Author Topic: What to do with captured spoiler ships? *Warning spoilers*  (Read 2765 times)

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Offline nakorkren (OP)

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What to do with captured spoiler ships? *Warning spoilers*
« on: October 12, 2021, 11:59:02 AM »
Pretty much this entire discussion will contain spoilers, so mouse-over at your own risk, and if you reply, please use spoiler tags.

I recently captured a bunch of Precursor ships. I ran into a system with multiple fleets protecting two different installations, and they eventually merged into a large fleet that I was not able to beat until I could collect my entire empire's fleet together, plus build a few more PD escorts to handle the debilitating AMM spam. I was finally able to defeat their fleet, leaving a string of their disabled ships half way across the system, with fairly minimal losses on my side. I then boarded and captured each ship. As a result, I now have about 600ktons of Precursor ships, which nearly doubles my empire's military tonnage. However, their tech is about one level below mine in most areas including ECM/weapons/sensors etc.

The first big issue is that the engines have NO fuel efficiency tech at all; they're still using one liter per engine power hour. Even getting them home to a shipyard where I can repair them will take 45 to 60 million liters of fuel, and that's a significant disincentive to try using them offensively

The other big issue is that about half of that tonnage is offensive missile ship, and up to now I have avoided using missiles at all. I did recently started building some small fast ASMs to distract enemy AMMs and keep the AMM spam off my fleet, but I haven't built any ships to launch them yet, and I certainly don't need ten 30kton missile cruisers to do so.

Hence my question is... what should I do with them? I could park them in orbit around my home planets, load them with legit ASMs and never use them unless I get attacked. I could try to re-engine the non-missile ships with more fuel efficient engines and use those either offensively or as colony garrison forces, but there's quite a mix of ship classes and I'd have to retool for each class to do so. Or should I just tow them home using civilian tugs and scrap them for minerals? Most are pretty heavily damaged, although I repaired the essential components (engines, fuel tanks, and crew quarters) using MSP from my fleet support vessels, so I may not get a lot of useful components out of scrapping them.

I guess one other option would be to SM in some more reasonable engines (still at the lower engine tech level, just with commensurate fuel economy tech, with the rationale being that it's a game reason (NPCs don't use fuel until 1.14 I believe) that they ignored fuel efficiency, and real ships at this level of tech would be better.
 

Offline TheTalkingMeowth

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Re: What to do with captured spoiler ships? *Warning spoilers*
« Reply #1 on: October 12, 2021, 12:09:51 PM »
If they are underteched and inefficient, I'd consider scrapping them. Beam combatants that can't keep up with the fleet are pretty useless, and if you don't have missiles for the missile ships then that chunk of tonnage is useless too.

You might save fuel by tugging a shipyard to the system rather than tugging the ships back individually (you'd have to work out the logistics to see if this is a good idea yourself).

If you captured any of their heavy gauss turret PD ships, those might be worth hanging on to and maybe even refitting to fleet speed since more PD is always nice. Or just parking in orbit to defend a colony. Electronics refits are cheap, after all.
 

Offline nuclearslurpee

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Re: What to do with captured spoiler ships? *Warning spoilers*
« Reply #2 on: October 12, 2021, 12:11:58 PM »
I would just scrap them. The ships are out of date, don't support the rest of your fleet at all, and you don't have the logistics to make them useful. That 600k tons would be better filled with ships you built yourself as the cost to refit these into something useful would be quite high. If the fuel cost to fly them home would be too high, consider using some tugs with more fuel-efficient engines to do the transport.

One thing to note, I believe you may have to repair in a shipyard before scrapping a ship if there is armor damage. It may be worth trying to work out the costs involved (look up various related dev posts to do this), and it may end up being more useful to scuttle the ships in place and send salvage ships instead. Even if scrapping is technically worth more, salvage may be easier and less micro-intensive for you as well.

FYI, NPRs do use fuel however they are still able to fly their ships when out of fuel (as the AI is not capable of correctly handling refueling logistics otherwise). These ships just don't really need fuel efficiency due to their particular role meaning they don't have to fly around very much and don't need the range.
 

Offline Garfunkel

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Re: What to do with captured spoiler ships? *Warning spoilers*
« Reply #3 on: October 12, 2021, 09:40:23 PM »
We do have a Spoiler forum for this kind of stuff.
 

Offline nakorkren (OP)

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Re: What to do with captured spoiler ships? *Warning spoilers*
« Reply #4 on: October 12, 2021, 10:13:16 PM »
Oops, I missed that, sorry. Is there a way I can move the thread there?
 

Offline kilo

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Re: What to do with captured spoiler ships? *Warning spoilers*
« Reply #5 on: October 13, 2021, 01:24:15 AM »
An alternative to tugging the ships would be scuttling them after evacuating the boarding parties. The intact components will be salvaged and the resources recovered are pretty much what you get from scrapping. Another advantage is that it keeps the shipyards unoccupied, as you need military or repair yards to do the scrapping, if i am not completely mistaken.
 

Offline Zincat

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Re: What to do with captured spoiler ships? *Warning spoilers*
« Reply #6 on: October 13, 2021, 08:40:42 AM »
What has already been said is correct. You might try to tug one of them back for scrapping, and if the results are underwhelming scuttling + a salvage ship is better than keeping shipyards occupied.

Are you sure they are underteched in all areas? If there's somewhere they are not, scrapping might yield some useful components...

Finally a note. You said you have 10 30k ton missile ships. Those seem to be the most useless ones for sure, since you don't use missiles that much and if you do you can either build useful ships yourself, or orbital missile platforms, and these would be much better due to tech and not having tonnage for things you don't want etc.
But... you did not detail what the other 300k tons of ships are. AMM ships? Smaller missile ships? Beam warships? To be honest, none of these sounds much interesting for your fleet due to speed and fuel concerns.

BUT if there's a couple of PD ships, or even long range beam warships, they might have some usefulness as immobile "defensive" platforms of sort for outlying colonies or fuel harvester stacks. After all, you just need to repair them and tug them there. Depending on your situation, and on the designs of these ships in question, they might or might now be useful. Just give it a thought. A couple of extra ships are always a couple of extra ships after all...
 

Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: What to do with captured spoiler ships? *Warning spoilers*
« Reply #7 on: April 26, 2022, 02:07:59 AM »
I would scrap them.  In some cases, you can do interesting things with the components.

When I was at Ion tech, I managed to get some salvaged 250,000km ranged lasers and fire controls, that I could just shoe horn one into a 1000 ton ship.  With boosted engines, it could outrun and outrange everything but a beam capital ship, so I developed a strategy of identifying and killing the beam ships with missiles, running the enemy out of missiles, and then chasing down the empties with my part alien tech light cavalry ships.

A very good stopgap until I researched the technology myself.
 

Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: What to do with captured spoiler ships? *Warning spoilers*
« Reply #8 on: April 26, 2022, 02:29:13 AM »
The following component types can be useful:
Fire controls with technology beyond what you have
Beam weapons with range beyond what you have
Jump Engines that are more efficient that you can build.  I salvaged one of these for my jump assault squadron.
Sensors
Captured missiles can sometimes be useful as chaff, if get into a long war without significant ordnance factories to rebuild stocks quickly.

Alien ships are so often a different fleet speed, inefficient engines, short crew endurance or really crappy maintenance endurance, so unless you need to use them IMMEDIATELY you are better off taking them apart to find out what makes them tick.

Sometimes you can get enough commercial engines salvaged that it is worth a production run of freighters with them, since the most expensive component of a freighter is usually the engine.  And salvaged terraformer components are definitely worth it, iirc the game treats salvaged ones interchangeable with your own.