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[LoSboccacc]

they'll be fairly rubbish against Invaders without a large tech advantage

well, almost everything is useless until magneto plasma.
starting a campaign with invaders at the doors is a waiting game: you need a mass of anti missile ship and endless gauss turrets to protect your planet from their ship, but you can't retaliate as they will smash you as soon as you close in.

best strategy I've found is kill all the missile you can, with defences and ships. recycle as much as possible, and wait. keep something always in orbit so that your shipyard and planet don't get too much damage, and hope they have small magazines

it's just a tower defence until your fighters can reach them and poke their shield. at magneto plasma tech, you can bring one of two of their ship down, but you'll be trading huge mass for just some damage and an eventual kill.

once you start salvaging them, expect quick changes in the balance of force as you get free techies 

[Flying Dice]

they'll be fairly rubbish against Invaders without a large tech advantage

well, almost everything is useless until magneto plasma.
starting a campaign with invaders at the doors is a waiting game: you need a mass of anti missile ship and endless gauss turrets to protect your planet from their ship, but you can't retaliate as they will smash you as soon as you close in.

best strategy I've found is kill all the missile you can, with defences and ships. recycle as much as possible, and wait. keep something always in orbit so that your shipyard and planet don't get too much damage, and hope they have small magazines

it's just a tower defence until your fighters can reach them and poke their shield. at magneto plasma tech, you can bring one of two of their ship down, but you'll be trading huge mass for just some damage and an eventual kill.

once you start salvaging them, expect quick changes in the balance of force as you get free techies 

I'm already past M-P level tech, and I believe I'm close to a speed parity, though it has been a while since I last fought Invaders.

As for them "running out" of ammunition: doesn't happen. They use plasma torpedos, which are essentially a mix of missiles and EW in that they are infinite repeaters but also have very long range and actual flight times. The best way I've found to deal with them is to hit hard and fast; if they start bombarding your homeworld you should already be in a position where you've got essentially nothing left to stop them other than PDCs. Personally, I think I can break them with a combination of long range missile bombardment and masses of FACs, but to do that properly I need to be able to engage them on my own terms, rather than in defense of Earth.

[Sirus]

Remember Yaga Minor? Apparently, the outer planets are so far out there that I get overflow errors trying to go to them, on the order of 45 trillion km. The primary star has a luminosity of 900,000. Automated survey doesn't work as there are no asteroids or anything within 10 billion km of the JP. In short, Yaga Minor is pretty useless to me until I get some better engine techs, which won't happen until I get a decent scientist, or unless there are plenty of jump points there to use as a nexus.

[Felius]

EW FACs that can hit >10,000km/s are excellent for dealing with Swarm if you can gather the critical mass needed to out-DPS Queen shields; they'll be fairly rubbish against Invaders without a large tech advantage, and they'll probably do decently well against NPRs with poor sensor/FC tech. You'll want to invest RP in compact ECM, though. And I can't see low-med tech S1 missles being particularly strong, so I'm guessing that you're sandpapering the Precursors. Note that that only works because you're able to engage without taking fire and because Precursors have no shields and shitty armor.

I generally take the precursors out with a single salvo, but that's mostly because a salvo is a ridiculous amount of missiles. If I have a fleet of 12 FACs, and have them fire about 8 to 12 missiles each in a salvo (generally enough to destroy the enemy ships), it means I'm hitting them with about 96 to 144 damage 4 missiles. If I fire the whole arsenal, each FAC is firing 46 missiles, for a total of 552 damage 4 missiles for a twelve ship fleet.

EW FACs as in microwave armed ships, right?

Nonono. EW = Energy Weapons. Microwaves do nothing but fry electronics and burn shields, and are support weapons at best. The ideal would probably be a 10cm laser per FAC or a reduced size 20cm (or thereabouts); you basically just want to be able to beat the 10,000km/s that the Soldiers can pull while also having enough DPS to burn through the Queen's fast-regen shields.

Would taking a page from the swarm itself work well? That is, meson armed FACs?

For the invaders, ouch, that's tough. That only reinforces my wish to wait until I'm somewhat more ready (and having a buffer between me and them) before turning them on.

[Vgray]

Started a new game. I managed to get a little colony on mars. Or should I say SolA IV. On to outfitting my ships with active sensors  so I'm not blind. And figuring out fire-control. What's the difference between building jump gates and giving your ships jump drives anyway?

[Sirus]

Building jump gates takes a while, but after that any ship, no matter what class or size, can use it. Jump drives have a limit in terms of the size and number of ships they can support, and come in military and commercial flavors. Military jump drives cannot transport commercial ships, and vice-verse.

[LoSboccacc]

As for them "running out" of ammunition: doesn't happen.

that's strange: why do they stop attacking after some torpedoes waves? it is not like I'm fighting back. they just retreat with no apparent reason?

