Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread: C# Edition

[Kurt]

Not sure if this is a known issue, or something I'm doing wrong. 

I'm trying to get my fleet to lead my assault transports to a planet occupied by a spoiler with active STO's.  I want my assault carriers and battlecruisers in my fleet to absorb the heavy STO fire as they approach the planet, with the assault transports following 50,000 kilometers behind.  Seems easy enough.  Order the fleet to move to the planet, and hit the "set speed" button to reduce the fleet's speed to match the slower assault transports speed, so they don't leave the troop transports behind.  Then order the assault transports to follow the fleet at 50,000 kilometers separation.  Should work, based on my understanding. 

However, every single time when I hit the time advance button, my fleet's speed resets to its maximum and it leaves the troop transports behind.  Am I doing this wrong?

[Ultimoos]

You might just be doing the order in wrong sequence. You have to click the target planet, then click "move to" order. Now you set the speed and now you press "Add move" button. This ensures the order has all set parameters.
Now the real issue. What you want to achieve probably won't work at all. NPR will prioritize your drop ships and since you need many hours to complete deployment, your warships won't achieve what you want.
just move your warships close enough to provoke STO fire and destroy them all with a salvo of missiles or beam weapons. I was surprised how easy it is to clear STO's from a planet.

[jahwillprovide]

Like destroy the STO fire with beam or missiles or can ships in orbit directly attack STOs from a distance? Cause that would be really nice. I always run into STOs with beam weapons so I couldnt shoot those down

[Ultimoos]

Yes. I should have probably made a spoiler warning before.

If you have a ship with active sensors than can detect relatively small signatures than that ship will single out all STO's that fired in it's vision range. Let's say 10 STO's fired at your ship. Now you have a separate signature of those 10 STO weapons that can be directly targeted by your weapon targeting systems. Those STO's do not get fortification bonuses and can be easily destroyed by your beam weapons and missiles.

[jahwillprovide]

Invasions are going to be so much easier now
I always armored the drop ships up and lets the ground troops kill the STOs before coming over with my fleet.

[nuclearslurpee]

Not sure if this is a known issue, or something I'm doing wrong. 

I'm trying to get my fleet to lead my assault transports to a planet occupied by a spoiler with active STO's.  I want my assault carriers and battlecruisers in my fleet to absorb the heavy STO fire as they approach the planet, with the assault transports following 50,000 kilometers behind.  Seems easy enough.  Order the fleet to move to the planet, and hit the "set speed" button to reduce the fleet's speed to match the slower assault transports speed, so they don't leave the troop transports behind.  Then order the assault transports to follow the fleet at 50,000 kilometers separation.  Should work, based on my understanding. 

However, every single time when I hit the time advance button, my fleet's speed resets to its maximum and it leaves the troop transports behind.  Am I doing this wrong?

There is a checkbox that says "Use Maximum Speed" at the upper-right of the orders pane. Make sure that is unchecked.

[Kurt]

You might just be doing the order in wrong sequence. You have to click the target planet, then click "move to" order. Now you set the speed and now you press "Add move" button. This ensures the order has all set parameters.
Now the real issue. What you want to achieve probably won't work at all. NPR will prioritize your drop ships and since you need many hours to complete deployment, your warships won't achieve what you want.
just move your warships close enough to provoke STO fire and destroy them all with a salvo of missiles or beam weapons. I was surprised how easy it is to clear STO's from a planet.

It might be the order I'm giving the commands in, I'll try that. 

My plan did work, by the way, as my assault transports lagged far enough behind my fleet that the STO's had already fired on the warships and ignored the transports.  The STO's were in two varieties, a powerful anti-ship weapon that had good range and good damage, probably a particle beam of some sort, and point defense weapons.  The particle beam weapon takes time to charge, and by the time they recharged after engaging my fleet when they entered firing range, it was too late, so my transports escaped unscathed.   

As for destroying them from orbit, my ships were only getting hit percentages below 4% with their lasers, and I didn't want to drain my maintenance supplies bombarding the planet for hours.  My marines cleaned up the STO's without too much problem after landing. 

[Kurt]

Not sure if this is a known issue, or something I'm doing wrong. 

I'm trying to get my fleet to lead my assault transports to a planet occupied by a spoiler with active STO's.  I want my assault carriers and battlecruisers in my fleet to absorb the heavy STO fire as they approach the planet, with the assault transports following 50,000 kilometers behind.  Seems easy enough.  Order the fleet to move to the planet, and hit the "set speed" button to reduce the fleet's speed to match the slower assault transports speed, so they don't leave the troop transports behind.  Then order the assault transports to follow the fleet at 50,000 kilometers separation.  Should work, based on my understanding. 

However, every single time when I hit the time advance button, my fleet's speed resets to its maximum and it leaves the troop transports behind.  Am I doing this wrong?

There is a checkbox that says "Use Maximum Speed" at the upper-right of the orders pane. Make sure that is unchecked.

That's it!  I knew it was something like that.  Thanks!

[Ultimoos]

You might just be doing the order in wrong sequence. You have to click the target planet, then click "move to" order. Now you set the speed and now you press "Add move" button. This ensures the order has all set parameters.
Now the real issue. What you want to achieve probably won't work at all. NPR will prioritize your drop ships and since you need many hours to complete deployment, your warships won't achieve what you want.
just move your warships close enough to provoke STO fire and destroy them all with a salvo of missiles or beam weapons. I was surprised how easy it is to clear STO's from a planet.

