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[Sheb]

Does it need to be at Mars though? I thought protection level were computed by system, so parking a few military ships in Earth orbit would do the trick.

[Dutchling]

Does it need to be at Mars though? I thought protection level were computed by system, so parking a few military ships in Earth orbit would do the trick.

I'm pretty sure it's per colony.

[MarcAFK]

I don't think so, I usually don't bother pudding any PDCs on Mars untill some time later, so the PDCs on Earth or the fleet must be providing enough protection.

[Flying Dice]

Does it need to be at Mars though? I thought protection level were computed by system, so parking a few military ships in Earth orbit would do the trick.

I'm pretty sure it's per colony.

That's a different thing entirely.

Ground forces raise your political stability modifier by their presence on a colony, but do not prevent stability loss. It's just that if your GF strength is sufficient, you'll have a net gain of political stability.

Your fleet presence is for all ships in the system, which is why ships can be deployed from colonies to patrol, defend jump points, etc. without the colonies going crazy. Ships prevent stability loss from ever occurring; this is what the Requested and Actual protection levels in the bottom left of the summary indicate; as long as your fleet presence within a system has an APL greater than the RPL of the colonies within it, none of them will lose political stability. Your capital is automatically insulated from loss of political stability, and there's a population threshold before other colonies start losing it.

At least, I'm about 85% sure that it's fleet presence in system; it's been a long time since my last campaign died, and the current one is a really slow burner.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   Someone was asking about Ground Units (GUs) and since I have been working with them recently I figured I would go into some stuff about them. Anyway first off the low tech units are junk as everyone has said. Now if you don't have anything else they can hold the line I guess but they are actually 10 times the size of a normal unit. The reason for this in lore is that the TN tech means that instead of a mass of men your units are instead small groups of well equipped soldiers. If you want to read Steve's post about it then you can find that here. Anyway time for a chart direct from the wiki to show the strengths of various units:

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Unit Name Type Atk Def Size TP
Assault Infantry Battalion AST 100% 50% 5 100
Brigade Headquarters BHQ 0% 20% 5 150 †
Divisional Headquarters DHQ 0% 30% 5 250 †
Construction Brigade CB 0% 50% 25 150 ††
Combat Engineer Battalion CEB 100% 100% 5 180 †††
Garrision Battalion GAR 0% 100% 5 60
Heavy Assault Battalion HVA 120% 120% 5 180
Low Tech Armor Division LTA 30% 30% 50 90 *
Low Tech Infantry Division LIT 12.5% 25% 50 50 *
Infantry Cadre ICD 1% 1% 5   **
Armor Cadre ACD 1% 1% 5   **
Marine Battalion MAR 100% 100% 5 180 ‡
Marine Company MRC 20% 20% 1 36 ‡
Mobile Infantry Battalion INF 50% 100% 5 100
Replacement Battalion REP 0% 5% 5 40 ‡‡

†: Brigade Headquarters may command up to four battalions forming a brigade. A Divisional Headquarters may command up to four brigades at a time.
††: Construction Brigades act as a construction factory while on a planet. They are also required to recover abandoned faculties from alien ruins. Construction Brigades are five times bigger than battalions and cannot be split up.
†††: Combat Engineer Battalions fight at double strength when attacking or defending a PDC.
‡: Marines fight at double their listed strength when performing boarding actions against ships and PDCs.
*: Low Tech Infantry and Armor Divisions maybe be converted into Infantry and Armor Cadres respectively.
**: Infantry and Armor Cadres may be used to reduce the cost of training a new unit. Infantry Cadres reduce the price by 40 and Armor by 60.
‡‡: Replacement Battalions will help wounded ground units on the same planet recover to full strength at a cost to their own health.   The percent is of your GU strength tech. You will notice that while the low tech units are weak the cadres are the weakest so its better to keep them as actual units till you need to use them but the moment you start making actual units use them up. A cadre reduces the cost and the time it takes to train a new unit of the corresponding type(armor/infantry).
   Okay with that out of the way let me state that you probably won't need GUs till you find an opponent to invade. This however doesn't mean you shouldn't make some. First off your unit morale will give them a bonus not only to their strength but helps protect them from damage. The way they gain morale is by being in a brigade HQ with a bonus when that HQ is under a division HQ based on the leaders of the HQ(half from the division HQ's). Basically what this causes me to generally do is get the tech for the Garrision Battalion and the Brigade HQ then make one brigade of the garrision battalions. This should provide a good seed of defense should it hit the fan and you can always just move them to your first colony when they start to dislike you and let them keep that down.
   Now to talk about transporting them. The units that are size 5 will fit one to a Troop Transport Bay. This means that you actually need 10 of them and not 5 to transport a low tech unit as someone had stated previously if I remember correctly. 10 is an awkward number of them though and since the TTBay is commercial I would advise either 5 for a brigade or just going straight to 21 which will hold a full division. I am partial to the division size transport as it will hold a number of other unit formations that wouldn't fit in just 5. For instance with alien ruins I like a Brigade HQ, 3 Garrison Battalions, and a Construction Brigade which all told would take 9 which I must admit would fit in 10 but honestly you shouldn't ever have to move your low tech stuff ever as in basically any situation you will want to have turned them into something else. The armor especially as the HQ units take armor cadres.