[Neonivek]

As for them "running out" of ammunition: doesn't happen.

that's strange: why do they stop attacking after some torpedoes waves? it is not like I'm fighting back. they just retreat with no apparent reason?

My little Pony was on and they were missing it.

[Flying Dice]

As for them "running out" of ammunition: doesn't happen.

that's strange: why do they stop attacking after some torpedoes waves? it is not like I'm fighting back. they just retreat with no apparent reason?

Because Aurora AI. 

Anyhow, my early warning force nailed their survey ships. Now I've got the entirety of my nonmissile forces sitting on top of the wormhole. Hopefully my speed will prevent a certain class from getting in successful ramming attempts. Managed to salvage a drive and an ECM-6 from one of the survey ships, but both had their shields destroyed. Not a big loss, though, as Invader shields honestly suck ass compared to normal ones when faced with a moderate amount of power.

Slowdown because the starting NPR is tangling with Swarm; apparently the NPR has Inertial Confinement drives mixed with Str-6 EM sensors. I sense an unbalanced research division there.

EW FACs that can hit >10,000km/s are excellent for dealing with Swarm if you can gather the critical mass needed to out-DPS Queen shields; they'll be fairly rubbish against Invaders without a large tech advantage, and they'll probably do decently well against NPRs with poor sensor/FC tech. You'll want to invest RP in compact ECM, though. And I can't see low-med tech S1 missles being particularly strong, so I'm guessing that you're sandpapering the Precursors. Note that that only works because you're able to engage without taking fire and because Precursors have no shields and shitty armor.

I generally take the precursors out with a single salvo, but that's mostly because a salvo is a ridiculous amount of missiles. If I have a fleet of 12 FACs, and have them fire about 8 to 12 missiles each in a salvo (generally enough to destroy the enemy ships), it means I'm hitting them with about 96 to 144 damage 4 missiles. If I fire the whole arsenal, each FAC is firing 46 missiles, for a total of 552 damage 4 missiles for a twelve ship fleet.

EW FACs as in microwave armed ships, right?

Nonono. EW = Energy Weapons. Microwaves do nothing but fry electronics and burn shields, and are support weapons at best. The ideal would probably be a 10cm laser per FAC or a reduced size 20cm (or thereabouts); you basically just want to be able to beat the 10,000km/s that the Soldiers can pull while also having enough DPS to burn through the Queen's fast-regen shields.

Would taking a page from the swarm itself work well? That is, meson armed FACs?

For the invaders, ouch, that's tough. That only reinforces my wish to wait until I'm somewhat more ready (and having a buffer between me and them) before turning them on.

Yep, mesons are one of the more effective approaches to dealing with Invaders, as they circumvent two of their three main advantages. I'm just a masochist (who didn't bother researching any meson tech).

[Sirus]

Refresh my memory: How many troop transport bays are needed to carry engineer brigades? I found a lost colony in a nearby system, and I want to partake in the delicious alien knowledge. Or wake the killer alien robots. Whatever.

[Metalax]

Engineers need 5 bays.

[Tarran]

Wait a minute, I don't remember Proxima Centauri being a binary or being a G6-V star.

The primary star has a luminosity of 900,000.

Wow. What's the spectral class, and what's the mass?

[Sirus]

The primary star has a luminosity of 900,000.

Wow. What's the spectral class, and what's the mass?

Spectral class: O6-Ia
Mass: 50
Diameter: 43m
So, basically a blue super-giant.

I've washed my hands of the system. The survey spots are so far-spread that automated surveying gets canceled due to distance. I'll build some sort of heavy defense cruiser on the Sol side of the JP and continue exploration in other directions.

[Flying Dice]

Wait a minute, I don't remember Proxima Centauri being a binary or being a G6-V star.

I finally went back to playing with Real Stars off again for the sake of increased NPR spawns, black holes, and nebulae. Since I'm still using the Terran Federation theme, it uses a lot of the same names as the Real Stars names.


Popped a solid half-dozen of Invader survey ships and meanwhile my own have run across Precursors in another system adjacent to Sol. Don't really want to pull anything away from camping the wormhole, so I think I'll pump out another squadron or two of frigates to deal with them.

Ed: So there I am, thinking that I'm sitting pretty. No worries, just a single wormhole and some Precursors in the neighborhood. I start to open up the JPs in the systems connected to Sol, when suddenly

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Oh bugger.

[Sirus]

Not sure whether to continue this game or not. I'm barely finding any colonizable worlds outside of Sol, and the few I do find would require hyperdrive to get to. Well, let me just start that resear - oh wait! I'm 40 years in and I still don't have the right specialist. Hell, I've been firing most of my new scientists because they're all Logistics or Biology specialists with a 0% boost and maximum of five labs. There hasn't even been an NPR or Precursor robots to break up the boredom. I'm actually hoping that the one easily-reachable extra-solar colony I've found has killer robots or something on it, just to shake things up.