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[Flying Dice]

So whats a good ASM for earlyish game?

So, I actually went and took a look at the missiles I've made. At ion drive level tech, I've got a size 4 that travels 112m km at 21,000 km/s, delivering a strength 4 WH and a size 12 PDC-launched missile with a 94m km range that travels at 27,000 km/s and carries a strength 16 WH. Yours isn't actually that slow relatively, and I've invested pretty heavily into the engine size/power modifier techs and the other missile techs. The main thing on yours is the short range. Precursors will launch missiles from hundreds of millions of kilometers away, so you should try to match that.

This is pretty standard. I tend to stick with strength-4 WH for a damned long time, focusing on improving chance to-hit, range, and speed. Once I've got around 200m km range with at least 50% CTH against targets moving at 10k km/s, I start increasing the MSP allocation to WH.

Also, the objectively best approach to missile warfare is smaller numbers of large volleys of missiles, thanks to the way point defense works. Basically, PD set to final defensive fire will attack each volley during the final 5-second tick before it impacts; the more missiles you have in each volley, the more will get through.

For example, assume that you are attacking an enemy ship capable of shooting down an average of 8 of your ASMs from each volley. If you fire volleys of 6 ASMs every thirty seconds, on average you will get no hits minute of firing. If you fire volleys of 12 ASMs every sixty seconds, you will average 4 hits per minute of firing. If you fire volleys of 24 ASMs every two minutes, you will average 8 hits per minute of firing.

Of course, there's room for variation within that. I typically break into four distinctive styles of ASM: Standard WH-4 ones with a range of 120-250m km; fighter missiles with large warheads, comparable speed, and short (~25m km) range, designed to be launched from fighters (which can get close to enemies without being detected); long range missiles (WH-4, similar speed, and a range of 800m km or more). These pay for their range with increased size, and I use them sparingly, but they're good for reaching out and touching things you don't want to get close to; and finally cluster missiles, which are basically long-range drones that launch swarms of small missiles within a shorter range, comparable to fighter missiles. These are basically novelty weapons, but they're fun to play with and are still effective at breaking through PD.

How strong are Star Swarm ships?

They take only a few hits to kill and have low firepower individually, but they're fast, hard to detect (with early technology) and numerous.

That's just the Soldiers, of course...

That said, Queens are actually easy to deal with if you know the trick to them and there aren't any NPRs feeding them streams of ships.

[WhitiusOpus]

Ok, so I just got this... How do I play?

Is it even a game???

I thought Dwarf Fortress had a learning curve, good lord.

[Tarran]

A tip: Asking a question as vague as "how do I play" is far less likely to get a response than asking something even slightly more specific.

Yes, it's a game, just reduced to its raw internals. You'll have to supply your own data-player interface.

[Ak-Sai]

Ok, so I just got this... How do I play?

Is it even a game???

I thought Dwarf Fortress had a learning curve, good lord.

Yeah, my thoughts were quite the same when I started it first time. When I pushed myself to second try I went a bit further but it seems to be very complex for me (yet). Maybe third try will bring me some enlightement ) .

BTW, sorry for asking (possibly) silly questions but is it possible to play as non-human race (with some special features ad/or tecnology) ? Or maybe to develop starting race into something... different. 

[Rabid_Cog]

That depends. Do you want to play 3-eyed, 4-legged aliens with a serious superiority complex and a biologically programmed mission to destroy all life in the universe? Easy. You've been doing that all along.

Do you want to play something that colonizes planets by infecting hosts? Hmm, thats a bit tougher. But doable with some SM goodness.

Basically, the game is so bare-bones (I mean that in a good way) that racial variations are just up to your imagination.

[EuchreJack]

BTW, sorry for asking (possibly) silly questions but is it possible to play as non-human race (with some special features ad/or tecnology) ? Or maybe to develop starting race into something... different.

You can use SM mode to start as non-human.  Different options are: methane breather instead of oxygen breather, different gravity preference and tolerance, different preferred temperature and tolerance, different pressure tolerance, and different preferred breathable gas and tolerance.

Tolerance basically means how much the planet can vary and still be inhabitable.

As for modifying your starting race, you can create modified people with different temperature and breathable atmosphere tolerances.

You've pretty much got to imagine anything else.  But some of the name themes can help out.  The machine race options add extra flavor, for example.  You can also change the portrait.

[Sharp]

Hmm I'm sure it's been proposed before but I want to try and have some sneaky short range ships armed with plasma carronades to surprise enemy ships and shotgun blast them. Defensively it seems fine when camping jump points but offensively it looks like it's harder to work.

