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Author Topic: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games  (Read 2838238 times)

BurnedToast

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6345 on: August 27, 2011, 08:20:33 pm »

I... don't understand.

You dropped troops on the planet to start killing people so now they are mad you are killing them? Why did you drop troops in the first place?
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Tarran

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6346 on: August 27, 2011, 08:21:10 pm »

Black hole, not Wormhole. Wormhole=SPOILER BAD GUYS and cannot be entered. Black hole=Thing that sucks things in in a sucky way.
No, I meant wormhole.
Oh, I just thought you meant Black hole considering people were talking about them.

what's causing it to rise in the first place?
Military issues.
Let me guess, you need more protection?
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Quote from: Phantom
Unknown to most but the insane and the mystics, Tarran is actually Earth itself, as Earth is sentient like that planet in Avatar. Originally Earth used names such as Terra on the internet, but to protect it's identity it changed letters, now becoming the Tarran you know today.
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Tarran has the "Tarran Bug", a bug which causes the affected character to repeatedly hit teammates while dual-wielding instead of whatever the hell he is shooting at.

Jacob/Lee

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6347 on: August 27, 2011, 08:33:23 pm »

I... don't understand.

You dropped troops on the planet to start killing people so now they are mad you are killing them? Why did you drop troops in the first place?
No, the population is complaining about not having enough protection. It's my own colony, nobody is killing anybody.

Tarran

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6348 on: August 27, 2011, 08:35:06 pm »

Then they need more military protection. Isn't that obvious?
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Quote from: Phantom
Unknown to most but the insane and the mystics, Tarran is actually Earth itself, as Earth is sentient like that planet in Avatar. Originally Earth used names such as Terra on the internet, but to protect it's identity it changed letters, now becoming the Tarran you know today.
Quote from: Ze Spy
Tarran has the "Tarran Bug", a bug which causes the affected character to repeatedly hit teammates while dual-wielding instead of whatever the hell he is shooting at.

BurnedToast

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6349 on: August 27, 2011, 08:38:51 pm »

sorry I misunderstood, I thought you meant the unrest was going up because the soldiers were shooting people.

You need more ships in the system... ships with weapons. I believe PDCs count, too. So build a whole bunch of those and plop them down (I think they can be on any planet on the system and they count for all planets, but I'm not 100% sure about that)
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Paul

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6350 on: August 27, 2011, 08:55:12 pm »

Like BurnedToast said, you need ships. Ground troops can keep unrest down, but they aren't solving the problem.

If it's a new colony you don't need much. I have a system with new colonies being "protected" by an old 1st generation explorer ship that I never got around to refitting, with nothing but a pair of 30k range mesons for point defense. Basically the ship is just sitting forgotten above one of the planets and the people are all satisfied that they're protected.
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Flying Dice

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6351 on: August 27, 2011, 10:33:53 pm »

So, I know there's a tutorial for beam ships, lasers and things, but there's nothing for missiles.

How does one effectively design/use missiles? Also, sensors? Turns out the beam weapon page has stuff on sensors. Go figure.

There will be a tab for missiles in the Economics window, right next to turrets. The first thing to do is design the missiles you want, so you know what range your sensors and targetting controls need to be above.

 For antimissiles, you need a size of one, and a warhead strength of one, which early on will usually mean 0.2 points to Warhead. You should only need 0.1 or 0.2 points to fuel for AMM(fuel helps dictate the maximum range and endurance of your missile), put the rest into the combination of speed and agility that gets the highest interception percentage for targets going 10,000kps or faster. You can see the stats for your missile at the bottom.

For ASMs (anti-ship missiles), you will usually want between size-4 and size-10, at least early on. The warhead strength is up to you, but keep in mind you'll be shooting at armored targets. You should probably shoot for a range of at least 100M km with lower-mid tech levels, and after that, try to maximize the to-hit chance. Also, once you get to higher techs, you should be adding ECCM to your ships, which is linked to your fire-control to help reduce the effects of enemy ECM. You can also build sensors, armor and ECM into your missiles, but for lower tech levels, those are too expensive and bulky. The same goes for multi-stage warheads and drones, which you should start paying attention to after you get used to the basics.

