Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: July 06, 2020, 07:29:59 AM »
Missiles are expensive, but so is trying to fly a fleet through hundreds of 70,000km/s missiles coming every 5 seconds when you only have ion tech. What missiles allow you to do is substitute quantity for quality in a really direct way; 100 half speed missiles are almost exactly as effective as 50 full speed missiles. In my experience industry builds up faster than research, and particularly against the industry free spoilers, allows you to take the fight to them much sooner than if you waited until you could match them head on.
Energy weapons are definitely the correct tool in jump assaults; I'm just not convinced of their role outside of that. The amount of PD guns you need to close with a base and not take horrible losses to the AMMs is sobering, and then once you get there you still have to deal with the fact that they have strength 37 lasers and you have strength 10. Much better to park at 20 million klicks and snipe their AMM ships with missiles. EW for cleanup is an option though.
That's a risky strategy and there is little guarantee that they will leave your jump tenders alone. The last assault I did, I lost as many jump tenders as warships even though there were 3x as many warships. The tenders were the smallest thing I sent though and I lost two in the first 5 seconds. Also, to achieve high fleet speed relatively little of a ship's hull is devoted to weapons; this means that jump tenders have to sacrifice passive defenses as well as weapons and so are "very" fragile compared to the combat ships. The idea of not including enough jump tenders to bring the entire fleet through in one go is not something I'd considered, but I don't think it's a reliable plan.
A middle ground between commercial jump assault vessels and this strategy would be to build cheaper, slower, but still military drive jump tenders that can maintain the same passives as the warships because they have less engine. This would hurt strategic mobility, but so would using commercial assault ships. And you could have a small number of full-speed tenders to let the fleet move in secure territory. This still doesn't address the obscene cost of large military jump drives, but that is the price of using big capital ships.
You don't need to kill all AMM every 5 second turn and even doing that take relatively little effort anyway in comparison with box launched ASM missiles, especially in a long term perspective. AMMs do like 1 point of damage so a ship with just a decent amount of shields could tank them very well and then retreat and recharge the shield. A decently big ship can have hundreds of points of shield strength with not too high a technology. Combine that with strong PD and you will weather the most devastating AMM storm. If your ships are already designed to defend against large box launched ASM hordes you should be just fine. If you can already take down 100+ box launched missiles swarms with PD alone then those AMM should not really be much of a problem, most effective PD can shoot every 5 second increments already.
You also can fire your own close range very fast ASM as you approach close to the enemy who then will soak most of the fire in the process. I usually also have some escorts with rapid firing anti-craft missiles and then you have your own AMM missiles too.
It is the combination of these tactics that makes it so effective. You don't have just ONE tool to fix every situation you have many.
Personally I would not even try attacking the AMM missile bases with ASM before I'm close enough to start receiving their AMM against my ship, that is the point you release the ASM specifically designed for that purpose.
There is nothing wrong with using missiles but just saying beam is not worth it is so not true as they are way more effective from a resource perspective as you can generally have a bigger fleet if you use the mined resource more efficiently by spreading the costs better. It also might be that you are not using very effective PD designs or mostly small ships with very little durability.
I also presume that any attack against a stationary object such as JP and planet will be done with sufficient force... we are never going to do this with with equal forces. Then beam weapons and shields are the most efficient as they will cost less resources to use, especially long term.