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[Flare]

How long would it take your empire to retrofit existing designs with disposable non retreating missle throwing fireships?

[Rift]

"Disposable"... I don't know if my empire has a strong enough economy to really support throwing away huge amounts of ships.
Hell, the only offensive ships i have are pretty much what you discribe, in that they couldnt retreat, all died, and were throwing lots of missiles quickly... [5*10ton ships was what were fighting them... they can throw 10*size3 missiles, but only get 7 salvos]
I don't suppose the moral implications of sending a bit over a thousand crew to their deaths every ship bothers you?
I can technically produce 10 of these 10ton ships every 2 years at the moment, and my economy can likely survive that.
I suppose in a decade or so i'll have em creamed.

[Earthquake Damage]

I can technically produce 10 of these 10ton ships every 2 years at the moment, and my economy can likely survive that.
I suppose in a decade or so i'll have em creamed.

A fighter engine, the lightest propulsion system in the game, weighs 50 tons.  Perhaps you mean 10 Hull Spaces?

Really, you shouldn't waste time producing crap ships to maybe beat them in a decade.  It's more cost effective to spend a few years teching up then clean their clock with few losses and a relatively small fleet.

[Rift]

oh. is that what a "fireship" is supposed to be? a fighter?
...i guess i could make a rather large amount of fighters.

[Earthquake Damage]

oh. is that what a "fireship" is supposed to be? a fighter?
...i guess i could make a rather large amount of fighters.

I wasn't recommending fighters.  Just pointing out you botched your units (FYI:  1 HS = 50 tons).

I wouldn't recommend fighters, either.  I hate the micromanagement, personally.

On the other hand, they're cheap to manufacture (individually), cheap to replace (individually), each one can potentially soak an entire missile salvo, their speed makes them hard to hit and they have an easy time hitting fast enemies (esp. since fighter-specific beam fire controls gain a 4x tracking speed multiplier).  As an added bonus, being cheap means you don't really need to worry about durability (thus armor and shields).

The downsides:  Very high fuel usage during battle (since you'll keep them in a carrier otherwise, right?) and a pain in the ass to micromanage (assigning carriers, deploying, assigning targets if you don't use auto-fire or "copy to whole TG" options, and so forth).

[Flare]

"Disposable"... I don't know if my empire has a strong enough economy to really support throwing away huge amounts of ships.
Hell, the only offensive ships i have are pretty much what you discribe, in that they couldnt retreat, all died, and were throwing lots of missiles quickly... [5*10ton ships was what were fighting them... they can throw 10*size3 missiles, but only get 7 salvos]
I don't suppose the moral implications of sending a bit over a thousand crew to their deaths every ship bothers you?
I can technically produce 10 of these 10ton ships every 2 years at the moment, and my economy can likely survive that.
I suppose in a decade or so i'll have em creamed.

Well, you probably don't need the top of the line engines for those ships, and seeing as the alien ships only have 7 salvos, I think it would rather be rather easy to get them to expend all their ammunition against smaller more disposable targets in the process.

As for the term fireship, I guess in this case it would just mean a really heavily armored,, very large, and very slow missile. Hopefully it wuold have enough armor to soak up enough of their PD missiles to let the other ones with bigger warheads through.

In any case, if that moral implication bothered me, I wouldn't be playing these games to begin with. In SotS the player has to commit mass genocide regularly just in order to survive.

[Rift]

In any case, if that moral implication bothered me, I wouldn't be playing these games to begin with. In SotS the player has to commit mass genocide regularly just in order to survive.

i was more driving at the fact i didn't have to sacrifice lots of my people to survive, it isn't a 1 viable option situation...
But i rather have my society focused on not using large groups of people as expendable..

[Deon]

Yep, 5.40 spams a lot of form load erros with "path not found" and somethng else for me . Just when I wanted to try to get into this game.

Yea it gave me errors when i tried to create a new game, which was fixed when i did a fresh install.

you could try a completely fresh install [the 4.9 install /patch] + 5.4, which is working fine for me atm.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

My newest empire ran into precursers one jump away from sol, and is now trading blows.. Throwing missile salvos against the bigger ships seems to be working in my favor, but the little fighters were annoying. The biggest issue is their missiles are sooo much faster then my missile tracking technology. The fact they are so much faster isn't as big of issue[other then the inability to say, run away and not all die].. the fact that 80%+ of their missiles get through... means i lose a ship in each salvo. At the moment, my main battlefleet managed to inflict heavy loses on the precursers but is pretty much doomed to be completely and utterly whipeded out due to the inability to retreat]

That's what I did. But then I cannot launch the game due to "path not found" errors.

[Tarran]

For everyone who gets the "Path not found" errors:

OK, this is a bit of a long shot but I have replaced the patch file using a slightly modified exe. Try downloading it again and please let me know if it fixes the problem

Steve

Try re-downloading again, see if it works.

[Earthquake Damage]

In any case, if that moral implication bothered me, I wouldn't be playing these games to begin with.

There's a very practical reason to avoid wasting crewmen.  Your crew pool is limited (academy-dependent) but superior to conscripts (grade 0, -10% modifier to many rolls esp. in combat).  At best (max training multiplier = 5), a single academy produces 200 crewmen per year with, what, 500 grade points or so?  So at max training your fresh recruits have something like a [sqrt(5 x 100) - 10] = 22% bonus to their rolls.  That's a pretty substantial edge in combat for brand new ships.

[Deon]

Wow. I missed it. Thank you very much Tarran, I will give it a shot.

P.S. Yay it worked!

[Thexor]

If you're talking about the moral implications of sending crews to certain death, I vaguely remember a quote: "The job of a soldier is to die. I do not waste soldier's lives; I spend them."

Likewise, over-spending your trained recruits and having to fall back on conscripts hardly matters if you're just intending to deal some damage before dying. I mean, sure, your suicide ships won't deal as much damage as if they were all staffed by well-trained crews, but hey, if they're doomed anyways...

[forsaken1111]

Can't you mark certain ships as conscript-only anyway to avoid burning up trained useful crew on suicide ships?

[Aldaris]

Okay, so I haven't been on this forum for a while and therefore skipped the past ~200 pages or so of discussion, although I did read the updated first post.
I upgraded to 64 bit Windows 7 and now run into the dreaded msstdfmt.dll error, I tried fixing it on my own, I tried googling for fixes, I tried using the fix in the front post, but it either plain doesn't work or I get the 0x8002801c error.

Halp.

[Areyar]

Can't you mark certain ships as conscript-only anyway to avoid burning up trained useful crew on suicide ships?

IIRC you can.