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[EuchreJack]

Fighters = Workers.  Yeah, one meson cannon, but there is usually plenty of workers.  I think the queen has like six heavy meson cannons.  So don't waste your build points on shields.

[Karlito]

Ahhh so those are the space bugs. Been wondering if I'd see them soon. Since my battle tactics are very much in...uh...it's 'testing' phases, how would you respond to the threat? I was going to try to build something like 30 fighters armed with lasers and see how much damage they could do (although if the enemy is still sitting on the jump point, my fighters would be blind for a while) but...what would you do?

For now you should probably just put a scout on your side of the jump point and forget about the system until you've got more military experience. The general consensus is that beam-armed fighters aren't terribly useful. Expect to take massive casualties whenever you engage an enemy with them.

EDIT: Also how do you bombard planets? Right now I'm pumping another race's atmosphere full of fluorine, but I'm guessing there's a more accepted way

You can target a planet with missiles if the launching ship is in orbit, but that will destroy infrastructure and potentially population if the radiation levels are too high. I don't know if that's more acceptable than your method of genocide, which will kill off the entire population but leave the infrastructure intact. Ideally, you'd just want to land vastly superior ground forces and take the population and infrastructure mostly intact, though you usually need a substantial tech advantage for that to work.

Also: Dutchling the 1 post escaped lunatic???

[Chocolatemilkgod]

I didn't actually see a queen, but I assume it's there. So I'm going to build meatshields brave fighter volunteers first to distract the workers, armed with the caronades, and then I'll send in a few bigger ships with corranades to overwhelm the queens shielding and destroy it. Hopefully that works

[Karlito]

I'm pretty sure the worker's mesons will out-range pretty much all carronades, let alone the tiny ones you'll try and fit on your fighters. Your fleet will be cut to pieces. You probably want several larger warships with redundant systems and large laser turrets to fight the swarm workers, or a whole lot of missiles.

[EuchreJack]

Aurora Combat = Missiles, heh.

If you're going the plasma carronade route, you'll need wicked fast ships, as the Workers and Queen will outrange you and will stay out of range unless you're faster.  And the more time it takes to catch up, the more damage you'll sustain.

The fighter tactic only works if you outnumber the Swarm.

[Flying Dice]

Fighters = Workers.  Yeah, one meson cannon, but there is usually plenty of workers.  I think the queen has like six heavy meson cannons.  So don't waste your build points on shields.

Not quite. There are three classes of Swarm ship.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Soldiers are the 800 ton, FAC-sized bugs with single meson cannons and ~10km/s v_max. Queens are the motherships for the Soldiers, mount heavy mesons, and have fast-recharging shields, making EW much more effective than anything but a total saturation bombardment of thousands of missiles arriving in small intervals. Queens can also use a long-term radiation attack to assault inhabited worlds. Workers are the mid-sized bugs that harvest minerals and wrecks to create the eggs that spawn more Soldiers and Workers.

From what I've observed, the most reliable way to bring down Swarm is with fast ships focused on high-DPS lasers, though missiles are also effective against the Soldiers if you've got enough tech to have reliable hit percentages on fast movers. Trying to wear down a Queen's shields with anything lower than midgame (30+ years from a normal start, 50+ from conventional, by my estimation) missile tech is an exercise in frustration unless you're launching salvos of hundreds. With lasers and decent speed, you can usually kill off most of the Soldiers at range and survive the close combat, and then kite the Queen(s) around from beyond their maximum range.

If you're going to build ships specifically to combat Swarm, don't bother with armor or shields, and use engines and power plants with reduced chances to explode on destruction (which is part of the +efficiency -power tech, IIRC). If they hit you at all, they'll be hitting you with mesons, so defensive measures other than ECM are a waste of volume.

[Chocolatemilkgod]

Thanks for the help guys! I don't know when I'll actually get to attacking the swarm but the feedback will definitely help. Going back to the planetary invasion...How do I do it? I think theres two classes of moving troops (transport and dropship?) but I'm not entirely sure. And by 'more advanced tech' what do you mean? Do you mean researching the different types of ground units, training a whole bunch and then sending them off to attack? Finally (I promise ), can i get a detailed scan of a NPR world? Like populations, structures etc? And how does the entire mechanic of moving and landing troops just move in general? Anyway thanks a lot for the help guys!

[Karlito]

So, as you've identified there are two different ship modules that are involved: troop transport bays, and droppods. Each of them comes in two sizes: battalion and company, but the only companies are Marine companies, and the only reason you'd ever want to use Marines is for boarding actions so we'll ignore the company sized ones for now.

