I've just had my first major battle in my campaign! I've been playing very conservatively but after about 200 years I found my first NPR and quickly got my invasion fleet together and sent it to them. The invasion isn't completely over yet, but the main fleet action is finished.
I did learn a lot from it so far. The battle should of been a resounding victory but I ended up with a lot of losses I shouldn't have.
The main core of the fleet consisted of 24 FFEs (10kton), 12 DDEs(20kton), 24 DDGs(20kton), 12 CAs(40kton), 2 BBs(80kton), and 1DN(160kton). Also a strong carrier force of 4 CVEs and 4 CVs. Each CVE carried 1 wing of 40 gauss cannon fighters and 4 command fighters. The CVs had a gauss cannon fighter wing and a missile bomber wing of 40 missile bombers carrying 6 size 2 missiles each on box launchers. A large assortment of tankers came with transports loaded with five full divisions of land troops ready to invade the planet.
The enemy had a...well a ragtag bunch of 10-20k ships mostly, with a few 40ks and a wing of 46 fighters. They formed up into about 8 different groups of ships all with different speeds that all sped toward my fleet at once.
Possessing a large tonnage advantage (4 to 1 easily) and what I judged a bit of a tech advantage (my fleet travels at 7500m/s, the enemy only 4000~ or so) I quickly had my fleet head straight toward the planet and straight at the enemy. As soon as they entered maximum range for missiles I launched all my fighters to intercept theirs thinking they could wipe his fighters out then launch all their missiles at the enemy fleet and return to the carriers to reload.
This quickly revealed a new problem: my missile fighters could not target his fighters, even as I got closer the enemy fighters would not show up on fire control. I am pretty sure this is because they have a resolution 16 on their FC. At the time of design I was thinking they would only target larger ships with their missiles and not fighters. Next time I think I'll use a res 1 FC (even though it ends up taking up more space) and having them use less missiles.
Not a problem I thought: the fighters can simply close in to point blank range and the gauss cannon fighters can blast the enemy fighters out of the sky, after all I had 320 gauss fighters. They closed smoothly and without a problem I thought, until just right before they got into cannon range. The enemy fighters started running and lobbing missiles at point blank range and my fighters did not get a chance to fire at the missiles! My fighters took two waves of missiles losing over 40! fighters each wave, over 80 of my fighters were wiped out in an instant. Then the real problem hit: they were in range but wouldn't fire! I had forgotten to check the training while assembling the fleet. My battleships and dreadnought where below 10% and all the new fighters for the new carriers were 1-5%.
More waves of missiles came in obliterating my fighters. The speed and initiative advantage allowed my fighters to stay on top of the enemy but I kept losing more and more fighters! I was thinking they would all be obliterated and was about to order them to run so the remaining fighters could try to shoot down the incoming missiles during their retreat when the enemy fighters finally ran out of missiles.
It took 2! TWO! minutes for my gauss fighters to finally open fire. The enemy was wiped out, but I had lost 221 fighters in the opening shots of the battle! The only good news was there was no damaged fighters, if a fighter took a hit it was destroyed, so no damaged ones...just dead or alive. I had them press on toward the larger enemy ships since I still had a large number of fighters left and I was shooting for a little revenge for my remaining fighters.
The enemy ships were not going in one direction they had ships going toward my fleet, away from it, and then ships going in what seemed random directions. The whole thing was bizarre to me, really. His groups of ships were in a rough circle shape about 10 million km in diameter. I had received several interrupts of turns earlier, so I knew the enemy had fired missiles at something. I wasn't sure if it was at my fighters or my main fleet. The enemy was at about 150mkm and my fleet long range missiles have 300mkm range so they were definitely in range for me. I didn't fire though because I wanted my fighters to get first blood.
