-crackers that miss basically every enemy troop but wipes out my colony and accidently clicking the wrong increment letting hostile fleets jump past my own fleet and bombard my homeworld, but probably my favorite was the Battle of Stein in my LS campaign. I sent a task force towards Stein separated into two squadrons, each with a carrier, command\jumpship, and a meson\laser hybrid escort. Stein had a known Precursor presence and had already been the final resting place for several small destroyers out on patrol along the frontier. Deciding to not risk too much of what was the entirety of my striking forces, I sent Squadron #2 to a nearby asteroid to watch the friendly side of the JP while Squadron #1 raised shields and sensors then popped in. ...I didn't know that shields went offline for a jump (my ships relied almost exclusively on shields, with barely any armor protection at all), and Precursor forces were waiting on the far side. Luck favored me, as the Precursors were exclusively missile-armed and sat on top the point, as well as targeting the beam escorts instead of their more valuable sisters. After a few minutes the carriers and command ships managed to jump out, and once the beam ship's heavy dual meson batteries started working it was a massacre in my favor.
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Detected a small thermal signature on a random moon in a system that originally had a couple of precursor ships. Naturally I called in the troop transport which landed an engineer brigade and a full mobile infantry brigade. Overkill of course but its always easier to just hit unload all troops and that's what my rapid reaction force was carrying. They capture a few tracking stations without any opposition. The freighters load the tracking stations and move off.
After a few updates I notice that I have two zero population colonies on the moon which offends my sensibilities. Without thinking I abandon one of them before checking to see whether it was the one with the troops. Too this day they use the story of the lost brigade combat team to scare the new recruits before their first deployment on an alien world.
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Entered a known *spoiler* infested system without active sensors on. I knew what planet their mothership was orbitting, but 40-50 of their smaller ships met me very close to the jump point. The first I knew of their existence is when they blew up my leading scout. Luckily, it was a few million KM's ahead of the main body so I was able to engage them fairly quickly. They managed to cripple one of my carriers. . . when it slowed down, it was automatically placed in a different task group. But, due to a bug in fleet management software, 4 taskgroups were created, 3 of which were empty. I went to delete the empty taskgroups, and deleted the wrong one. My carrier vanished in a flash of light, never to be seen or heard from again.
Did manage to pull through, with the loss of one scout, one carrier, and two close range gauss-equipped escorts. Lesson learned. . . if you know the enemy is waiting for you, dont rush in blindly. Also, don't delete taskgroups without double-checking its empty, or your ships will transit to another universe never to return.
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"...but as I was leaving on the shuttle, I looked back and the station just sort of wrinkled, twisted like putty and just, just disappeared. *The minute I left*..."
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Reminds me of my ghost squadron- an entire carrier's worth of fighters that vanished upon being built. The carrier, finally completed, cruises out of the shipyard, ready to pick up its contingent. Which, while existing in theory, somehow can't be directed or interacted with.
Always assign your fighter factory output to the planet's shipyard TG before you start building fighters, lest you end up with a ghost squadron as well.
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Just had one of my worst snowballing set of disasters yet.
Through a muck up in orders the grunts of the 110 assault infantry brigade were delivered to Eta Cassopie B1 instead of A1 leaving them sat on an outer rim planet some 6billion km from where they were meant to be. Fortunately the 22nd Engineering Brigade got the right orders and were quickly dropped off at A1, a fledgling colony with 5 million odd people, a small number of high tech alien ruins, a mass driver and some 20 massive terraformers in orbit busily making the air breatheable. The colony was expected to become a backbone of the economy with huge deposits of all minerals located on an unihabitable planet - B2. Substantial automated mines had already been set up and the first packets of minerals were now arriving on A1.
When the Engineers touched down they discovered an empty scrubland when they had been expecting a pre-prepared base, set up by the 110th. With the orders error finally identied the one troop transport in the system finished dropping off the engineers and immediately headed out to B1 to pick up the 110th. In the mean time the Engineers got stuck into setting up there base.
About 40 days later with the troop trnasport now about 3/4 of the way to B2 the Engineers turned their attention to the ruins and uncovered an old manufacturing facility. Emboldened by their success they dug deeper only to discover a vault of robotic soldiers just as the troop transport was heading back.
Knowing that relief was on the way the Engineers dug in to try and hold our for the month however the first week of fighting left them with a 53% casualty rate. With the troop transport 25 days out the Engineers were overwhelmed and destroyed and the local population subsequently surrendered to the robots. Seeing the population surrender the captain of the terraforming group also decided to surrender his entire fleet.
The orders error has cost me the colony, an engineer brigade and my entire terraforming fleet. What's worse is that control of the mass driver has been lost and there are about 30 increasingly large packets of minerals headed for the planet with no way to stop them.....
I hate to think what I am going to find when I'm actually able to safely land some troops back on the groud.
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While it's not quite so epic as the one above . . .
I had thought I'd cleaned out a particular dead-end system right off my own system. Found a colony on one of the asteroids and decided to go in full-force, spend a few 5-days attacking then wait for them to counter and soak it up. My only troop transports are built out for engineers, so I have room for 5 battalions / 1 brigade. Loaded up a full brigade of Heavy Assault troops - 1 brigade HQ and 4 assault battalions. The full complement of my empire's heaviest troops.
Yup, system wasn't cleared. Now there's about 3 years' worth of heavily armed ground troops floating in little bits among the wreckage.
Stoopid.
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I have sent a fleet to a spoiler system to wipe the occupants out. My plan was, that my fleet support vessel/jump tender with a 140m km radar will support the fleet from behind. After 2 hours(ingame) of searching i've found 3 hostile contacts and ordered the fleet to engage them. Only then I've realized that I have forgotten to match the speed of the FSV/Jump Tender with the fleet, and it runned at 3100km/s 5m km ahead of the fleet. Of course it got pulverized out of the protective range of the main body. After all it was the only casualty of the battle and my fleet emerged victorious. It's good that i had a spare jump tender to take the fleet home. ;D
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That doesn't even count as boneheaded. It's almost standard procedure in my games.
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Ran into some spoilers, or possibly a NPR, I never figured it out, one system over from Sol in one of the first games I played. I threw a frigate squadron at em (before realizing the size), with (decidedly and rather obviously) disastrous results. It was an 80k ton monster with shields. Luckily I had a DesRon stationed in Sol and moved to engage when it decided to pay earth a visit. I intercepted about 750m km out from Terra at my max engagement range, about 70m km. My missiles were very slow, so I shot my DDGs dry on it, hoping to kill it and not worried about overkill as it was only one ship. Not long after my last missiles leave the tubes and my ships turn around i pick up ~15 800ton FACs less than 400k km from my fleet. Panic ensues. I break off my DDEs to engage with amms while my ddgs withdraw , but only manage to take out two of the FACs before they get utterly wrecked. I watch as my salvos approach the enemy mothership, hoping to at least take THAT out, and watch as they start winking off the screen before reaching the ship. I thought they were getting interepted, but there were no explosion indicators. They were burning out before getting within 3m km. I looked at the missile specs. I had miss remembered their range. I watched helplessly as the still intact FACs descended on my ddgs and DDL and wrecked them, then on to earth to extinct-ify the human race. It was part tactical blunder, part aurora's learning curve being an ass to a new player.