   Now in relation to the political stability people have been talking about. GUs lower it by force, I don't think actually kill population but it wouldn't surprise me. The reason a colony destabilizes is when you don't have enough of a military presence in system with ships and PDCs. It doesn't matter where in system, just the knowledge that you keep your old broken down first age ships mothballed out on Pluto in a bunch of PDC hangers is enough to make them feel safe. The bigger your colony the more you need to coddle them. Generally early on, especially with a conventional start it will be a lot easier to just station some ground units on a planet though that will cause a little bit of event spam as it will alert you that the stability went down and that the stability went up.

[Rod]

Thanks for helping me out before!  Just one more silly question..
Mass drivers are capable of moving 5000 tonnes per year each right?  When I look at actual stockpile values in a colony, what are the units of those values?  Im trying to figure out the optimum number of mass drivers to have at a comet/asteroid..

[Dutchling]

Your fleet presence is for all ships in the system, which is why ships can be deployed from colonies to patrol, defend jump points, etc. without the colonies going crazy. Ships prevent stability loss from ever occurring; this is what the Requested and Actual protection levels in the bottom left of the summary indicate; as long as your fleet presence within a system has an APL greater than the RPL of the colonies within it, none of them will lose political stability. Your capital is automatically insulated from loss of political stability, and there's a population threshold before other colonies start losing it.

Are you sure? I thought PDC presence (well cost) vs population (unless it's your homeworld) was all that mattered for as stability loss.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

@Rod
   At the bottom of the mineral screen there is a total column under the last mineral and you can check the total annual. This shows how much you make annually with your current tech and the number of mines there. Divide that by 5k should give you the optimal number. Just to note of course if you add more mines, research the next mining tech, or you put a geo team down and they improve the availability the numbers will change.

@Dutchling
   It counts PDCs and Ships in system. What it is meant to represent is your control of the system from what I can tell. Ground Units don't count because they can never shoot a space ship down while Mil ships and PDCs can and generally do have some point when it comes to space defense and thus are counted (even if they are woefully below your current tech level and couldn't hurt a fly). I am sure Steve would like to be able to calculate your actual ability to defend a system and then modify by various leaders ability to spin it but that would be a lot harder because its hard to tell if something is worthless or not. A PDC with a massive sensor system and doesn't have weapons could be vital to your defense while the ship filled to the brim with missile launchers might not have any missiles to reload and totally useless.

[Culise]

Your fleet presence is for all ships in the system, which is why ships can be deployed from colonies to patrol, defend jump points, etc. without the colonies going crazy. Ships prevent stability loss from ever occurring; this is what the Requested and Actual protection levels in the bottom left of the summary indicate; as long as your fleet presence within a system has an APL greater than the RPL of the colonies within it, none of them will lose political stability. Your capital is automatically insulated from loss of political stability, and there's a population threshold before other colonies start losing it.

Are you sure? I thought PDC presence (well cost) vs population (unless it's your homeworld) was all that mattered for as stability loss.

PDCs, space stations, whips and everything count towards the whole system's actual protection level.

I've had a few PDCs on earth, and Mars was perfectly happy, even though they could be bombarded and Earth could do nothing about it.

Oddly, they don't actually care if they actually can be protected at all, as long as they think they can be, and it doesn't just apply to having working PDCs on the wrong planet.  They discovered in the main forum that you can rig up a PDC with a carronade or size 100 missile launcher with no actual capacitors, fire control, magazine, or the other things you need to actually make it useful, and it'll still boost the APL of the system.  I suppose it's a model of security theatre - a big cannon sitting next to the colony pointed up at the stars looks reassuring, even if it's just an empty shell in practice. 