So all you really need to launch a ground invasion is a troop transport ship. The transport will need cargo handling systems to load up the battalions in a reasonable time, and it shouldn't be seeing any combat, so it doesn't need any armor or shields, though a few CIWS probably wouldn't be out of place if you want to be extra careful. Therefore, you should probably just take whatever basic freighter design you have and replace the cargo bays with troop transport bays, and you'll have a functional troop transport. Note that the troop transport bays count as civilian components, so your troop transport will actually be classed as a commercial vessel.

Now, it takes time for your troop transports to be loaded and unloaded, with sufficient cargo handling systems it'll probably be on the order of days rather than months, though it's the same time to load and unload. Drop pods also take a certain amount of time to load a battalion, but they can be unloaded instantly, which is useful when launching an invasion, though they do have a drawback.

While the troop transport bays probably aren't the most comfortable accommodations for your would-be conquerors, but they do provide enough space and resources to keep your armies happily contained in space for an indefinite period of time. Drop pods, on the other hand, aren't designed for long term occupation and any battalion left for too long in a drop pod will start to lose morale or readiness or some other important stat (I can't really remember), so it's important to only load battalions into the drop pods right before they're sent off into battle.

You don't actually need drop pods to land you're armies on an enemy planet, troop transports can unload battalions directly onto an enemy colony. The only time you'd want to build dropships is when the opponent controls PDCs on the planet that could launch attacks against your transports. Remember, it'll take a few days for a transport to unload a battalion (I don't believe they can be attacked by enemy ground forces during this time), so if the NPR has a hostile fleet or PDCs that can harm your troop transports, you'll either need to neutralize them before starting the ground invasion, or build well defended drop ships that can withstand planetary defenses.

[Flying Dice]

I believe he was talking about having a fairly high GF strength tech, which enhances their effectiveness. There are a number of methods for invading an enemy planet:

1. You can bring in terraformers and pump chlorine or some other deadly gas into their atmosphere. Note that this is probably the longest-term method, and that you'll need to remove it all later if you want to colonize the planet. Also, this will only kill civilians, and I don't believe that it is recognized as hostile action (and thus won't trigger surrender), so you'll still need to fight it out.

2. High-rad bombardment. There are special warhead techs that boost radiation while reducing power, essentially making dirty bombs that do less damage to industry, letting you wipe out large numbers of civilians, and ideally triggering a surrender without needing to invade. This is usually the method that requires the most recovery time, as the radiation and atmospheric dust will kill productivity for a loooong time.

3. Ordinary bombardment. You're going to be launching missile strikes at enemy ground forces. Your goal here is to do as much damage as possible to ensure success for your own ground forces without doing so much that you wreck the industry you want to capture. This tends to leave lower levels of radiation and atmospheric dust, as well as causing lower civilian casualties.

4. Unaided invasion. If you've got good GF strength tech and a ton of forces, you can drop a few divisions off and fight it out. Depending on relative strengths, this can be both more and less damaging to planetary population and industry as compared to a conventional bombardment, as ground actions have a chance to destroy installations and kill civilians. Essentially, you're going to want to go for the method which will result in the most rapid surrender, as your real goal with (non-RP) invasion is to take as much industry as possible intact, as well as preserving the population for tax income and (eventually) more no-terraforming, no-genemod colonization options. After the conquest, you can use tractor beam-equipped tugs to move any surviving shipyards to your own planets, if you so desire.


Re troop transport, you can also use the general-purpose design, where your transports have both TT bays and drop modules, simplifying logistics. You're probably also going to want to add a CIWS or two as soon as your gauss tech is good enough to make it useful, as that can help save them if they're ambushed by an enemy warship. Personally, I tend to use the bay/transport type as my general-purpose transport, as well as division-sized pure transports for moving large forces in preparation for garrison duty or large assaults.

"Dropship", from my observation, is used more in reference to the fast-movers you use for boarding actions, which are essentially a company-sized set of drop modules bolted to a high power engine. At the moment, boarding is very difficult to pull off without disproportionate losses, and is generally only used for special scenarios and LPs.

You can get both thermal and EM readings on NPR planets, and if you've got a bit of knowledge (or bother doing a comparison with Earth) you can get a general idea of their population (indicated by thermal readings) and industry (EM) (mainly, for both of those, IIRC). I believe that espionage teams can also give you that sort of information, though I might be mistaken, as I never really bother with them.

