What's Going On In Your Empire: C# Edition

[Ulzgoroth]

I just hit a world held by a different and perhaps squishier spoiler.

I had little idea how much defense force I'd find - I don't know whether I didn't bother to do an active scan or what, but all I knew was that there was a warm and hostile presence randomly situated on Promethia II.

So I dropped 10k tons of heavy battle tanks on them.

Code: [Select]

Flamberge Assault Tank - 2059
Transport Size (tons) 104     Cost 12.48     Armour 108     Hit Points 108
Annual Maintenance Cost 1.6     Resupply Cost 45
Heavy Anti-Vehicle:      Shots 1      Penetration 90      Damage 90
Heavy Crew-Served Anti-Personnel:      Shots 6      Penetration 22      Damage 15It turned out they were all infantry, heavily equipped but with greatly inferior tech. They might have enough firepower to run roughshod over the 'military police' battalions that make up my only planetary defense forces, but against the assault tanks they might as well have been unarmed, scoring numerous hits but not disabling a single vehicle. I neglected to bring replacement logistics for the assault formations so they ran out of ammo about the same time they ran out of things to shoot.

It turned out, not too surprisingly, that all I'd captured was a handful of automines. Not much, still worth the exercise.

[AlStar]

Your tanks have three times the armor, twice the HP, and weapons somewhere between 2 and 3 times more effective than my own.

I would very much like to have a squad of your ground units around, I must say.

[captainwolfer]

I just hit a world held by a different and perhaps squishier spoiler.

I had little idea how much defense force I'd find - I don't know whether I didn't bother to do an active scan or what, but all I knew was that there was a warm and hostile presence randomly situated on Promethia II.

So I dropped 10k tons of heavy battle tanks on them.

Code: [Select]

Flamberge Assault Tank - 2059
Transport Size (tons) 104     Cost 12.48     Armour 108     Hit Points 108
Annual Maintenance Cost 1.6     Resupply Cost 45
Heavy Anti-Vehicle:      Shots 1      Penetration 90      Damage 90
Heavy Crew-Served Anti-Personnel:      Shots 6      Penetration 22      Damage 15It turned out they were all infantry, heavily equipped but with greatly inferior tech. They might have enough firepower to run roughshod over the 'military police' battalions that make up my only planetary defense forces, but against the assault tanks they might as well have been unarmed, scoring numerous hits but not disabling a single vehicle. I neglected to bring replacement logistics for the assault formations so they ran out of ammo about the same time they ran out of things to shoot.

It turned out, not too surprisingly, that all I'd captured was a handful of automines. Not much, still worth the exercise.

I think you are fighting an NPR, not a spoiler. I could be wrong though

[nuclearslurpee]

I just hit a world held by a different and perhaps squishier spoiler.

I had little idea how much defense force I'd find - I don't know whether I didn't bother to do an active scan or what, but all I knew was that there was a warm and hostile presence randomly situated on Promethia II.

So I dropped 10k tons of heavy battle tanks on them.

Code: [Select]

Flamberge Assault Tank - 2059
Transport Size (tons) 104     Cost 12.48     Armour 108     Hit Points 108
Annual Maintenance Cost 1.6     Resupply Cost 45
Heavy Anti-Vehicle:      Shots 1      Penetration 90      Damage 90
Heavy Crew-Served Anti-Personnel:      Shots 6      Penetration 22      Damage 15It turned out they were all infantry, heavily equipped but with greatly inferior tech. They might have enough firepower to run roughshod over the 'military police' battalions that make up my only planetary defense forces, but against the assault tanks they might as well have been unarmed, scoring numerous hits but not disabling a single vehicle. I neglected to bring replacement logistics for the assault formations so they ran out of ammo about the same time they ran out of things to shoot.

It turned out, not too surprisingly, that all I'd captured was a handful of automines. Not much, still worth the exercise.

I think you are fighting an NPR, not a spoiler. I could be wrong though

Given that his tech level is quite high, I can see how it could be at least one of the spoiler races which would certainly be outteched in this case.

[Ulzgoroth]

It is most definitely a spoiler, not a regular NPR. You might not be able to infer that from the battle report I gave, and I couldn't have inferred it from the invasion itself, but I'm quite familiar with the faction in question.

