ECM: 1 Per ship
No Stacking.... Else a lot of players would have 150%-200% ECM by default... >.>
ECCM: 1 Per Fire Control (If you have long-ish weapon recharge(RoF) and have a hankering for micro-managing... you can probably use 1 or 2 ECCMs per whatever fire controls...)
Easy Example: Beam weapons with RoF 10 seconds, 2 Fire Controls and 1 ECCM
Each turn is 5 seconds
Turn 1: Weapons charge
Turn 2: Both weapons fully charge, Place ECCM on FC#1, Fire FC#1, FC#2 does nothing
Turn 3: Place ECCM on FC#2, Fire FC#2, BW on FC#1 is charging
Turn 4: Place ECCM on FC#1, Fire FC#1, BW on FC#2 is charging
and so on...
At least you don't have to do it for every ship since you can macro change it all. Only problem is that you don't fire all weapons asap.
Could be varied for all other RoFs and number of FC as needed.
If I ever used this tactic... I'd probably use weapons with varied and 15 second or more RoF, only sometimes would you not be able to put the ECCM on both weapons. So you could still fire anyways or wait, depending if enemy has ECM or not....
ECCM means jack if the enemy does not use ECM, just so you know. All it is... is a counter measure against ECM, nothing more.
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Zapp Brannigan Maneuver
Can still work, you just need more cheap ships/fighters. You can set it so that these ships have no commanders and use... non-academy crew.
Since you normally use academy crew members trained by the academy... and you only get so many per year...
As small a tonnage as possible, so you can fit more of these lil buggers inside a carrier.
Fast explody fighter engine
smallest crew quarters possible
mini fuel tank
piddly gauss cannon with crappy fire control so enemy fleets won't classify these as non-military and totally ignore em... Hey, you might be able to do some damage!
Overall you want this tactic to work more then once. If these things are seen to be non-issue, AI will ignore em... and favor sending missiles at other targets.
I've had the star swarm run from my boarding party fighters... thinking they are going to attack... then, once the boarding parties got jettisoned, they realized that these fighters can't fight... so proceeded to ignore them and go after my real military ships... The AI is that good.
(I've considered the possibility of thermal detection after my fighters stopping moving after jettisoning the boarding parties. They were still being fired upon as the star swarm turned around to chase after my much slower main fleet.)
Bunch of optional features too...
Fighter ECM, but Precursors are probably equipped with ECCM by default...
Fighter ECCM, might be useful? Well... your choice...
Armor, its going to get destroyed anyways... really only useful if you want them to take more then 1 missile... well, its speed vs armor here.... Your choice.
Ultimately, you want your fighters to get close to the Precursor/NPC ships... and piddly shooting it. That means the Zapp Brannigan Maneuver is working.
The concept of seeing +100 fighters swarm a ship sounds... cool.
Did you have an individual fire control for every laser? 1 fire control for 4 lasers will still only destroy 1 missile at a time.
You need one fire control per laser to engage multiple targets (in this case, missiles) simultaneously?
And how do multi-barreled weapons affect this? And how do CIWS behave, in comparison?
I believe you need multiple fire controls to engage multiple flights of missiles, but a single fire control linked to a multiple weapon system in a turret should still engage several missiles in a single missile flight, correct?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
No, turrets don't fire on different targets. Use of double/tri/quad turrets are more along the lines of
shoot a lot at 1 target... CIWS... eh, I never used em... or seen em in missile combat... phased that stuff out pretty quickly. My logic would say no though. 1 CIWS per missile per turn.
Fact: CIWS don't need Fire Controls, they are automated and have a built in FC.