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[Metalax]

Gauss cannon and railguns are short range so you will want either good engines or a large percentage of mass, 30%-50%, dedicated to engines in order to have sufficient speed to close with the enemy. You will also want heavy armour, 10%-20% of total mass, in order to survive to reach engagement range. Shields are more for catching the occasional missile that leaks through your point defense screen, normally I'd only put 5% by mass into shields.

If you are using missiles as your offensive weaponry, you can get away with weaker armour, 5%-10% and less engines, 25%.

For gauss PD you will want to design a beam firecontrol 4x speed, 50% range or 25% range. This keeps the firecontrol size down to 2 or 1, as gauss weaponry has such a short range that you don't need longer range firecontrol.

Pick a size for your gauss cannon and desing and research it. Smaller size gives a bigger chance to miss so I tend to stick to full size cannon. You then need to design a turret with the tracking speed to match that of your firecontrol. If you are using smaller ships stick to single or twin turrets as a quad fullsize gauss turret is over 3500 tons.

Remember that you will need a resolution 1 active sensor with a decent range, 3 million km+, in order for your turrets to target incoming missiles.

For railguns as they cannot be turreted you will usually not need to make an increased speed firecontrol unless the ship speed is significantly above the tracking speed level you have researched. You may want to use increased range in order to have a higher hit chance at the end of the railguns range.

Remember that railguns need power, so put powerplants that produce sufficient power to match the capacitors of the railguns on the ship.

Missile design has been covered multiple times in the thread, but here are some basics.
Use size 3-6 missiles for anti ship roles, any larger and you are usually unable to fire them off in large enough salvos to get past enemy point defense.
Use size 1 warhead 1 missiles for anti missile roles, you will want to be able to fit as many as possible onto your ship as you will usually chew through them fast and it will frequently take multiple missiles to score a hit.
You want your warheads to be square numbers, ie 1,4,9,16,25,etc. This is due to the way that damage is applied to armour from missile strikes.
Don't go overboard on fuel. Most of the time there is no need to have excessively long ranges on missiles.

If S = the missile size,
and M = your current missile agility per MSP (depends on tech),
and T = the total MSP available for Engines plus Agility,

Then E = (T/2)+(5xS/M) is the amount of MSP that should be used for Engines
and A = (T/2)-(5xS/M) is the remaining MSP that should be used for Agility.

You need to ensure that your missile firecontrol range is long enough to keep the targets in sight as your missiles will lose tracking if the target gets out of range.

Combat overview, F8
This is where you assign weapons, ECCM and missiles to their firecontrols. You also set firecontrols to a point defense mode here, final defensive fire is the mode you will usually want to use for gauss cannon PD.

You can switch on active sensors and shields from here. Remember shields take 300 seconds to reach full strength and any enemy has to be detected by an active sensor not just passive in order to be targeted.

Once you have available targets you can assign individual firecontrols to each. The buttons under copy targets can speed up assigning multiple ships to the same targets. There are two buttons for open fire, the top only fires the selected firecontol for that ship the lower fires all weapons linked to assigned firecontrols with a target within the fleet.

[Karlito]

Ok guys, I'm going to need a crash course in warfare, since I just encountered my first alien race and, predictably, they were total dicks and blew up my Scout.

Metagame knowledge can play a big role in ship design. Do you think it was a precursor vessel or an NPR? Do you know how to tell?

[Canuhearmenow]

Ok guys, I'm going to need a crash course in warfare, since I just encountered my first alien race and, predictably, they were total dicks and blew up my Scout.

Metagame knowledge can play a big role in ship design. Do you think it was a precursor vessel or an NPR? Do you know how to tell?

It was an NPR, a race of obnoxious Vulcans no less. I was assaulted by around 3 different ship designs, for a grand total of 5 ships total, all of which lacked shields (from what I could make out.) They were fast bastards, averaging around 4,100 k/s and they exclusively used missiles; the combat report I was able to make out from the Events log indicated they didn't fire a single kinetic or beam based weapon during the engagement.

The more I'm looking at Sensors, the more I wonder; what's the difference between, say, a Resolution 1 Missile Fire Control and a Resolution 40 Sensor?

[Canuhearmenow]

Delicious Knowledge

Thanks! I've been reading this over and coming up with some ideas on my current fleet design, here's what I got planned; I'm thinking of having designated Point Defense ships, they'll be fairly large and give off a strong thermal/EM signature so ships will target and fire at them first. They'll lack any sort of weaponry besides CIWS and anti-missile defenses, but will be heavy on armor and shielding. I'll probably also make them the primary sensor ships of the fleets, so they'll definitely be painting themselves as a nice, big target.

