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[Dutchling]

WHY!
TELL ME WHY!
WHY ISN'T THE MISSILE EXACTLY 10 MSP!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 

[Paul]

Because filling the rest out as warhead didn't accomplish anything warhead-wise, and adding more engine or fuel just makes it faster or longer ranged - neither of which is at all useful for an orbital bomb.

It also saves fractions of a space when loading into ships. 200 of them only takes 1968 space instead of 2000 space, giving you room for another 3 of them or another 32 antimissiles.

I generally make my ASMs and AMMs exact sizes because in them the extra fuel is always handy for the little bit of extra range you get, but bombs don't need more than 0.0001 fuel. For a bomb to hit a planet when dropped from orbit all it needs is 100km/s speed (the lowest speed that registers for missiles) and at least 5 seconds of endurance.

I think older versions let you make bombs solid warhead and drop them as orbital bombs, but they just run out of endurance now - unless I'm missing some special orbital bomb option.

[Dutchling]

Well, that's something I'd never do I guess.
But I also always make sure my ship have nice speeds, I'd never create a ship that would go like 1247 km/s. I'd prefer to add some useless parts to make it a bit slower.

Anyway, I just started a conventional empire (I really should try to not start over again until I meet an enemy..) and I made a laser frigate.
With a range of 30km. Pretty pathetic imo.
Actually, I think I'll start over again with 4 or 5 NPC empires in sol. I'm not going to stop until I meet an enemy this time >.>

EDIT: how do I add gasses as SM?
Never mind, the same way you add gas out of SM..

[Elvang]

Just made it through the tutorial, wasn't that bad a learning curve; the tutorial itself could use some work though. Anyhow, I was wondering why when a part breaks down, and the ship currently doesn't have the MSP to repair it, the cost to repair it in MSP goes up? All of my designs have a max MSP higher than that required for the biggest MSP eater, but the cost for a part that wasn't repaired automatically is always higher than that; quite annoying trying to get a large ship back to a shipyard for repairs when it is 5 jumps out and the part broken is the jump drive.

EDIT: Also, anyone know what determines the higher MSP value when it isn't immediately repaired? The geological survey sensor from the tutorial needs 100 MSP, but if you don't have the MSP on hand, it shoots up to 200. On the other hand, whenever a jump drive has failed it only goes from 100 to 113.

[Paul]

I think I might try a game with the "no overhauls needed" simplification. All the games I've played, I've never turned it on. But I've realized none of the AI uses it - even an NPR is running around with a 20 year old ship with a maintenance life of 2 years that has never resupplied.

Theres a small mineral drain, but it isn't that big - and just building a dock PDC and landing the ships in it can completely ignore it. I never really agreed with the mineral drain anyway - why would a ship sitting in orbit be sucking up so much raw materials to keep it maintained? Wealth I can understand since you have to pay to have upkeep done on it, but haven't these people heard of recycling? If an engine breaks down, they put in a new one and go "Welp, that engine is broke. Let's jettison it into space." If real people acted that way metal prices would be sky high and the landfills would have 1,000,000,000,000 tons of aluminum and iron and tin and copper in them.

The only part of it that's justifiable imo is requiring ships to come back to a planet every so often for resupply and overhaul, but having to refuel already requires a trip back to at least a refueling ship - as well as the occasional trip to the shipyards to refit to get the ship up to date in tech. Even with it off you still want maintenance supplies on warships so they can do damage control. Plus it's annoying for when you want to make defense bases and tow them into place. The micromanagement of dragging them back and forth for overhaul every few years is so bad that I haven't even used a defense base for most of my games.

It's just starting to seem like needless micromanagement. Anyone else feel the same way?

[Osmosis Jones]

Wait... you're complaining about needless micromanagement in Aurora?

On the Dwarf Fortress forums no less?



Seriously though, nah, it's not that bad. Also, it's kinda true to life. RL Military equipment is like 95% maintenance to 5% use.

[Rask]

It's just starting to seem like needless micromanagement. Anyone else feel the same way?

Yeah, I realised that a few hours into my first game. Maintenance doesn't do much except being a big annoyance. Since it doesn't add to my fun, I turned it off and have never looked back.

[Zebulon]

I haven't really played a game that lasted long enough to get too upset over it; the only ships that spend much time away from Sol and the adjacent colonies are my survey ships (partly because I keep trying to make jump tenders to help with my battle fleet's force projection and making mistakes, heh. I should just build a jump-capable warship at this point.)

That said from a purely theoretical standpoint I like having maintenance on. For some classes of ships it gives a design consideration (namely that commercial engines require no maintenance). There are some strategic considerations as well since it provides another upper limit on how long a fleet can be out (assuming they have a tanker), at least without having a dedicated mobile maintenance platform (which is a ship type I like the idea of, although it looks like Maintenance Modules require 5000 tons of repair-er ship to 200 tons of repair-ee ship which looks like it gets kind of ridiculous fast). Brand new colonies also need infrastructure (as in maintenance facilities, not actual in-game infrastructure) to properly support a defensive fleet, which takes time or resources. I also like the idea of ships being caught pants down while in overhaul, requiring you to make sure all your cruisers aren't getting the metaphorical spa treatment when invaders come knocking. Also, the need to cycle ships on sentry-type posts.