It might be the order I'm giving the commands in, I'll try that. 

My plan did work, by the way, as my assault transports lagged far enough behind my fleet that the STO's had already fired on the warships and ignored the transports.  The STO's were in two varieties, a powerful anti-ship weapon that had good range and good damage, probably a particle beam of some sort, and point defense weapons.  The particle beam weapon takes time to charge, and by the time they recharged after engaging my fleet when they entered firing range, it was too late, so my transports escaped unscathed.   

As for destroying them from orbit, my ships were only getting hit percentages below 4% with their lasers, and I didn't want to drain my maintenance supplies bombarding the planet for hours.  My marines cleaned up the STO's without too much problem after landing.

How do you design your dropships? I can't even imagine how they can survive STO fire when even with drop modules it takes hours to deploy ground troops.

Edit: I just realized there is an Orbital drop order...

[bankshot]

Precursor planet question:

After a lot of back and forth fighting to pick off ships orbiting their planet while minimizing damage from a substantial long range STO contingent (6K tons, 6 squadrons of 11 >300K range lasers) the precursor fleet has finally been wrecked.  There is also a 58K ton regular ground forces signature.  But this world shows a population with a Thermal 90 and EM 50 signature. I've seen thermal signatures on other precursor worlds but never one so large, and I don't remember seeing EM signatures on prior worlds.

Would this be due to the combined 64K ton ground forces signature or are there actually installations (perhaps ruins?) on the planet?  I can't use ELINT to check since the STO will destroy any orbiting ship and the planet will move out of range of my sensor when the 5 day production tick hits so I can't get intelligence points.

I assume by the time I can eliminate 66 long range STO (potentially plus more PD STO) troops via orbital bombardment I'll have destroyed any installations that are currently on the planet.  I'll be happy to post a copy of my database if anyone is interested in having a look. 

[Ghostly]

Precursor planet question:

After a lot of back and forth fighting to pick off ships orbiting their planet while minimizing damage from a substantial long range STO contingent (6K tons, 6 squadrons of 11 >300K range lasers) the precursor fleet has finally been wrecked.  There is also a 58K ton regular ground forces signature.  But this world shows a population with a Thermal 90 and EM 50 signature. I've seen thermal signatures on other precursor worlds but never one so large, and I don't remember seeing EM signatures on prior worlds.

Would this be due to the combined 64K ton ground forces signature or are there actually installations (perhaps ruins?) on the planet?  I can't use ELINT to check since the STO will destroy any orbiting ship and the planet will move out of range of my sensor when the 5 day production tick hits so I can't get intelligence points.

I assume by the time I can eliminate 66 long range STO (potentially plus more PD STO) troops via orbital bombardment I'll have destroyed any installations that are currently on the planet.  I'll be happy to post a copy of my database if anyone is interested in having a look.

It's not uncommon for Precursor worlds to have supporting installations, I often see Refueling/Ordnance Stations and DSTS's. Those are independent of any ruin you could find on that world and are indeed likely to get destroyed during STO suppression, it's up to you whether to sacrifice them or risk an opposed landing with dropships. Any installations you might recover from a ruin do not technically exist until they've been excavated, and will not get damaged. Also, STO's active sensors also emit a EM signature, but those show up as a separate contact from the main population. And finally, I'm pretty sure ELINT intel is gained independently of 5 day ticks and you could collect it from any small population by issuing an order to follow the planet at a distance, but collecting it takes a while and it should be impossible to gain any from 100 Xenophobia species, which all spoilers are.

[bankshot]

Having both a Refueling and an ordinance station makes sense as there was a fleet of fuel harvesters plus escorts near the system's gas giant and a few ships with box launchers in the fleet guarding this planet. Tracking stations would also make sense.  The planet has four contacts, the STO signature, the ground forces signature, the active sensor, and the population.  I hadn't considered that they would have 100 xenophobia so yeah that would prevent gaining anything from ELINT. I'd gotten intelligence on active sensor ranges earlier but that's tracked separately.

My dropships aren't armored so my doctrine is to clear any STOs from orbit first.  I have six 30Kt brigade dropships, followed by ten 30K standard  transports.  The dropships create a "landing zone" for the rest of the army to deploy. As this is a forested world and they've had plenty of time to dig in I'll probably need every bit of my army to have any chance of success.

[Andrew]

The ruins survive , but I have almost never taken the limited facilities intact if there is a garrison , as even if I don't blast the STO from range they get wrecked during the ground fighting.  Frankly the damage taken to even heavily armoured troop transports is going to be more inconvenient to fix and expensive than building new installations , there are only deep space tracking, ordenance transfer and refuelling stations until you start exploiting the ruins

[Ghostly]

I also regretted making opposed landings the few times I did so, you can "cheat" by moving the dropships towards the planet in a large increment so the STOs won't get to fire at them on approach, but dropships will still require a separate 5-second increment to actually drop troops so they're bound to take at least one full salvo at point-blank range then more damage as they move back. The only way I can see this being economically worthwhile is if the planet has very difficult terrain (see: Jungle Mountain) and you would actually waste more resources on MSP needed to sustain anti-STO fire. Add this to the way unloading troops from normal troop bays works ("Unload all Ground Units" order will unload everything at once when the timer ends so the defender will never have a chance to engage a partially disembarked force) and dropships become situationally useful at best.

[babygenaral]

gday mates hope your all having a good day i was wondering if there's a way to make the text bigger because im dyslexic and at this size it is a bit hard to read it properly so if there's a way to enlarge the text please let me know