Is it a good idea to have a "heavy" missile ship and a "light" missile ship (a screen of lighter missiles to overwhelm point defenses while the anti-ship missiles go through the barrage unnoticed) or a combination of the two?

After that, it'll be getting a bit more "fluff" with incorporating 1-2 25cm Railguns (spinal mounted if possible) and 5-6 smaller railguns.

[Flying Dice]

The more I'm looking at Sensors, the more I wonder; what's the difference between, say, a Resolution 1 Missile Fire Control and a Resolution 40 Sensor?

Sensor resolution, roughly speaking, determines the minimum size of object which can be detected at any point within the sensor's range. So (If I'm remembering my values correctly) a R16 sensor with a range of 100m km can detect ships of 800 tons or more up to 100m km away, and will pick up smaller contacts (namely missiles, as NPRs and the various special enemies don't use fighters) at closer ranges, depending on the size of the smaller contact. Incidentally, R16 is my recommended resolution for all AS because of the size of a certain enemy ship type. Also: The lower the resolution, the smaller the objects that can be detected at its maximum range. However, lower resolution will also tend to correspond to larger size, hence why you use a R1Range6m AMS and a R16Range100mAS, as opposed to a R1Range80m universal AS.


Re: missile use: It is better to use the same munition types for all ships (so no), as saturating their PD with AMM or submunitions isn't useful if your ASM are slower, unless your AMM can do enough damage to significantly impact PD performance (unlikely). Incidentally, it is much better to use large numbers of reduced-size increased-reload time launchers, as, say, a single salvo of 200 ASM from a 4-ship battlegroup is going to be much more effective than a large number of smaller salvos. Also (this is more of a personal preference), but adding a number of XO racks (box launchers) can be a very helpful boost; doubling your weight of fire for a single salvo can often be enough to break through heavy defenses.


Additionally, does anyone have a link to that missile design spreadsheet Paul(?) made? Got a class in 10, so I can't be arsed to dig around for it right now. That thing is one of the best tools you can have.

[Metalax]

Skip the CIWS and just use gauss turrets directly. CIWS only targets missiles headed for the ship it is mounted on while gauss turrets set to final defensive fire will fire on any missiles inbound at any ship in the taskgroup. They can also be used for ship to ship combat if necessary.

I'd put the fleet sensors on a different ship than your primary point defense ships as you will need far fewer sensor ships than you will point defense ships. Putting them onto your jump ship tends to work out quite well, as fleet scale sensors are large and jump ships need to be bulked out to their jump limit.

As an example a standard squadron for me at low-mid tech will consist of 1 jump/sensor ship, 3 gauss PD ships and 2 heavy beam ships or missile ships.

Using a missile screen to get ship-killers through can work, but it takes quite a bit more managment as you will have different reload speeds of the launchers and need to ensure that they arrive at the target at the same time. I usually find it simpler to go with a single intermediate missile, which also simplifies the logistics train as you only have to produce a single missile type.

Dedicated anti-missile missile ships can be of use however as you can use them to thin out incomeing salvos, making it less likely that missiles will slip by your point defense. They also tend to be good at killing fighters/light facs.

Of course feel free to experiment, I know that I've played many games where I've deliberatly gone against my usual design decisions just to see how it plays out.

[RedKing]

The more I'm looking at Sensors, the more I wonder; what's the difference between, say, a Resolution 1 Missile Fire Control and a Resolution 40 Sensor?

Well first off, they're two different animals.

Fire Control sensors are short-range and critical for firing missiles. The other is likely a search sensor which is used to detect objects. Think of it this way: the search sensor tells you what's out there, the FC sensor lets you "lock on" to it and fire.

Resolution is the default sensitivity setting the sensor is attuned to. By sacrificing sensitivity, you can increase sensor range. A resolution 1 sensor will detect anything size 1 (i.e. 50 tons) or larger at the stated range. Basically, it's tuned as fine as possible, with a concomitant reduction in range.

A resolution 40 sensor is geared to looking for objects of size 2000 tons and larger. Much bigger range, but against objects which are below the resolution threshold (fighters, small FACs, and missiles) its detection range will be appropriately reduced. It might not detect missiles until they're right on top of you.

Which is why I typically either:
1. Build a dedicated AWAC craft with multiple layers of sensor detection: a low-resolution long-range search sensor for spotting capital ships, a medium-resolution medium-range search sensor for detecting frigates/corvettes/FACs/fighters, a high-resolution short-range search sensor for missile defense, and then usually one or more high-resolution short-range fire control radars to tie into the area defence weapons like gauss turrets, AMM launchers, etc.

or 2. Build my battlegroups to have overlapping sensor profiles (maybe the lead capital ship mounts the LR sensors, the destroyer escorts mount the medium ones, etc.) and overlapping area defence capabililties.