The basic theory of ASM design is saturation of enemy defences; essentially, putting out so many missiles that enemy PD is overwhelmed. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. One of the simplest is the use of reduced-size launchers. You can research the appopriate tech in the Missiles/Kinetics section. These are launchers that sacrifice reload time for smaller size, which allows ships to launch larger individual volleys, but farther apart, which is more likely to overwhelm enemy PD. One way to take this tactic to semi-insane levels is to practice it with size-1 missiles. This typically works better at higher tech levels, where 0.1 to Warhead could result in a strength-12 warhead, but even early on a massive swarm of fast strength-1 warheads can overwhelm enemies (this is what the *SPOILERS*Precursor*SPOILERS* ships often do to you). One advantage of this design is that your ASM and AMM can be the same missile, greatly simplifying supply issues.

Later on in the game, you can achieve serious levels of saturation with typical ASMs or with multistage missiles that launch multiple submunitions.

After designing your missiles, design your sensors and fire control. You will need seperate fire control and active sensors for antiship work and missile defence; the latter should be Resolution 1, the former can be whatever ship size you think will be the smallest you'll see a lot (for me, that is 800T for reasons that are obvious to some of us  :P). Your active sensors should in general be at least 133% of your fire control range (by my design standards), if possible more.

When designing launchers:
1. Make sure they are the proper size to launch your missiles. Keep in mind that launchers can launch all missiles at or below their size.
2. Make sure they are proper for their role. Size-1 launchers for antimissile work generally don't need to be reduced in size, as they are only 1HS and rate of fire is generally more important against missiles. For antiship missiles, size reduction should be appropriate to the role. For a long-range support sniper role, larger volleys (as well as enough engines to outrun enemy ships) are the most important, as they won't be closing the range and can afford long reload times. For extreme close-range missile combatants (pretty much anything below 75M km, expressly designed for that), RoF is probably more important. For mid-range, I usually go with a  medium, usually 50% reduction, to achieve a balance between RoF and volley size.

Keep in mind that missile ships should try to fulfill several criteria:
1. Be able to bring to bear sufficient fire to eliminate beam-armed enemies before they close.
2. Be able to outrun enemies that outclass them in range or firepower, as well as being able to close quickly with enemies with greater range but inferior power.
3. Be able to fire for extended periods of time (BUILD MAGAZINES IN YOUR SHIPS). IOW, make sure your ships carry enough ammunition to fill whatever role you have for them. AMM ships should have enough to fire at dozens of enemy missile volleys. ASM ships should be able to put enough tritanium into space to take down any reasonable number or strength of enemies.
4. Plan for the future. If you know what sort of spoilers lurk out there, prepare for them. (Also known as don't rely only on missile ships because you need fifty metric fucktons of missiles to break some shields if you know what I mean).


/long, incoherent stream of poor advice
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Paul

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6352 on: August 27, 2011, 10:34:55 pm »

For most missiles you just put in numbers for warhead strength, engine power, fuel capacity, and agility. If you're making a fancy missile you can put on sensors, armor, ECM, or even give it a second stage if you wanted the missile to release other missiles (or a drone to release missiles).

I have an old spreadsheet posted here on the Aurora forums as a missile design aid. You just put in your missile tech numbers and it will give you the minimum fractional numbers you need to get the attributes you want. Warhead, fuel capacity, and agility numbers are dead on - the engine one is often a few fractions above the minimum for the speed but you can quickly shave a few .0001s off and put it in fuel if you wanted a little bit extra range. You can copy the numbers from the spreadsheet and paste them in the missile design window. It was made in OpenOffice (the .ods version is meant for that) but the xls version included should work in the Excel too I think.

I use it to design optimal missiles all the time. The warhead size, range, and missile size are the values you supply, and the output is a list of agility ratings followed by the speed and hit rate against a target (you provide target speed) as well as adding the leftover to fuel capacity. It marks the highest hit rate as a visual cue, but you'll often want to go up a few notches for more speed at a reduced accuracy on anti-ship missiles since they might have to chase a ship down thats moving away from you and higher speed makes them harder to shoot down.

