Boneheaded tactical mistakes you've made? (And did you pull through?)

[SteelChicken]

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.

[Havear]

"...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*..."

[Redshirt (OP)]

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.

[chrislocke2000]

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. 

[Konisforce]

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.

[Icecoon]

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. 

[Zook]

That doesn't even count as boneheaded. It's almost standard procedure in my games.

[strych90]

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.