Good one Kurt,
A question...what is a lot of planetary sensors and what is their planetary sensor technology level? I am asking because I have lvl 9 or so for the Draak and I'm not sure if I should go for more and if so how many more.
This sort of battle is one of the reasons I'm not all that fond of the "fire at waypoint" strategy. The other thing it seriously illustrates is the difference between real life and game combat. Fire at one target til it pops and then switch targets is almost never a valid real life naval model. In a gunfire combat you never leave a ship unengaged as the effectiveness of an unengaged ship is significantly higher (for all sorts of obvious reasons). In missile combat the actual calculations reflect more a desire to destroy as many targets as possible in the attack, the formula I could post up if your interested. But it goes completely away form the "empire state formation" and "shoot on one till she pops" which dominate almost all space combat games I've ever played since starfleet battles years ago. I actually recall being stunned when someone put all their counters in one hex and fired them all on one target but that is just because I tend to treat game combat as if it was real...hopefully that doesn't come across as daft as it looks.
The changes Steve is proposing for 4.1 look to fix this "overwhelming" salvo tactic. Since in and of itself it seems to invalidate anything but missile as valid combat weapons and makes a mockery of close in point defence. Though admittedly the Sino-Russian battles are a valid counterpoint to that. But the Russians won due to the planetary launches from what I can see, and the fact the IJNs point defence was a mess. If I was the Reich and the alliance I would be building a crap load of small meson bases and the next time anyone makes that sort of threat like the Russian's did I'd launch a joint meson attack and destory their launch bases. The alliances orbital bases should be able to limit the launched missiles effectiveness...assuming the first strike doesn't eliminate all launchers anyway.
Anyhow, it was an enjoyable thanks for the effort Kurt.
The Novarans have Planetary Sensors tech level 550, and they had 40 Deep Space Tracking Systems. They built a lot because they didn't want to have to station ships at all of their warp points, but they wanted to make sure that they detected any ships that jumped into their system.
Your point about naval gunfire combat is one of the problems I had with Starfire, as it was typical to concentrate on one ship until it was crippled or destroyed, then move on to the next, and the next, and so on.
I am becoming less enamored of the "firing at waypoint" strategy, as it makes so much sense that there is no reason not to do it, unless you don't have the endurance to do so. As for the Sino-Russian battles, they were all in orbital space at point blank range, and thus not necessarily good examples. In fact, in retrospect, both the Russians and the Japanese should have specialized their ships more for orbital combat, since they had no real hope of successfully engaging the Alliance or the Reich in deep space on a level playing field. On the other hand, the way I visualized their stategy was something like the dreadnought "craze" prior to WW I, where second and third rank nations were buying dreadnoughts that they didn't need and couldn't afford for political/prestige reasons. The Russians and the Japanese desperately wanted to be interstellar powers, and for that you need a deep-space navy.
Both the Alliance and the Reich have been building meson bases (and the russians too for that matter) ever since the Africans nuked Europe. Of course, none of them have been able to build as many as they would have liked, or had originally planned, but there are a lot of meson bases on Earth these days. Still, the Reich in particular is going to be re-thinking its defense in light of the missile salvoes it was throwing at the Novarans. I'm pretty sure that the Reich's Earth-based missile defense systems would have been able to handle similar salvo sizes, but saying the words "pretty-sure" in relation to the defenses that stand in between you and destruction means that they probably aren't good enough.
Unfortunately, in Aurora v3.11 there is a bug that limits meson weaponry to anti-missile roles only. Meson weapons cannot hurt anything else, and no other weapons will work through the Earth's atmosphere, so its either nukes or army divisions. No one wants to detonate any more nukes on Earth, and to be sure of defeating the Russians both major nations would have to act in concert, but that's not likely to happen now that the Reich has attacked the Novarans. The Alliance fears that the Reich has turned expansionist, something to fear given the Reich's birth in WW II (or the War of European Unification, as the Reich calls it).
After all of the battles recently, the survivors are going to be doing quite a bit of post-combat evaluation. It should be interesting.
Kurt