[captainwolfer]

It is most definitely a spoiler, not a regular NPR. You might not be able to infer that from the battle report I gave, and I couldn't have inferred it from the invasion itself, but I'm quite familiar with the faction in question.

I didn’t think any spoilers used automines

[Ulzgoroth]

It is most definitely a spoiler, not a regular NPR. You might not be able to infer that from the battle report I gave, and I couldn't have inferred it from the invasion itself, but I'm quite familiar with the faction in question.

I didn’t think any spoilers used automines

It's possible that the automines were put there by an NPR and then taken over by the spoilers. I don't have any way to know the history, but it is a place where the Windorah Empire might have set up a mining outpost.

[Steve Walmsley]

I've taken a different approach to my other combat vessels too. As usual, I have based on them on designs of the time, but this time the battleships and destroyers have only 6 months endurance, the heavy cruisers and light escort cruisers have 12 months while the light patrol cruisers have 24 months.

Interesting approach. I've never been brave enough to do something like this, mostly because I expect my ships to have to camp out on a jump point at some time or another so having disparate deployment times (and maintenance lives) would make that complicated to say the least. I have tried setting different fuel ranges for cruisers vs system craft for example.

Let us know how this unusual doctrine works! 

I'm trying to replicate an early 1900s approach where the cruisers do most of the work and the battleships remain in port until called upon to fight a major battle. In this scenario, the battleships would not be engaged in any jump point defence, or picket duties. They will leave port to engage in battle and then return. That's the plan anyway

Besides, during that period, some cruisers were the same size or larger than the pre-dreadnought battleships of the time. They were designated for different roles with different armament and capabilities, rather than designated by size as tended to be the case in the 20th century.

For example, the Powerful class cruisers of 1894 were 14,200-tons. The Drake class cruisers launched in 1899 were 14,150-tons. The contemporary battleships were the Majestic class of 14,560-tons (nine ships in 1894), Canopus 13,150 tons in 1896, London 14,500 tons in 1899 and Duncan 13,270-tons in 1899.

[Andrew]

The Size of large cruisers and battleships being the same continues until the 1930's fast battleships. Before then the Battlecruisers (or Dreadnought Armoured Cruisers) were the same size or larger as their Dreadnought Battleship contempories. Historically its down to the extra speed of the cruisers requiring a lot more machinery than the Battleships had so if you wanted any reasonable firepower and protection combined with speed you got something the same size as a Battleship

[Ulzgoroth]

Minted a new discretionary medal for extraordinary feats after crushing a huge spoiler incursion, again out in Windorah space.

The first round was significant but hardly legendary - my best cruiser squadron (4x 7.5 kt cruisers, 1x 10kt command cruiser) plowed through about twice their tonnage in enemy ships including two never-before-seen larger types. Didn't scratch the paint, though they almost managed to knock down the command cruiser's shield and one of the cruisers consumed all its MSP and burned out a laser cannon.

Then as the squadron made its way home to resupply and offload rescuees, it turned out there was another enemy squadron sneaking around in the dark.

And they rather one-sidedly massacred a Windorah force. A bit strange to see the weapons discharges, it seemed like a lot fewer Windorah ships were contributing to the fight than were dying. Maybe a range thing, I had no units able to see details beyond weapon discharges and wrecks appearing.

So I picked out the one cruiser that had managed to make it through the first phase with full MSP and sent it back alone (and also dispatched a second cruiser squadron, but that one would be a considerable distance behind and arrive too late to do anything so far.) With careful use of range control and shield regeneration, the solitary 11-year-old cruiser took on four semi-comparable warships at once and destroyed them all in the course of 10 minutes with only minor armor damage.

...All while carrying triple its own crew count in survivors rescued from the Windorah lifepods, who were subsequently safely delivered to one of my outer colonies.

[AlStar]

My empire has spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out how to deal with size 8 ASMs that are moving at 30,000 km/s with multiple decoys.

After my explorer's first encounter ("Hey! There's a ship over there! It appears to be holding distance! Incoming Missiles! Full power to guns!" *Sound of five lasers missing* *SPLAT*) we've gradually been improving our designs.

In fact, you can see the progression in the lines of wrecks that are all spaced roughly five minute's travel time from each other!