Problem with method 1 is that you're putting all your eggs in one basket. If the enemy takes out your AWAC, the rest of your task group may be left blind or at least severely hampered. Problem with method 2 is that it takes more ships and it's more rigid. You can't make ad hoc squadrons as easily, whereas with method 1 you just tack on an AWAC to whatever grouping of combat vessels you want.

As to your force composition, it sounds pretty reasonable. I typically build one capital ship that carries the long-range sensors (often a carrier of some kind with a fighter squad or some FACs) and the jumpdrive. This is grouped with 4-6 missile boats. I usually make them with 4-6 tubes each, of medium size missiles (size 6-8) and enough reloads to get about 12-20 salvos off. Hook those up with synchronized fire, and most of the time the total volley will overwhelm onboard point defense, and have enough punch to reduce enemy vessels pretty quickly. My current game, I also mounted three "Capital Gauss Cannons" (Gauss Cannons with 100% accuracy rather than using railguns) for close combat. The GC actually work pretty damn well at point-blank range. They only do 1 pt of damage per shot, but the high ROF and a 5 sec reload time mean that I'm pouring a constant stream of steel into an enemy. Instead of punching holes into armor every 2-3 rounds, I'm chewing the armor away every 5-second round. This also increases the chance of getting a followup hit in a section where the armor's already been breached by a missile hit or laser or PB, which leads to internal damage (an old Battletech/RL strategy).

[darkrider2]

Might be precursors.

[Eagle_eye]

Might be precursors.

I think if they give up, it's guaranteed swarm or precursors.

[catoblepas]

I'm pretty sure that I have had them give up at least once when starting multiple species on the same planet. I think it might have even happened with different human nations, hilariously. India and China giving up on communicating or something.

Is there any way to transfer conquered population to the 'main' population btw? it seems odd that elements of the same empire on the same planet refusing to share technology infrastructure etc with each other. I recall the game crashing when I tried previously. A real shame because I usually start Earth out with numerous nations and organizations such as Russia, USA, China, India, Arab League, African Union, European Union, and UNASUR. It's kinda wierd to have most of the planet reduced to living off the scraps of one nation after 'unification' so I was wondering if there was a way to better integrate them?

[Hanzoku]

The only way I've seen is to go into SM, write down the numbers for the nations to merge, merge them by hand and delete any leftover races.

[forsaken1111]

I'm pretty sure that I have had them give up at least once when starting multiple species on the same planet. I think it might have even happened with different human nations, hilariously. India and China giving up on communicating or something.

Is there any way to transfer conquered population to the 'main' population btw? it seems odd that elements of the same empire on the same planet refusing to share technology infrastructure etc with each other. I recall the game crashing when I tried previously. A real shame because I usually start Earth out with numerous nations and organizations such as Russia, USA, China, India, Arab League, African Union, European Union, and UNASUR. It's kinda wierd to have most of the planet reduced to living off the scraps of one nation after 'unification' so I was wondering if there was a way to better integrate them?

Can you not pick up the population with a colony ship and drop them into the other colony on the planet?

[RedKing]

I'm pretty sure that I have had them give up at least once when starting multiple species on the same planet. I think it might have even happened with different human nations, hilariously. India and China giving up on communicating or something.

Is there any way to transfer conquered population to the 'main' population btw? it seems odd that elements of the same empire on the same planet refusing to share technology infrastructure etc with each other. I recall the game crashing when I tried previously. A real shame because I usually start Earth out with numerous nations and organizations such as Russia, USA, China, India, Arab League, African Union, European Union, and UNASUR. It's kinda wierd to have most of the planet reduced to living off the scraps of one nation after 'unification' so I was wondering if there was a way to better integrate them?

Can you not pick up the population with a colony ship and drop them into the other colony on the planet?

There's issues where if the population is less than required to fill up the colony ship completely, they won't load. I ran into the same problem trying to establish "resettlement camps" where I brought various populations (of the same empire and species) after conquering a couple of settlements. Had to just SM them all into one place.

[miauw62]

Okay, im starting, and i named my civ The Vestibule Of Hills, my race Dwarven and the planet 'The Realm Of Time'
:3
Tutorials, i hope you are updated nuff.

[Flying Dice]

Might be precursors.

it was a bunch of lizard-folk.

The racial image is irrelevant.

Okay, im starting, and i named my civ The Vestibule Of Hills, my race Dwarven and the planet 'The Realm Of Time'
:3
Tutorials, i hope you are updated nuff.

Heh.

Where we're going, we don't need tutorials!