As an example, heres a small anti-ship missile I just designed in my 35 year game (fairly high tech):
Spoiler (click to show/hide)


Oh, another tip: Pick warhead strength for their optimal damage pattern to make best use of armor penetration. The way it works is a pyramid pattern starting at the top and moving down. Generally taking an armor number, adding 1, and squaring it is a good idea, since that's the minimum warhead to get 1 damage through on an undamaged armor hit. A strength 3 warhead is:
Code: [Select]
OOOxxxOOO
OOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOO
A strength 4 warhead is:
Code: [Select]
OOOxxxOOO
OOOOxOOOO
OOOOOOOOO
Strength 8 would be:
Code: [Select]
OOxxxxxOO
OOOxxxOOO
OOOOOOOOO
Strength 9 would be:
Code: [Select]
OOxxxxxOO
OOOxxxOOO
OOOOxOOOO
Strength 12 would be:
Code: [Select]
OOxxxxxxO
OOOxxxxOO
OOOOxxOOO
And so on. As you can see, strength 3 is a pretty poor choice. It's basically like 3 strength 1 hits with no extra penetration. Strength 4 makes it punch to the 2nd layer. The strength 8 missile only damages 2 layers - meaning it will penetrate armor level 1 (3 points getting through) but not penetrate armor level 2. Just 1 extra warhead gives it the point needed to push through and deal 1 damage to a ship with 2 armor, which could mean the difference between a large armor 2 ship taking no damage from repeated missile strikes or taking 1 damage per hit and losing internals on every impact. Strength 12 is a good compromise between 9 and 16, since at that warhead it deals 2 points of damage through level 2 armor. 11 would be a rather poor warhead, since it would lose that extra penetration and just open a slightly bigger hole in layer 1 and 2. Hitting an already damaged portion of armor just pushes the damage for each block downward, so if you happened to hit the exact same spot with two missiles you'd get way better penetration - but that's not very likely.
« Last Edit: August 27, 2011, 10:52:21 pm by Paul »
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Jacob/Lee

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6353 on: August 27, 2011, 10:51:38 pm »

Don't forget to constantly research better missile parts. They all let you get more out of your space (or in the case of warheads, more bang for your buck) while retaining the same size.

Flying Dice

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6354 on: August 27, 2011, 11:04:36 pm »

Thanks for posting that spreadsheet!  :D


Oh yeah, upgrade whenever you get a couple new techs, and don't be shy with missile use on the strategic level, because you'll be building new models soon anyways.


Also, with my test game with all techs, the warhead damage was insanely high even for fractional points. 1 point turned it into the next best thing to a planet cracker.
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1. Game Parameters -> Reduced Height Windows.
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Jacob/Lee

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6355 on: August 27, 2011, 11:10:49 pm »

Give the missile 3 points of warhead

Laugh like a madman when single missiles blast whole battleships to pieces

Flying Dice

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6356 on: August 27, 2011, 11:12:43 pm »

Well, the excel download for the spreadsheet is brakened. So much for efficient missile design, unless he reuploads it.







WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE KNOW WHAT I MEAN KNOW WHAT I MEAN  :P
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Paul

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6357 on: August 27, 2011, 11:15:03 pm »

Oh, I reposted it already. The link in the first post has both the .ods and the .xls.

I went ahead and edited that post further down in the thread to remove that broken link.


Too bad you can't make missiles smaller than 1 msp. I'm at the point tech-wise now where I could make an AM missile size .5 and still have about the same hit rate as a size 1 if it would let me, and they would be way cheaper. As-is I'll probably keep using older generation AM missiles since the newer ones cost too much more without that much increase in effectiveness.
« Last Edit: August 27, 2011, 11:23:34 pm by Paul »
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forsaken1111

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6358 on: August 27, 2011, 11:23:33 pm »

Just make a google doc of it so you can share it out easily.
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Flying Dice

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6359 on: August 27, 2011, 11:26:57 pm »

Thanks.



Also: So the game actually prevents you from making designs smaller than size 1? Because I was looking forward to making 2-stages filled with dozens of tiny submunitions way down the line.  :-\
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2. Lock taskbar to the right side of your desktop.
3. Run Resize Enable
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