I do agree it's a shame the AI is a cheating bastard with it, and I'm glad it's an option so people who don't like the micromanagement don't have to deal with it if they don't want to. I just like that it adds a few more relevant decisions to the game and enjoy the little injection of realism.

[Majestic7]

I think maintenance would be fine if we could automate it. Like, build some sort of maintenance ship and make them do rounds servicing defence bases and so forth. Too much micro is always annoying, when it doesn't give the game any extra content.

[Paul]

It just seems like an artificial system designed to make the player micromanage things. If the AI used it I would be more inclined to keep it on, but if the AI just ignores it why should I bother to take all the time micromanaging it? I can guess why they ignore it - Steve probably didn't want to go through the trouble of programming them to check maintenance clocks and send ships back for overhaul and such. And handling disabled ships that run out of supplies and lose their engines or something.

Theres another thing the AI ignores too - shipyard refitting. They never actually set shipyards to build certain ships. They just pop out ships of any type as long as the size fits. Looking at them with designer mode I even caught them building military ships in commercial shipyards. The inability to clear a shipyard of the ship its going to build has always been a pet peeve of mine - in some cases it's easier to build a new shipyard and expand it than expand an existing small shipyard and then go through an expensive process of refitting it to the larger design - especially if the larger design is very expensive.

I kinda wish there was an intermediate maintenance option that made ships have a set rate of failure not based on an overhaul clock, and just require resupply with maintenance supplies every so often. That way resupplying a fleet of defense bases would be as simple as sending a supply ship every few years, instead of having to send tugs and give a bunch of orders to tow them back and forth. Maintenance facilities could be changed so that instead of keeping a ship at 0 clock or rewinding the clock they would reduce the failure rate of ships in orbit and take the supplies from the planet so you don't have to give the order for the ships to resupply constantly. With a system like this I'd even like to see civilian ships require maintenance, maybe at a reduced failure rate so they can go further between resupply and don't require as many engineering sections. It'd make more sense to have civilian and military parts instead of the whole ship, so you could still use civilian engines on a military ship for reduced maintenance cost if you wanted to - and putting one military part on a civ ship (like, say, grav sensors) wouldn't suddenly make your commercial engine start breaking down.

The minerals used aren't really enough to be concerned about unless you're running out, and there are simple ways to completely bypass the whole thing (build a PDC with docks, land ships - presto, in overhaul but ready to be launched at any minute. Bonus: no maintenance facilities required, no mineral losses, no wealth cost, quick repairs to any ship landing at the cost of MSP). I've gotten to where I just transport hangar PDCs out to my colonies and assemble them, and land my defense fleet in them - so im practically ignoring overhauls already.

I haven't really played a game that lasted long enough to get too upset over it; the only ships that spend much time away from Sol and the adjacent colonies are my survey ships (partly because I keep trying to make jump tenders to help with my battle fleet's force projection and making mistakes, heh. I should just build a jump-capable warship at this point.)

That said from a purely theoretical standpoint I like having maintenance on. For some classes of ships it gives a design consideration (namely that commercial engines require no maintenance). There are some strategic considerations as well since it provides another upper limit on how long a fleet can be out (assuming they have a tanker), at least without having a dedicated mobile maintenance platform (which is a ship type I like the idea of, although it looks like Maintenance Modules require 5000 tons of repair-er ship to 200 tons of repair-ee ship which looks like it gets kind of ridiculous fast). Brand new colonies also need infrastructure (as in maintenance facilities, not actual in-game infrastructure) to properly support a defensive fleet, which takes time or resources. I also like the idea of ships being caught pants down while in overhaul, requiring you to make sure all your cruisers aren't getting the metaphorical spa treatment when invaders come knocking. Also, the need to cycle ships on sentry-type posts.

I do agree it's a shame the AI is a cheating bastard with it, and I'm glad it's an option so people who don't like the micromanagement don't have to deal with it if they don't want to. I just like that it adds a few more relevant decisions to the game and enjoy the little injection of realism.

Those are the same reasons I've kept it on so long. I do like the strategic implications, and even if I play with it off I'll still be designing most of my ships the same way as I always have with maintenance supplies for repairs and such. Supporting a proper defense fleet on a world requires more than just a maintenance facility anyway. You need ordnance, fuel, maintenance supplies for repairs, maybe a shipyard to do armor repair (or a hangar PDC, heh).

[Zebulon]

Maybe I'll feel differently when I get a larger fleet. As it stands, I've finally seen combat and the Precursors have been happy to dismantle (nearly) my entire fleet.  Had two engagements, one a jump point assault and second one in a system I thought was clear because I had the bug where you get control of the ships when I captured an outpost. Down to two carriers, a single fast destroyer (designed to outrange the enemy and then skirt back out of trouble - of course, their missiles had a longer range, especially after that drat ECM), and a strikegroup from my destroyed carrier who's now sitting on the opposite side of the point three jumps from Sol awaiting pickup.