[Karlito]

Yeah, the completely useless ICBM silos you get in conventional starts work well for that.

[Metalax]

snip

Couple of things to add on to Akhiers post on ground units.

Marines don't, or at least shouldn't be, getting a bonus when fighting in PDC's. They used to but it was removed with the introduction of combat engineers.

One thing to note with morale training is that it only occurs when the ground units are deployed on a bodies surface, if they are on a ship or stationed inside a PDC then they do not conduct training.

I'd go a little further than Akhier suggests for divisional troop transports and make them capable of carrying 25 battalions. This lets them carry a full division of troops along with four replacement battalions to allow you troops some sustainability in combat. It also allows for the transport of five construction brigades at a time rather than four.

Thanks for helping me out before!  Just one more silly question..
Mass drivers are capable of moving 5000 tonnes per year each right?  When I look at actual stockpile values in a colony, what are the units of those values?  Im trying to figure out the optimum number of mass drivers to have at a comet/asteroid..

Stockpile quantities are listed in tons. Note that that is 5,000 tons total per year including all minerals not 5,000 tons of each. To work out how many you need look at the totals in the "stockpile" and "stockpile plus production" columns on the mining tab, the difference is the production per year you will want to shift via mass driver.

Usually a single mass driver will be sufficient to handle an asteroid/comet unless they get a very large number of mines.

[firsal]

My first few ship and PDC designs. Please review. Better to be laughed at here than being obliterated in game. 
 
Cargo Ship, used to deliver things from Earth to the colonies

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Delivery class Cargo Ship    71,400 tons     205 Crew     886.6 BP      TCS 1428  TH 1500  EM 0
1050 km/s     Armour 1-153     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 2     PPV 0
MSP 16    Max Repair 25 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 18 months    Spare Berths 1   
Cargo 50000   

Polaris Aerospace Corp 100-C Pulse Drive (15)    Power 100    Fuel Use 7.96%    Signature 100    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres    Range 31.7 billion km   (348 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
Survey Craft. I decided to combine the geo and grav survey role into one design for simplicity.

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Discovery class Survey Vessel    4,000 tons     120 Crew     757.4 BP      TCS 80  TH 120  EM 0
1500 km/s    JR 3-50     Armour 1-22     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/2/2     Damage Control Rating 4     PPV 0
Maint Life 7.68 Years     MSP 473    AFR 32%    IFR 0.4%    1YR 14    5YR 212    Max Repair 100 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months    Spare Berths 1   

Federation Propulsion Corp J-4-3-50 Phase Drive     Max Ship Size 4000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3
Yaroslavi Industries 40EP Pulse Drive (3)    Power 40    Fuel Use 57%    Signature 40    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 500,000 Litres    Range 39.5 billion km   (304 days at full power)

Gravitational Survey Sensors (2)   2 Survey Points Per Hour
Geological Survey Sensors (2)   2 Survey Points Per Hour

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

PDCs - The first one is my sensor PDC, to look for incoming hostiles. The second is my point-defense PDC, to shoot down incoming nasties. My missiles are TERRIBLE right now, so I put it lots of magazines and launchers to be able to intercept more advanced hostile missiles, via outmassing them. Some are bound to hit, right? The third one is my anti-ship PDC. 

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Oracle class Planetary Defence Centre    4,400 tons     127 Crew     570 BP      TCS 88  TH 0  EM 0
Armour 5-23     Sensors 18/240     Damage Control Rating 10     PPV 0
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 1   

CIWS-80 (4x6)    Range 1000 km     TS: 8000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit
Federal Sensor Corp. ASS-120-100 (1)     GPS 24000     Range 120.0m km    Resolution 100
Thermal Sensor TH3-18 (70%) (1)     Sensitivity 18     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  18m km
EM Detection Sensor EM5-25 (1)     Sensitivity 25     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  25m km

ECCM-1 (1)         
This design is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre and can be pre-fabricated in 2 sections


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Guardian class Planetary Defence Centre    4,600 tons     117 Crew     605.8 BP      TCS 92  TH 0  EM 0
Armour 5-24     Sensors 1/120     Damage Control Rating 20     PPV 5
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 0   
Magazine 480   

