Posted by: Michael Sandy
« on: May 27, 2018, 07:16:03 PM »Another trick you can use with sensor missiles is to gauge enemy sensor sensitivity. First, there is the cheesy way, where when the missile is fairly close to a known alien inhabited body, switch to 5 second sub-phase, and see at what distance you get a detection interrupt.
You can also just send a series of them in ahead of your fleet as you are moving in, and thereby detect when their fleet leaves their planet, presumably upon detecting your fleet.
It won't detect everything, because some enemy ships patrol. I put notes on the galactic map of what ships and number I detect in various systems, especially for Precursors, because I have noticed that the smaller ships tend to patrol. Which is great programming, in my opinion, because it means you can't count on Pearl Harboring them with a 2-stage missile barrage fired from across the system, counting on homing missiles to kill everything.
That said, I have encountered systems with such massive Lagrange point networks that launching 2-stage missile bombardments from a Lagrange point and then jumping billions of km away was an option
You can also just send a series of them in ahead of your fleet as you are moving in, and thereby detect when their fleet leaves their planet, presumably upon detecting your fleet.
It won't detect everything, because some enemy ships patrol. I put notes on the galactic map of what ships and number I detect in various systems, especially for Precursors, because I have noticed that the smaller ships tend to patrol. Which is great programming, in my opinion, because it means you can't count on Pearl Harboring them with a 2-stage missile barrage fired from across the system, counting on homing missiles to kill everything.
That said, I have encountered systems with such massive Lagrange point networks that launching 2-stage missile bombardments from a Lagrange point and then jumping billions of km away was an option