For instance, we discovered that the tracking speed of your fire controls is really, really important. Turns out that just bringing those up from 2,000 km/s to 6,000 km/s tripled our to-hit% (who'd have guessed?). Now, on the fourth run into the hostile system, our latest fleet is our heaviest armored (going from 3 or 5 layers to 5/7), most well-armed, and most numerous. We're also trying out anti-missile jamming.

If this doesn't work, we're playing around with some turreted quad-lasers with the gearing needed so that they can track as quickly as the missiles move. We're avoiding that for the moment, because it will require an entirely new ship design - and probably a large one, at that, since both the turrets and the beam fire controls that they'll need are huge.

Normally I'd probably also go with trying to develop some AMMs and/or mass gauss defenses, but my empire has somehow literally never produced a single missile scientist, so I'm roleplaying that we're morally against such weapons ("dishonorable to strike at an enemy that's not at the space version of knife-fighting range.")

In other news, my starmap plot is a complete mess. For a good long while I was able to shift things around so that nothing overlapped. But then my explorers managed to find a link between the extreme far end of one of my lines and a system that's inside of two other loops. There's simply no way to rearrange the plot so that I don't have at least one system line crossing - it distresses me greatly (but not quite enough to SM out the offending connection.)

[nakorkren]

My empire has spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out how to deal with size 8 ASMs that are moving at 30,000 km/s with multiple decoys.

A few hard-earned tips:

• You will rarely be fast enough to get from the start of the enemy's AMM range into beam fighting range and then kill them with beam weapons before they run out of missiles. Therefore, you should try to run them out of missiles at the edge of their range where any other ships can't hurt you, and you can run away if their missiles are too powerful.
• Speed of the missile when trying to hit it is based on closing distance, so if you run away from the missiles, your ship speed is subtracted from the missile speed, which helps hit chance. If your ship is 5k km/s, that reduces the effective missile speed from 30 to 25k km/s, which is not nothing. In general the faster your ship, the less likely you are to be hit AND the more likely your non-turreted weapons are to hit, so ship speed is important.
• Shields are really helpful for tanking missiles, especially if your enemy is using reduced size launchers which let them launch larger salvos spaced longer apart in time, since the shield can recharge somewhat or entirely in between.
• Bigger ships are more efficient in terms of armor, AND they take more damage before you outright lose one. Hence if you have two big ships you can let one soak some damage, pull back out of range, let the other one soak some damage, and see if the enemy runs out of missiles. Works even better if you have shields that can recharge while out of range.

My personal preference for this situation is large (~50k ton) ships (however many are needed based on how big the enemy's force is) which a lot of shielding, a decent complement of turreted 10cm lasers for quasi-effective and very flexible PD (also good for high DPS at lower tech levels), and larger non-turreted lasers for fighting other beam ships if/when you get into beam range.

[nuclearslurpee]

• Speed of the missile when trying to hit it is based on closing distance, so if you run away from the missiles, your ship speed is subtracted from the missile speed, which helps hit chance. If your ship is 5k km/s, that reduces the effective missile speed from 30 to 25k km/s, which is not nothing. In general the faster your ship, the less likely you are to be hit AND the more likely your non-turreted weapons are to hit, so ship speed is important.

Do you have a source for this? I've never heard of this and it sounds extremely suspect, but I'm assuming you're not pulling this out of nowhere.

[captainwolfer]

I've been playing with fast particle beam/gauss PD battleship, and I haven't seen running away from missiles improve hit chance beyond what would be expected of the base missile speeds.

There is only 3 things that affects PD hit chance as far as I've seen
1. Speed of missile vs PD tracking speed
2. Tactical bonus from ship CO or tactical officer
3. The tech line that gives a percentage bonus to tracking speed the longer a missile is tracked, up to a cap determined by tech.

[nakorkren]

You're right that I've never seen it in patch notes or other gospel. I remember coming up with the experiment using a FAC with a speed comparable to that of an NPC missile, and I thought I remembered it working, but I guess I can't swear to it. Note that it should also apply to forward motion, so... if I was right, I'd think folks would've noticed something was up with moving vs stationary to-hit effectiveness being off. Seriously starting to doubt myself on that point, now.

That said, should be an easy experiment to do (or re-do?); I'll check it out this weekend and report back.