Fuel Capacity 50,000 Litres    Range N/A
CIWS-80 (2x6)    Range 1000 km     TS: 8000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit
PDC Size 1 Missile Launcher (5)    Missile Size 1    Rate of Fire 10
Federal Sensor Corp MFC-7-1 (1)     Range 7.2m km    Resolution 1
Size 1 Anti-missile Missile (480)  Speed: 4,000 km/s   End: 138.2m    Range: 33.2m km   WH: 1    Size: 1    TH: 24/14/7

Federal Sensor Corp ASS-6-1 (1)     GPS 120     Range 6.0m km    Resolution 1

ECCM-1 (1)         Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s


This design is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre and can be pre-fabricated in 2 sections


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Lasher class Planetary Defence Centre    3,050 tons     108 Crew     343.4 BP      TCS 61  TH 0  EM 0
Armour 5-18     Sensors 1/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 24
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 2   
Magazine 116   

Fuel Capacity 50,000 Litres    Range N/A
CIWS-80 (2x6)    Range 1000 km     TS: 8000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit
PDC Size 4 Missile Launcher (6)    Missile Size 4    Rate of Fire 30
Fedral Sensor Corp MFC-45-100 (1)     Range 45.0m km    Resolution 100
Size 4 Anti-ship Missile (29)  Speed: 4,000 km/s   End: 129.6m    Range: 31.1m km   WH: 4    Size: 4    TH: 24/14/7

Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s


This design is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre and can be pre-fabricated in 2 sections
Engine tech is at Nuclear Pulse Engine level.

[Flying Dice]

RE: Oracle: A R100 sensor is going to be nearly useless. You need to pay attention to all of the range markers, not just the maximum one. The only things that'll pick up at anywhere near maximum range are big honking ships. If it gets to the point where you have multiple ships in the 5-10kton+ range inside Sol and you aren't detecting and engaging with your own fleet before they get anywhere near your populations... yeah. Granted, sensor tech is really volume-hungry at low TLs, but you're using PDCs. Just pump up the size as high as you can afford and set the resolution to something more useful. I use R16 for all of my anti-ship sensors, but that's just paranoia about a certain type of 800 ton thing. You can probably get away with R40 or so; that'll give you a nice, long maximum range with a large sensor while still ensuring that you have an advanced warning zone for small vessels.

RE: Guardian: Don't. Just, don't. AMMs are a high-cost investment even when your TL is high enough for them to be effective, but at this they're nothing but a resource sink. There is literally nothing in the game that you will stop with 5 launchers throwing missiles with speeds and intercept chances like that. You're better off pushing hard for better tech, putting your resources into meson PD, putting resources into more ASM launcher bases, or some combination of those.

I'll put it another way: a TL4-5ish fleet with 3 AMM escorts might blow through a few hundred AMMs intercepting launches from half a dozen enemy missile ships, and that's if the enemy has low ammo stores and the player is a cheapass who only uses two AMMs per target. That's with tech good enough that a decent percentage of those AMMs are intercepting targets; keep in mind, too, that they're going to have a lot of AMM launchers, enough to assign 2-3 missiles to every enemy ASM at ideal ratios. At that level the cost of those missiles is barely enough to make them a viable option. At TL1-2, you're frankly better off just teching up and hoping nothing nasty happens across you, because nothing you build will be particularly effective, but certain things like AMMs might actually make it worse by consuming minerals that you could have used for slightly more effective weapons now or much more effective weapons a few decades down the line.

But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

RE: Lasher: It's about the best you could hope for at this TL, but with ammo reserves and to-hit chances that low, you're not going to do much of anything unless you build hundreds of the things.


tl;dr: Really low tech weapons are a waste of time and resources. They won't pose a serious threat to anything that might stumble across you, and as long as Invaders are off it's highly unlikely that that will happen anyways. I honestly can't recall ever having NPRs or other special things show up in Sol, at least not for the first 50-60 years. Now, some of those 1m population "hidden last colony" scenarios starting in other systems with multiple habitable worlds... hoo boy. :x

[firsal]

Okay then. I'll dump em' all and tech up. Thanks.

How are my missiles, given my current tech level?

[Flying Dice]

The speed and intercept chances are terrible, but that's the tech more than anything else. It's why it's sort of pointless to build them before TL3-4ish: they're too slow to catch anything and too clumsy to hit it if they do. It's even worse with the new mechanics for drives. :|