noob request

[Zed 6]

I'm sure there are other ways. This worked for me.

Save a copy of your database so you can try again. That's what I did till I understood what's going on. I also found that a small number of marine companies is nowhere near enough troops for most ships. My troop transports are in the same task group with the dropship carriers plus assorted escorts. All ships go ~ 3000 km/s. The troopships are also 5 battalions capacity. For practice: Move fleet to near where you are going to launch dropships ie a moon, planet, waypoint etc:

On Task Group window

System Locations Available                             Actions Available

Waypoint  #1                                                                Move to
Waypoint  #1                                                            Load GU into DropModule within Fleet ( this action should be available if you have troops in Task group)

At this point a new box should open up "Select Ground Unit". Highlight a particular Ground Unit and select "Add Move"
Plottted move should show "Combat Load xxx Company or Battalion from within own fleet"

When you move to the next turn, your events should show the Ground Unit has completed orders. You can check your dropships by clicking on them and you'll find the one holding this particular unit on the Individual Unit Details page under Parasites/Cargo/GU.

After several attempts, I had 100% casualties each time. Usually shotdown or splattered on the hull .   I increased dropship speed to 10,000 km/s and had better results. There were a few surprises along the way but I did capture that first ship. A nice one too.


Lessons learned:

I had fun figuring out what to try and not try.
Dropships need to be fast.
Don't leave troops in the dropships too long.
Bring more troops than you think you need.
Don't leave task group too near the target. I want to capture it, not destroy it or be destroyed.

[orfeusz (OP)]

Dropships need to be fast.

Is 8kkm/s enough? I used the design from Steave tutorial.

Bring more troops than you think you need.

I always use Imperial Guard strategy  Only thing they never run out of are reinforcements 

Don't leave task group too near the target. I want to capture it, not destroy it or be destroyed.

Yea, they tried to RAM me?!  It was shocking

[Ziusudra]

Is 8kkm/s enough? I used the design from Steave tutorial.

It depends on the target ship's speed. This post by Steve explains the math. He had some interesting posts later in thread too.

Here is the pertinent paragraph:

Trying to board a ship moving at several hundred or several thousand kilometers per second in this manner is still incredibly risky. Because of the speeds involved, the intercepting vessel must have a huge speed advantage to make the boarding attempt without suffering heavy casualties among the boarders. The cause of those casualties will vary but could include missing the target and ending up within the exhaust plume, impacting the hull at too high a speed, missing entirely and being lost in space, etc. The percentage of casualties from the boarding attempt is equal to 20xD10, giving a range from 20-200%. However, the amount of D10 rolled is reduced by Interception Speed / Target Speed. For example, if the interception speed is 6000 km/s and the target is moving at 1000 km/s, the number of D10 is reduced by 6. Therefore, if the intercepting ship is at least twenty times faster than the target ship, the attempt is automatically successful and no casualties are suffered during the boarding. Because of the risks involved, in most cases before a boarding attempt can be made the target ship will have to be slowed down or disabled.

[orfeusz (OP)]

They ships don't move so i was thinking that with any speed i will have enough advantage 


My newest question is: can i change game difficulty (%) while plying? Or do i need to create new game? i used 33% difficulty and 10% generation chance, and i cant find any aliens with planets or serious military power. I found only one carrier with 40+ FAC, and in other system 3 8000tones ships (two different races).

[Father Tim]

Even ships that don't move are technically speed 1.

Certainly you can change it.  It will not affect anything currently in your game, but when new NPRs are created they will be bigger/stronger - on par with your empire.  Keep in mind that changing it to more than 100% causes bugs, as something in the code is not scaling properly and NPRs will use up their minerals at an accelerated rate and then 'crash' due to sever shortages.

If you want more aliens to play with, up the NPR generation chance (which is the chance that a suitable planet or moon will have a NPR on it.  Suitable bodies are still fairly rare.

[Jacob/Lee]

Yeah, you can get a very good amount with 90% NPR spawn chance. Don't expect to find many already habitable worlds without needing to do a bit of cleaning though.

[orfeusz (OP)]

I am building a missile jump point fortification. It will be big ship without engines placed in top of a JP.

