Gothic Campaign Comments Thread

[Nori]

heh, 186 missiles missed. That sucks.. Think of all the wasted resources!

[Drakale]

Man those raiders are scary. With a significant tech deficit AMM are about the only thing that would be effective if tohit% can overcome the ECM. The fact that they have lowish armor makes it workable I think.

I liked the last stand of Commander Endymion, very heroic.

[Garfunkel]

Uh oh, raiders are indeed scary. The stuff of nightmares if one is doing a conventional start! Good luck - you're going to need it!

[Veneke]

Uh oh, raiders are indeed scary. The stuff of nightmares if one is doing a conventional start! Good luck - you're going to need it!

I was thinking the same thing! Probably a little like invaders and better to keep them turned off for that initial build-up period.

[simast]

A bit surprised about that larger raider fleet - to be honest was expecting them to be more like nuisance instead of a formidable and organized fighting force.

By the way, could we get a screenshot of Galactic Map? Having hard time connecting all the system links in my head.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

A bit surprised about that larger raider fleet - to be honest was expecting them to be more like nuisance instead of a formidable and organized fighting force.

By the way, could we get a screenshot of Galactic Map? Having hard time connecting all the system links in my head.

The raiders are mostly single ships and small squadrons, but they will have one or two larger forces available when they identify a potentially valuable target with relatively minor defences. However, they are still far smaller than NPRs or other spoilers in terms of total tonnage. Destroying their ships will slow them down though as they have fixed replenishment rate.

Their main advantage is their ECM. Otherwise they start with precursor-level tech. However, they can advance their tech in the same way as an NPR, so they will stay dangerous for longer than Precursors.

I've added a Galactic Map post.

[Nori]

That sounds super nice. 

[nuclearslurpee]

Seeing the first raider ship class noted as "Corsair" brings to mind: will there be a new class naming theme for the Dark Eldar to go along, similar to how we have a Necron theme for precursors?

A very interesting tactical situation posed by this raider that we don't usually see from NPRs I think, so looking forward to that. I do wonder if it might be a bit overtuned for the early tech level as players on default 500m pop TN starts will struggle to tech up enough to overcome the combination of ECM and 250,000? km range railguns. I recall the raider spoiler is supposed to tech up over time so perhaps some adjustment wouldn't be the worst idea? On the other hand with fog of war being a thing it might not be so bad as long as the raiders remain afraid of a respectably-sized fleet and stand off as much as possible.

The single alien ship was proving to be extremely troublesome. Almost three hundred thousand tons of Imperium warships were engaged in trying to catch a single, elusive 9500-ton alien ship.

LMAO!

And later on it seems that the raiders can mount a fairly convincing fighting force. Not sure how the Imperium will handle this just yet, it seems some sort of new technology is needed to make headway. Perhaps upgrading the Starhawk torpedoes to a model with less range or damage but more speed/agility or perhaps ECCM will be able to penetrate the raiders' ECM screens.

Definitely have left off at a tense moment, I eagerly await the conclusion of this surprisingly epic clash!

[Zincat]

I like it a lot, a tense moment to be sure.

If I had time to change fleet composition, in this situation I would be tempted to build a lot of fast ion drive beam fighters, since Steve just researched that. They would surely take horrific losses but on the other hand, missiles are very costly too.

Of course it's not so easy to quickly change fleet composition.... I look forward to read more 

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Seeing the first raider ship class noted as "Corsair" brings to mind: will there be a new class naming theme for the Dark Eldar to go along, similar to how we have a Necron theme for precursors?

Yes, already added

I'm using those Dark Eldar theme names in this campaign.

[Migi]

I realised that you didn't follow proper doctrine by making the smaller Imperial ships slightly faster than the larger ones, but you did a good job of displaying the normal Imperial strategy against Eldar of getting beaten into a pulp by something a tenth of your size. 

Are the Hermes class platforms classified as commercial, I thought anything small enough to be a fighter would automatically be military, but is that because they have no engine?

[nuclearslurpee]

Are the Hermes class platforms classified as commercial, I thought anything small enough to be a fighter would automatically be military, but is that because they have no engine?

Correct, commercial is the "default" classification of a ship and it is only classified as military if it has a military component - weapons, military engines, and sensors larger than 1 HS are military components, but notably sensors of 1 HS or smaller are commercial, so you can make such a monitoring station or probe.

I do remember Steve made a comment about requiring an Engineering Space as a bugfix in 1.14+ but I'm not sure I see that applied to the Hermes class, unless the required size is now dependent on the size of the ship to enable these kinds of small designs?

[db48x]

I do remember Steve made a comment about requiring an Engineering Space as a bugfix in 1.14+ but I'm not sure I see that applied to the Hermes class, unless the required size is now dependent on the size of the ship to enable these kinds of small designs?

It has 25MSP, so it probably does have an engineering space.

Those Eldar escort ships must have pretty good passive sensors.

[AlStar]

So all these Eldar ships are obviously coming and going from a fixed point in space - will that point be marked if you happen to see a ship entering/leaving, or is it up to the player to remember?

[nuclearslurpee]

Quite rare to see so many losses suffered in a Steve campaign, especially on the ground. Certainly keeps things tense and exciting!

Using the Dark Eldar's own ship against them is a clever tactic and makes for a great narrative moment, well played.

It seems to me that the raiders pose a threat in two stages from a naval perspective. First they send a scout to poke around in a potentially vulnerable system, which necessitates having light patrol and guard forces in all colonies or commerce lanes. However once they identify a target they commit to a large operation to make off with the loot, so detecting their scout requires a large response force to race towards that system to carry out counter-raiding operations. The result is a full encounter battle, and understanding it this way the raiders make a lot more sense to me, although they are still very different from the pirates people suggested initially (not a bad thing of course). Looking forward to similar stories in my own campaigns!