Also, lesson learned, don't leave Sol without actual point defense. My actual escorts got torn up during the jump point assault (which I ultimately won by the narrowest of margins. Yay me!), so all I had was a very modest AMM suite aboard one carrier (which was also the active sensor for the group).

Has anybody here tried beam-armed (I'm thinking gauss) fighters for missile interception/point defense? I heard the idea somewhere and loved it, and looking through Steve's campaign, he has three generations of a gauss-armed fighter. I'm not sure if that means it's effective or if he's just tinkering with the idea. I've got Magneto-Plasma drives with the 25% extra power tech, so I'm probably looking at speeds in the 15,000 area.

[LostCosmonaut]

I don't have any personal experience, but I do see how they could be useful at JP defense. I wouldn't necessarily recommend using gauss armed fighters in a PD role. To stick the cannon on a fighter,you'd probably have to use one of the reduced size/accuracy versions, and I personally prefer the maximum possibly accuracy in a PD role. In my last game, my heavy PD vessels mounted 4 triple turrets of 100% acc. gauss guns (of course, this was at a fair high tech level).

[Bremen]

Maybe I'll feel differently when I get a larger fleet. As it stands, I've finally seen combat and the Precursors have been happy to dismantle (nearly) my entire fleet.  Had two engagements, one a jump point assault and second one in a system I thought was clear because I had the bug where you get control of the ships when I captured an outpost. Down to two carriers, a single fast destroyer (designed to outrange the enemy and then skirt back out of trouble - of course, their missiles had a longer range, especially after that drat ECM), and a strikegroup from my destroyed carrier who's now sitting on the opposite side of the point three jumps from Sol awaiting pickup.

Also, lesson learned, don't leave Sol without actual point defense. My actual escorts got torn up during the jump point assault (which I ultimately won by the narrowest of margins. Yay me!), so all I had was a very modest AMM suite aboard one carrier (which was also the active sensor for the group).

Has anybody here tried beam-armed (I'm thinking gauss) fighters for missile interception/point defense? I heard the idea somewhere and loved it, and looking through Steve's campaign, he has three generations of a gauss-armed fighter. I'm not sure if that means it's effective or if he's just tinkering with the idea. I've got Magneto-Plasma drives with the 25% extra power tech, so I'm probably looking at speeds in the 15,000 area.

A purely point defense fighter doesn't work that well; it almost certainly wont be able to keep up with missiles, and has tiny range, so the only dependable way to use it is to keep it with the fleet and set to final defensive fire. As far as I know this will work, but all it gains you are faster firecontrol (fighters get a 4x fire control speed bonus) and a faster weapon tracking speed (speed of the fighter); on the other hand you have to add all the systems for each fighter (engine, crew quarters, fuel, etc). Usually its cheaper and smaller to just use turrets.

On the other hand, attack fighters that double as point defense work just fine; not only can they defend their mothership, but the enemy is usually more than happy to shoot missiles at incoming fighters.

[Zebulon]

Hmm. I've heard less than complimentary things about beam fighters in general; I just figured having mobile PD platforms might be a boon. I do like the idea of having dual-role fighters, though. It's worth a shot, at least; fighters are cheap, and if nothing else they're decoys I guess. Thanks for the thoughts guys.

[Bremen]

Hmm. I've heard less than complimentary things about beam fighters in general; I just figured having mobile PD platforms might be a boon. I do like the idea of having dual-role fighters, though. It's worth a shot, at least; fighters are cheap, and if nothing else they're decoys I guess. Thanks for the thoughts guys.

I used them extensively in my no missiles game, and they're workable but micromanage-y. You definitely need large numbers to swamp a prepared enemy force and sand through enemy armor. In my experience, 100 fighters do a lot less damage than you would expect 100 guns to do.

The biggest problem with beam fighters honestly seemed to be the fire control range. Speed was easy, thanks to the 4x bonus, but having any kind of range makes for a bulky fire control. However, an interesting twist of turn order can help this; fighters always move after normal ships, but before precursors. This means against precursors they have to have range at least equal to the precursor speed x 5 seconds, and preferably longer (since the accuracy falls off quickly). Against NPRs you can reasonably expect fighters to close to 0 km and hold there, so fire control is less of an issue. Unfortunately, I have a lot of trouble finding challenging NPRs to fight in my games.

I ended up with basically three types of fighters. The first and simplest was a gauss armed fighter; since it needs no reactor and gauss can be minaturized, it's the smallest (and therefor fastest) you can make a beam fighter. Unfortunately, since it has essentially no range it's mostly useless against precursors, who are your most likely opponents early on. The second type was a laser armed fighter, using the reduced recharge rate to make a 2 HS laser and tiny reactor to make room for a longer range fire control. These were fun but expensive fighters, and the most effective against precursors, but don't inflict much damage with their low fire rate. The third design was a railgun fighter with slightly more range than the gauss fighter, and a lot of damage; unfortunately it was heavy and required improved armor and engine tech to even be practical.

I didn't get that far, but I suspect at a certain tech level gauss fighters come to the forefront again; unlike lasers and railguns it gets increased damage (fire rate) techs, and against NPRs a tiny, fast, short range fighter could be nasty.