Aurora 4x
New Players => The Academy => Topic started by: ChubbyPitbull on April 23, 2015, 05:43:50 PM
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I had a question about the proper way to configure settings and fire controls so that a PDC equipped with AMMs will automatically try to shoot down incoming missiles.
I was in the situation where a far forward colony made first contact with the enemy, and shortly thereafter a massive enemy fleet jumped in and began the march. I was massively outnumbered, but had some drone launchers and multi-missile drones that I spent a few hours micro managing to keep firing as the enemy continued closer.
Once the enemy closed within 360m km, my AMM PDCs detected the first salvoes of size 6 enemy missiles 5m km out from colony. My AMMs have a range of 2.5m km, and the missile fire controls on my PDCs has a Range vs Size 6 Missile (or smaller) of ~8m km. Each PDC has 4 of these fire controls, 39 size 1 launchers, and are loaded with 39 of my AMMs. I went into Combat assignments, and for each PDC I set the "Point Defense Mode" for Fire Control 1 to "Two anti-missiles per target missile", with "Max PD Range in 10k units" set to 300. I then assigned all the launchers to this Fire Control as the salvoes were coming in with 20 missiles per salvo. The idea was the PDCs would begin auto-firing at 3m km out, so the enemy missiles would fly into the 2.5m km range of my AMMs. I set these settings on all PDCs, then advanced time 20 minutes (expecting the time advancement to be interrupted when my PDCs began launching missiles, was this the mistake?).
Time advanced, and my colony, PDCs, and ships disappeared in a bevy of mushroom clouds. None of my PDCs fired any AMMs. Two escorts I had in orbit made an attempt using Final Defensive Fire with their Gauss turrets, but there were too many missiles. Where did I go wrong?
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I would say the catastrophy came about because of the time advancement. In combat I advance time 5 seconds a go, maximum around 30 seconds a step. I've seen this happen when too high a timestep is used in the battle.
Your other settings looked to be ok.
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advanced time 20 minutes.
Never do that in battle. You should've chose the smaller time increments once the missiles got detected. Interrupt happens when missiles are detected, not when they are in range of your AMMs.
Likewise, do not attempt to advance time fast when you have already detected enemy fleet. That way, you'll risk the fleet closing in point blank range before your missile launchers get the chance to do anything.
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Likewise, do not attempt to advance time fast when you have already detected enemy fleet. That way, you'll risk the fleet closing in point blank range before your missile launchers get the chance to do anything.
Plus, it's a good idea to save when you detect an enemy fleet. That way if a major detection snafu like above occurs, you have the option of replaying it with smaller time increments.
John
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EDIT: Actually I lucked out; I've been using SVN to backup my game (remote download to anywhere with internet, database revision tracking), and I had a revision from about an in-game week prior to the invasion. This time the colony will (hopefully!) make it!
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Rather than start a new thread I'll just tack my question on to this one as searching popped it up.
There is the setting "Final Fire" and "Final Fire (Self Only)" I have to admit I'm not sure I understand the difference between them. I've only ever used "Final Fire (Self Only)" but for my PDCs I'd like them to cover each other with their meson turrets and I'm not sure how to set that up so it does what I want.
Currently I have 3 Fire Controls and 6 Meson turrets per PDC, with each fire control having 2 turrets. By the NCC tech base isn't a meson beam but just a combination weapon for use in atmosphere... I have 2 Fire Controls set to "Area Defence" and 1 Fire Control set to "Final Fire (Self Only)" But given the short range of the turrets would I be better off to set the two "long range" FCs for "Final Fire"?
Does "final fire" basically mean area defence but only against things at <=10K km from the mounting vessel/PDC/OWP?
I'd like to know since Operation Ivanhoe is coming up and it would be good to get mutal support from the Tribal's lasers against targets that are unlikely to end up within laser range as I expect Magic Missiles...but if the Wolvers go for single targets I'd like to bring my consorts into 5k Km seperation and let them add their 4 turrets to the mix as the current systems have about a 10% chance to intercept the Magics.
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Final fire is the one to go for if you want mutual defence on your ships with short range weapons. I always use that for Gauss cannon where the range is very low and I get intercepts across the fleet. Just need to make sure all of your ships in question are in range of each other.
I think you still need to detect the missiles the increment beforehand though which I think was one of your main issues with the "magic missiles" last time round.
Does that mean we are going to get a write up of Ivanhoe???
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Thank you. As for a write up I expect so yes. It has just been a lot of mainly administrative stuff lately... Largely dealing with things like rebuilding the navy and assorted other stuff that is hard to make interesting or at least I'm under the impression isn't that interesting to readers. Fundamentally the NCC was building up its outsystem colonies and improving the amount of minerals flowing to Earth...currently no significant mineral crisis exists as the focus on the situation has dramatically boosted production across the board. But the result was not much else happening outside of the frigate replacement program and the latest space frame renewal plan, and even those have been implemented. Logistics, logistics and more logistcs basically.
The big issue with the magics's was the 250K km jump they made, I could detect them, infact if my pinnaces had weapons I could have put one at the point they showed up and then shot at them but after that point the next time they moved they hit. This bypassed my missile intercept zone. And the NCN ship were always designed to use layered defence.
There has been a number of fairly interesting events ... but for the most part it is "business as usual" and I really wish there was a way to edit out the log files that worked better. That more than anything is the hard part to overcome. I take the raw log: strip out the not needed messages (such as unrest that is removed by garrison...), then organize it by catagory or system...this requires a lot of scrolling up and down with cut and paste, then condense those final results into something I can work with, then edit the time stamping and then adding in the text. I just need to do it when it is all said and done.
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If only someone could write a simple text editor that can strip unwanted lines from the log.... I'm sure there's something like that already out there, I just haven't really looked.
Also I can't even find my log file anymore.
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If only someone could write a simple text editor that can strip unwanted lines from the log.... I'm sure there's something like that already out there, I just haven't really looked.
Also I can't even find my log file anymore.
C:\Logs?
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Possibly :p
Edit: Actually, theres a few anomalies with my logs, firstly under D:\logs theres a folder named "red planet" which is empty, also in D:\logs are 24 text files which are the logs for my red planet game. So they are there, but the empty folder is mystifying.
Second I notice the log files are about a year out of date, so if I used some kind of standard text editing/scaning/formatting software, I wouldn't easily be able to search through recent logs.
And then there is an actual bug.
The oldest item in my Events tab is :
"4th July 2048 00:23:29 Terran Federation Minerals Located V577 Monoceri Minerals Discovered on V577 Monoceri-B-III: Mercassium ,708,100 (0,1)
when I search through the log file in D:\logs I find this line:
3rd July 2048 00:23:29,Federation,V577 Monoceri,Minerals Discovered on V577 Monoceri-B III: Mercassium 6,708,100 (0.1)
The displayed date is off by a day compared to the events tab.
The next 2 items down the list do in fact have matching dates. I checked a few more and their dates matched, so I don't know what was going on there.