I have two questions.

1) Does something like this benefit from 30cm laser batteries? 

2) My antimissile defense is laser turret. I didn't even start researching gauss weapons. Should i? From what i understand, CIWS use only gauss so i cant use them. Will laser turret be much worse? Of course for turret i use 10cm lasers.

[Garfunkel]

CIWS give you an extre layer of anti-missile defence - you got area defence, final fire and CIWS - but CIWS only defends the ship that it is mounted on. But you definitely should use them IF your enemies are relying on missiles.

[Brian Neumann]

CIWS give you an extre layer of anti-missile defence - you got area defence, final fire and CIWS - but CIWS only defends the ship that it is mounted on. But you definitely should use them IF your enemies are relying on missiles.

I only find them usefull when ships are operating in small groups (5 or less smaller ships)  This is because of its self defense only limitation.  A tripple 10cm turret with fire control is about 2 1/2 times the size of a single ciws turret.  For earlier techs it will have about 20% more hits on incomming missiles.  So call the relative worth for self defense to be around 3 times that of the tripple turret.  If each ship mounts 1 turret or 2 ciws then by the time you hit 6 ships the turrets are giving you the same defense.  If a salvo is spread between only a couple of ships then the self defense of the ciws is wasted on the other ships.  If you have turrets they are all contributing to the total defense involved.  This is especially important for a fleet of different sizes and specializations as it means that a destroyer which has a primary purpose of launching anti-missiles will still be as well protected with final point defense as the battleship.  It is therefore harder to take out the escorts in a fleet if you have turreted beam weapons instead of ciws.  At higher techs the utility of the rapid fire gauss cannon turret does make them significantly better against most incomming missiles.  The other benifit of having beam weapons instead of ciws is when you are fighting a beam armed oponent your ciws are useless as they will not fire on the enemy ships.  The turreted beam weapons including gauss cannon can be used in an offensive mode.  If you mount mesons in the turret then the are even an extremely good in close weapon system to use against capital ships.

Brian

[orfeusz (OP)]

So, if i want to place ONE big unit on one JP then it will be better to use CIWS. Time to cancel some research projects and start with gauss. Thanks

[Brian Neumann]

So, if i want to place ONE big unit on one JP then it will be better to use CIWS. Time to cancel some research projects and start with gauss. Thanks

The place I end up using ciws systems is on commercial ships that might end up in a combat zone as ciws does not make the ship military.  Even a couple of ciws on a forward area supply ship (mix of fuel and maintenance) makes it much harder to kill and therefore much more surviveable in combat areas.  The other place is on high value targets that would otherwise not have any point defense.  A carrier is a good example here as I am unlikely to put beam weapons and fire control and power plant on them, but a couple of ciws does make sense here to help when it is the target of an enemy salvo.

There is a place for the ciws, I just think it is not the primary point defense of the fleet.  Emphisis on Fleet ships.  On ships that are going to operate solo, or are particularily high value without having other defenses then ciws are very important.

Brian

[orfeusz (OP)]

I found somewhere on forum something about escort. IIRC someone write that escort TG ships can fire to incoming missiles more often? Does they need to be separate TG?

[Brian Neumann]

I found somewhere on forum something about escort. IIRC someone write that escort TG ships can fire to incoming missiles more often? Does they need to be separate TG?

They will need to be detached into a seperate TG.  What is happening is that the escorts can be positioned between the primary TG and the enemy and kept at a set distance.  This will often allow them more shots as the enemy missiles cross their position headed for their primary targets.  Of course there are times that the escort itself is the primary target in which case they get hurt as they don't have the rest of the fleet for support.

Brian

[Dutchling]

As this is the current questions thread: What is the difference between final defense mode and area defense mode? I once spawned an NPR + fleet on Titan tto test some of my ships (my only combat experience so far..) and I never saw any of that with my Escort Cruiser.

[Mini]

Area defense is pretty much the same as you manually targetting missiles every time your weapons can fire. This has the problem of missiles crossing the area that can be fired upon within 5 seconds, giving you no chance to fire.F inal defense only fires once (just before the missiles hit their targets) but is garaunteed that chance to hit (assuming it isn't reloading).