[gimlet]

^^ What these guys said.  It's been a long time since I played long enough to do ground invasions, so I was just puttering around with ground combat by putting a 2nd population on Earth and then fighting them with slight differences.  I left one with mostly default units, and waited to attack until the 2nd built 2 sets of 4xreplacement battalion.  It took about 8 months for pop2 to defeat pop1, which it did with only a couple of non-replacement battalions lost (plus all the replacements and while continually building more - I think it managed to finish 2 more sets of 4 and used up most of them).  THEN once all pop1's units were destroyed, it finally told me how much "police strength" would be required to actually conquer pop1 - this turned out to be about 380 police strength for just over the 500 million pop1 had grown to (police strength = total of the defence factors, so I had to build about 3 rounds of 4xgarrison to get enough to actually conquer, while rushing troop strenght multiplier tech to help out).

Then I SM'd some ships just about as described and tested out dropping on a colony:
civilian Troop Transports with about 5xTroop Transport bays each for long term carrying of troops
military Assault Carriers with a little armor and hangar bay space for 5 FAC
5 FAC each with drop pods - this JUST fit in 1000 tons with a little armor, reasonably fast with a FAC engine
Note that each Troop Transport can only load 1 FAC at a time, so if you want to do waves load 1 battalion from each of 5 different Transports
NOW you can give the FACs orders to Combat Drop onto an enemy colony - ideally with the expensive TTs/Assault Carriers standing off outside of PDC range if there are any

Looks like ground combat is done once every 5 days, with some amount of casualties to each side depending on relative strengths.  With 2x Cargo Handling per TT that allowed about 1 wave per day to transfer to FACS and then drop, 3x Cargo Handling didn't seem to change that - I need to play around to see why that didn't make a difference.  Anyway it was interesting, and a huge micromanagement PITA

So, lessons from my puttering:
- if there's serious ground combat replacement units are VERY handy, I had to build a lot more than I thought I'd need
- bring an extra few TT full of garrisons if there's much enemy population to take over, again it took a LOT more than I thought

[Graknorke]

Aurora Combat = Missiles, heh.

I've noticed this said around a lot.
But why?
What is it about missiles that makes them so vastly superior to other weapons? I would have thought them to be worse. You have a limited supply of them once you launch, they can cause damage if blown up inside your ships, and you need quite high tech to make them go fast enough to not be taken down.
Surely it would be a lot better to have a beam weapon, which cannot be intercepted because lightspeed, has effectively infinite ammo and can be useful at reasonably low levels of research.

[gimlet]

Missiles grossly outrange beams so you can kill beam ships LONG before they come into beam range, or have a fair chance to save at least part of the fleet if you're outmatched.  Especially at lower tech levels, it takes a fair amount of tech in multiple categories to make a ship fast enough, with turret speed and fire control fast enough and ranged enough to begin to defend themselves against missiles and close with missile ships.  And then you have to suffer through about a billion 5 second turns killing wave after wave of missiles as you sloooooooowly close the range and finally get to start firing at ships.   If you really want to abuse it you can launch missiles far FAR out of range of enemy ships, risking only a few sensor platforms anywhere close to being at risk.

Also upgrades can be super cheap, as you can use the same old ships with the same old launch tubes that are the things that take years to retool and build, and just load them with shiny new high tech missiles.  Use fighters to launch/sensor and you have a whole 2nd layer that is cheap to risk and also easy to upgrade.

[Graknorke]

I never really understood how bean weapons can have a range though, if it is a perfect beam with no spread, shouldn't it be effective forever? Unless I forgot something about how light works (which wouldn't be surprising).
So pretty much, missiles are mad OP? Especially when we get Newtonian physics and their range will literally be infinite. I guess I'd best backpedal on my laser research then. Thankfully, I haven't started producing any ships with them on yet, so that's all good.

[MrWiggles]

Missiles just have a natural advantage over other weapon platforms. 

[gimlet]

Actually lasers/gauss/mesons/whatever are fine as a layer in an anti-missile system - you'll save a LOT of minerals and hassle.  Since research costs increase so rapidly fairly soon it's cheaper to research enough beam/kinetic techs to make a credible anti-missile layer, and at that point not much more to make some anti-ship stuff.  And by then you might be getting bored with just missiles and want to fool with other stuff.  Or at least running low on those minerals and want to develop something that uses others.

Also I did mean to add,  the post I made earlier is true as long as the AI doesn't defend jump points - so if you set up things yourself for a challenge, or the AI gets improved or even just lucky (it HAS happened where  they luck out and camp on the other side of a jump point), THEN it's a different ballgame, beams are way more cost effective, you have to worry about jumping in squadrons, relying on the usual ancient thinly armored carriers is gonna actually be a big risk, etc.

Still, as the game is right now, in the early game missiles will in general get you out of the gate faster and more forgiving than beams.