Quote from: captainwolfer on Yesterday at 11:07:21 PM

New question: Does multiple warheads on a missile work with ground bombardment? If I understand the rules correctly, multiple smaller warheads will deal less collateral damage to infrastructure than 1 large warhead because each warhead will have less overkill when it hits a civilian building

Per Steve 2.2.0 Dev Post:

Quote

The chance to hit for the missile is calculated normally and then applied to a separate attack from each warhead.

The multiple attacks will all be applied against the same target, which could be a ship, population or individual missile.

Emphasis mine. This seems to suggest that multiple warheads on a missile will work with ground bombardment as long as each warhead is at least strength-1 (otherwise the fractional damage would be ignored, I presume).

Quote from: Droll on Yesterday at 04:09:54 PM

Quote from: nuclearslurpee on Yesterday at 03:16:18 PM

IMO we need some way to get intelligence on what ground units the other races use, so that we actually have some motivation to design such specialist units. Currently without such information we have no good reason not to build generalist (or terrain-specialized only) units, and by the time we are engaging an enemy in combat to gain such information, well, ground forces take so long to build up that this is simply too late to count as actionable intel.

That's what the ELINT modules are meant for but they operate on an impractical timeline as there is so much other potentially irrelevant intel that they can uncover.

It would be cool if ships with ELINT capability could be ordered to listen in for specific things like ground force tech or space force tech etc. at the cost of not learning much about other aspects of an alien force.

Does ELINT actually show you what types, kinds, numbers of ground units are present? I didn't think that was part of the information set it could access.

IMO we need some way to get intelligence on what ground units the other races use, so that we actually have some motivation to design such specialist units. Currently without such information we have no good reason not to build generalist (or terrain-specialized only) units, and by the time we are engaging an enemy in combat to gain such information, well, ground forces take so long to build up that this is simply too late to count as actionable intel.

Quote from: Ulzgoroth on Yesterday at 02:42:57 AM

Ground combat: are there any contexts where HAC is a sensible weapon choice?

The case against: HAC has a wildly unbalanced AP/damage profile, with 5x AP and 2x damage. I don't believe there are any targets that achieve a similar distribution. For almost all units except infantry, armor is at most equal to HP. So in the ideal case where you manage to get a target that exactly matches your AP...the HAC will be generating less than half as many wounds as a HAV would do to its inadequate damage. And the HAV weighs less.

The closest thing to a good case for it would have to be found in infantry, since HPA infantry can have armor double their HP. But they still don't have a high armor multiplier, so you've got to be fighting up a steep tech gradient. If the enemy has armor 50% better than your weapons, that makes a good fit for MAC. For there to be any point in going to HAC you need an even higher ratio.

Am I missing something, or is it really only for fighting vastly superior infantry or handicapping yourself for the sake of roleplay?

It is a reasonable choice to "balance" between having full-blown MAV/HAV and lighter automatic weapons. The 5 AP means it has some ability to penetrate armor, but with three shots it will do okay as an anti-infantry or anti-LVH weapon as well. That said, I usually find MAC better for this but that is in part because the NPRs don't use a lot of heavier unit types, the accounting may be different in case of multiple player races.

Is your decimal separator a comma?

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=10637.0