Aurora 4x
New Players => The Academy => Topic started by: Aloriel on August 15, 2013, 02:53:47 PM
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As some of you have probably read in the Chat section below, I have been dealing with a situation where an NPR has launched a massive quantity of missiles against me. Each wave of them is probably just under 1000 missiles, and they typically launch 3 full waves... plus a few extras here and there after those 3 waves. Grand total: ~4000.
I am vastly ahead in tech. So much so that my slowest warship flies faster than their missiles. So, I can avoid being hit forever, if I am careful.
My main problem is that this leaves me with two choices. Leave their homeworld system until I have even more vastly superior tech or numbers, or fly in and attempt to evade the missiles, while destroying the launchers.
I have been doing the latter strategy, but it is painfully slow and excruciatingly micro-management. Each 5 second tick takes 10 real life seconds. I can't click anything higher than the 5 second tick, because I need to know where my ships are relative to the missiles at all times. Plus, they launch new ones all the time. I have to be ready to alter course if they do that. They also appear to have a virtually limitless supply of these size 1 missiles. So, waiting until they are out of supply seems pointless.
Anyone have any suggestions as to how to handle this situation?
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Head your ships in until they get shot at, head straight back out of range. Might be 10-100 mkm or whatever, but it should far less clicks to eliminate a wave.
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Yes, but with the seemingly unlimited supply of missiles they have... how many times will I have to do that? I was actually doing that at first, while I still had missiles to fire at them.
It was feeling like no progress, which is why I went in to engage with lasers.
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As many as it takes... Homeworlds typically have ridiculous stockpiles of missiles, but not infinite. It's probably faster in realtime than trying to shoot the PDCs while dodging anyway. How many waves did you do that to?
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Just the one and I was done with it LOL. I did manage to find a pattern for a while, but once that set of missiles expired... the pattern was broken.
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Launch your own missiles with a longer range. Let them expend their stockpile on those. Those that get through sterilize the planet and stop them from making new ones. Basically - you know how it is: Nuke them from orbit.
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Oh, I've done that. My cruisers are empty. LOL I should have mentioned that. My carrier still has some, but I have to wait 6 hours for the reload of the fighters (even though it says 37.5 minutes :P). I suppose I *could* manually transfer those to the cruisers and fire them off instead of using the fighter launches. That would shorten the time between launches and kill a bunch of PDCs.
I'll probably do that when I get back from RPG night. :)
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There seems to be an issue with NPR missiles, which makes them way too slow.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,5427.msg59524.html#msg59524
Not that this will help you though :)
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Heh, no. That won't help. :) Actually, I'm quite thankful for their slowness. Although, with the tech difference, I might still be faster than them. It's hard to say.
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Getting in and then out of range works OK. Hitting them with longer range missiles works as well.
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Build and design bombardment cruisers. Firecons, and mongo big magazine space, then target the planet. See how much of their capacity gets diverted to interception, and maybe you can get other ships closer in.
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Build and design bombardment cruisers. Firecons, and mongo big magazine space, then target the planet. See how much of their capacity gets diverted to interception, and maybe you can get other ships closer in.
This is what I am going to do. Withdraw, redesign, and hit them harder with more ships.
First, I'm going to make sure my espionage team lands safely though.
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As a suggestion for your bombardment cruisers, try designing a large, armored "decoy" missile to draw out AMM fire. Of course, with that many missiles, it might not do much.
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Hm, in earlier versions, the AI tended to skimp on the number of firecons used, so you could swamp it with many small salvos.
Blue Emu (from Paradox Fame) came up with a way to do this.
Say, you have a ROF of 30 seconds.
You assign 1 tube to each FC and open fire.
5 sec later, you assign another tube to the same FC, so another missile is fired.
Important! Leave the already fired tube assigned!
Rinse repeat until the first launcher has reloaded.
Due to the reload time and the intervals, your launchers have fired, your ship will now shoot a missile per FC every 5 seconds.
