Three updates from my 4.82 game:
I just lost 9 10k ton GEs to a swarm, they were 2nd generation refits with good officers and crews. They were also my only GEs!
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I am currently at war with an NPR, I am faster than them, but do not have the salvo density to get passed their massive home fleet so I bypassed it and chased down some freighters/colony ships and then headed to their homeworld (in the B component) figuring I could get a few licks in before home fleet caught up. This is with 3 CruRons of: 1 CLJ, 1 CLE, 2 CLG.
I could barely manage a few hits on their orbital bases, which was sweet btw. So I moved into AMM range to thicken my salvo density but in doing so I entered their longer AMM range so the PD protocols were overriding my specific targeting - which is correct imo. What ended up happening though is that their bases were reloading from the planet and my PD AMM were trying to hit their AMM that was trying to hit my ASM. Very confusing and I lost hundreds of AMM from self destruction!Not sure it is possible to make this 'smarter' unless there was a way to tell the PD if an incoming missile is targeted on a ship.
I ran out of AMM and decided to run away gracefully, the 500k KM I had to traverse to get outside their FC range was hellish as wave after wave of massive AMM salvos bore down on me. One armor 5 15k ton CLE got totally sand papered and lost some engines before finally limping out of range. I repaired the CLE and headed at a slight tangent back in general direction of entry JP. I do not know if they did it on purpose, but they managed to get a fleet in the direct line of my tangent course and the JP (I only know of the single JP, haven't surveyed so they could have came from further out). I skirted that fleet and decided to head to a colony of theirs in the A component. It had no defences and just a small garrison so I bombarded expecting to just do damage and then high tail it out of there. The population surrendered! Alas I had done too much damage and destroyed most of everything, not sure if they had any missiles before I leveled the place.
Problem (already noted by Steve I think) is that the NPR home fleet came along and bombarded the planet later. But also, a freighter came along too so I pwned it and captured the crew as earlier. Of about 15 crew interrogations I got partial geosurvey results for one system - anybody know the formula for intel?
I finally ran for the JP and got away and that got me to thinking that if they had a small squadron of cruisers sitting there waiting I would have been mince meat.
While this fighting was going on, production of 2 more CruRons completed at Earth. I had a 4th CruRon standing guard over the GEs that I had lost earlier - but had brought it home for repairs and refuel
Once I get a couple months training for all 6 CruRons I am going to go back in and see if I can either penetrate their home fleet defences or get some proper hits on their actual home world. Problem is, I have a colony 4 jumps from them and we have both built a lot of JGs! It has one 20k ton PDC and 12 FACs guarding it - snow balls chance in hell of surviving if their home fleet comes out to play.
Currently researching railguns from scratch to design a heavy hitter if I can't get passed their PD.
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Precursors and Star Swarm just spawned in the same system!
And these Precursors have Beam/Missile defence bases plus a very sizable fleet. I finally dragged myself away from the PC around 1:30am after my NPR fight so haven't been watching the Precursor-Swarm fight yet, but they
are fighting.
I never realised, but I presume that Precursors scale the same way NPRs scale as the game progresses? Hence the larger fleet, bases and mine fields?
This game as been virtually bug free and running for ages with 3 NPRs (although one is stuck in a distant B component 50billion km away from nearest survey location and another started same time as me but with poor shipyard generation) 6 Swarms and 6 precursor systems. Total of about 60 systems so far.