Do alien ships have active sensors on all the time or do they only put them up when they detect TH/EM contacts or just random intervals put up sensors?

I have low thermal output engines so I think I can get fairly close without being spotted by thermal sensors but I think cloaking will take a long time to research to get effective results.

Otherwise I think I might just get some cloaking and just fire off long range missiles hopefully with impunity.

I think an obvious downside of shotgun ships though is even if I do manage to sneak in fairly close undetected, once I am detected although my hits will be doing lots of damage I too will be taking lots of damage at close range so enemy ship fire will be quite accurate as well. Maybe I should just try fighter shotguns and hope the smaller TCS and high speed will be enough to survive close encounters.

Mainly I want plasma carronades to have some use because lasers and particle beams seem much better and missiles even better then that so do space shotguns have use in a place where close quarters combat is pretty hard to get to.

And one final question, do fighters suffer from fleet inexperience? because getting close range undetected means having fire control off until close enough to fire and once that activates I want to get firing straight away without delays giving free hits to aliens.

[Sheb]

There is no way you can sneak that close. Maybe a swarm of fighters, where some will get through anyway?

[Metalax]

AI ships normally start with actives off and will switch them on when they detect an em or thermal contact or a ship takes damage. Once the actives for an AI ship have been switched on, I've never seen them switched off.

The cloaking in aurora isn't really designed to get ships into beam striking range, but rather is designed to make it harder to detect exactly where the long ranged missile boats are throwing their missiles from, preventing return fire until a sensor ship moves much closer to them.

Plasma cannonades are primarily useful for jump point defence, they are a poor choice for attack. I have used them successfully on small fast sub 10k ton corvettes, but it is a deliberate choice to use a non-optimal weapon system.

Reasonably sure that fighters do suffer if they have not received fleet training. However you can train them by leaving them on a carrier and sending it on training.

[Sharp]

AI ships normally start with actives off and will switch them on when they detect an em or thermal contact or a ship takes damage. Once the actives for an AI ship have been switched on, I've never seen them switched off.

Ahh good to know.

Low sig close range fighters are pretty damn expensive so even if they work it's a very big risk as they are likely to die in any return fire so it's just a pipe dream.

Also I'm so annoyed, I kept looking how to build PDC's and going through every single menu and button but just missing the one in the design view inbetween Class and Hull....so much time wasted trying to see if I needed to research PDC only stuff.

[Duuvian]

One note about PDCs: I made large PDC fighter bases by giving them heavy armor, hangars, armored magazines for missile storage and a small fuel supply, as well as a few AMM launchers and a fire control. Unfortunately it appears you can't order PDCs to start training exercises as they slowly gain fleet training without it.

That means the fighters loaded into the PDC fighter bases did not have a way to increase their own fleet training.

I just thought I'd mention this in case you had a similar idea since it seemed pretty cool to me.

[Metalax]

PDC fighter bases also suffer the issue that they cannot repair fighters due to being unable to mount engineering spaces. If you want trained fighters in your PDC's you will need to build a training carrier to carry them while training.

[Sharp]

I mainly wanted a PDC for a large active sensor so I could have a swarm of ships with only fire controls instead of sensors

Can asteroids be towed? I would love to just park an asteroid next to a jump point and mount lots of weapons. Is a ship with recreational facilities essentially a floating place where crew won't lose morale and does the recreational facilities apply to any ships in the same fleet? Also does dangerously low morale affect non-combat operations like surveying or is it fine to keep a geological survey ship constantly surveying a system while the crew goes space crazy?

[Mini]

Can asteroids be towed?

No.

Is a ship with recreational facilities essentially a floating place where crew won't lose morale and does the recreational facilities apply to any ships in the same fleet?

No, it has to be orbiting a colony. I'm not sure if the ship it is on will lose morale while in space.

Also does dangerously low morale affect non-combat operations like surveying or is it fine to keep a geological survey ship constantly surveying a system while the crew goes space crazy?

Sometimes, I think it did effect surveying. I'm pretty sure it does not effect cargo unload times, for example.

[Flying Dice]

Once again underlining the fact that we really need a class of construction to fill the fortress/station role, with no engines but also free of (or with greatly reduced) maintenance costs and (provided the right facilities are added) morale drain. That was actually around 75% of why I used to play with maintenance failures off, but because you can't deactivate morale it's basically impossible to have any sort of permanent or semipermanent facility that isn't bound to a planetary body.