The launchers to FC ratio should be equal to your ROF / 5
It is a bit of an exploit of the way Aurora works, but in a case like yours I will overlook it :)
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The decoy system, and the scaled firing won't actually make a difference in this case. The fact is that their missiles are so slow, and mine so fast, that they have a 0% chance to intercept. Even my older Tomahawk Mk 1 they had no success against, although they actually fired AMMs against those. My Mk 2 moves at nearly 10x their AMM's speed (22,400 vs 2500). They don't even fire AMMs against them.
So, I've designed a new missile cruiser that I will upgrade the older Edgar class to. It will have a bit more than 5x the missile storage, and a couple extra launchers. This new cruiser will be strong enough to have a guaranteed kill on 1 PDC per salvo (as opposed to almost guaranteed), and be capable of some 70+ salvos. It'll also have new launchers that are much faster reload.
That should be enough to eliminate the PDCs, ideally.
Unfortunately, it'll be a lot larger too. I think my missile cruiser is going from about 31k tons to about 38k tons.
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Hmm. If they don't even attempt to intercept your missiles, maybe fool them into expending their AMM against a large slow heavy missile. Scale a missile to be interceptable by them, load it up with armor and fire it. That should soak up their AMMs enough to give you a break in the missile curtain to get ships through.
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It sounds like you could probably design a fighter against which their missiles have an effectively 0% hit chance. Build a bunch of crazyfast decoy fighters with 2-3 armour and no weapons, and just park them in orbit around their planet until they're out. If the hit chance is low enough you may not even have to proceed at 5 second intervals.
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That's crazy brilliant. Seriously. Especially since I have a carrier as the flag ship of the task force. The catch is trying to figure out how ineffectual their missiles are. I may have to think about that one for a while, and do some in game research.
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Maybe you should just use your current fighters as decoys, they're almost 4 times the AMM's speed and you can't really reload them because of the bug you're experiencing.
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I've already designed and built one of these:
ADC Leucotis class Decoy 1,000 tons 4 Crew 192.8 BP TCS 20 TH 360 EM 0
18000 km/s Armour 1-8 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 0
Maint Life 1.37 Years MSP 12 AFR 80% IFR 1.1% 1YR 7 5YR 103 Max Repair 10 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.1 months Spare Berths 6
20 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (18) Power 20 Fuel Use 69.18% Signature 20 Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 5,000 Litres Range 1.3 billion km (20 hours at full power)
I've also SM'ed my fighters to have just one 25% size reduction missile launcher instead of the box launchers. They can reload those. So, they're useful again, even if they only have 1 launcher instead of 2.
EDIT:
An additional factor is that my line ships are now MUCH better designs. This war has taught me a number of lessons, and I have compensated for those with refits of my entire fleet (although the carrier won't get the upgrade before I go back in).
My Diadem cruisers should be able to eliminate the threat completely from 150 million km away (well outside their range). They have enough missiles for 70+ salvos of 10 missiles each. If they run out of missiles, I have a collier to reload them periodically. It carries a complete reload for 1 cruiser. I'll also have the missiles on the carrier, and all the bombers (which can now fire again).
This should, ideally, be enough to take out all of their launchers.
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Of course once your missiles get into the PDC's sensor range you'll be stuck with 5 second ticks till they land, On the bright side the detection range of your missiles will be well short of the range your ships would be detected at, which significantly reduces the time you'll spend in 5 second tick purgatory.
This is the main reason why i favor long range missile combat myself.
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One of the things that I like to do with mid-game missile combat is design a series of "First strike" missiles with absurdly long range and onboard sensors. I make them to fit my normal missile platforms, but give them a massive range that far exceeds my MFCs, instead firing them at a waypoint en mass and hoping they hit something valuable -- usually with a small scout parked nearby enough to watch the damage.
I usually like up-close missile combat, but this way I can drop a ridiculous number of warheads on particularly irritating aliens from the other side of a system and not have to significantly redesign my fleets.