Since the fighter missiles are downsized a lot they had to get a lot closer than my main fleet, they had 60mkm range and I wanted to fire well within that to make sure the enemy didn't avoid them. I decided I'd have the fighters fire mostly at the largest concentration of enemy ships and concentrate fire on their 3 40ktons. Before they got to the point I wanted to fire however missiles started coming in. Two 20k ton ships were in front of the main group I was after and once they got to 30mkm they started lobbing size 1 missiles at my fighters every 5 seconds! I wasn't expecting that, thinking the AMMs would have much shorter range. My gauss fighters shot most of them down, but the low training and low accuracy and reduced numbers let a few missiles through.
I decided to launch all the missiles from the fighters before I took any more damage. It took about 5 minutes to setup all the targets. I'm not sure if there is a better way to divide targets up but what I finally settled on was splitting off into a separate group how many fighters I wanted for each target then having each TG copy target settings for the lead fighter in each group. Then once all the fighters had targets I put them all back together in the same TG. I'm not exactly sure how many missile fighters I had left, but just over 300 missiles went out, divided at all the targets in range. More missiles for the bigger targets but no less than 4 fighters (24 missiles) went to any one target.
With all the missiles launched, I ordered all my fighters to return to the carriers. By then I had lost a few fighters to the size 1 missiles coming in, but I didn't think it would do much more damage. I was wrong about that though... Somehow my gauss cannon command fighters had taken disproportionate losses and then the last two were destroyed. The missile bomber command fighters had resolution 16 radar and couldn't pick up the size 1 missiles. Wave after wave of missiles were still coming in, now all the missiles were getting through. The missiles didn't destroy them in one hit but it didn't take long before multiple fighters were losing engines and being disabled or destroyed. Each fighter has twin engines so I ended up with a ton of half speed fighters trailing behind. It was horrible watching them be destroyed like this...I wasn't sure if losing my missile command fighters would cause the missiles to fail or not. The enemy was well within the main radar range of the main fleet, but at this point I was chewing nails at what else could go wrong.
Finally the enemy missiles stopped and my remaining fighters hightailed it to the carriers. The missiles fired by my fighters started receiving the AMM fire and quickly started to be cut down. Only the two ships by themselves in the lead were destroyed. A lot of missiles hit the main group but didn't seem to do any internal damage, just a bit of armor pounding. Of the 528 fighters launched, only 123 made it back...
I was pretty angry at that! They didn't even manage to do much damage. So I loaded up targets for all but 4 missiles destroyers to flush all their missiles at the enemy. Since each DDG had 120 box launcher missiles this was a total of 2400 size 6 missiles. Probably overkill, but we will not know since this is when I ran into the second huge mistake after the low fleet training. Every ship had their missiles, but as soon as I gave the order to fire it said they were not reloaded.
I'm not exactly sure why, but I think it is because some of the ships were built when I didn't have enough missiles for them, so before the fleet left earth I had them unload all their ordnance and then reload from the colony (after building more missiles) and did not give them enough time to reload into the box launchers?
Regardless as to why...my fleet had all its missiles but apparently they were not in the box launchers and couldn't fire. This upset me pretty bad and I rage quit for the day.
Coming back the only thing I decided I could do was to finish charging the enemy, braving his missile fire and using my larger ship's heavy laser beam weapons (that is after all what they were mainly for! I just thought they would be used at jump points when the enemy was really close by.) I really didn't want to do this though. It took about 4 real life hours because the enemy fleet ran and ran firing missile after missile delay after delay after delay. The overwhelming PD on all the escorts made sure no missiles got through.
Finally when the fleet closed it was absolutely no contest, the main enemy fleet group was obliterated nearly instantly by my cruisers. Unfortunately my battleships and dreadnought never fired because of low training... The remaining small groups of enemy ships were destroyed by small detached groups. They all were destroyed without doing any damage except for one small fight.
The last remaining group of 4 enemy ships engaged my detachment of 2 CAs/4DDEs/4FFEs. The enemy ships were apparently armed with some kind of beam weapons and I had not ordered my lasers to maintain long range (they have a range of 240kkm) and instead had them just close to point blank. They all targeted the same cruiser of mine and blazed away its shielding in the first shot. My ships then returned fire destroying two of his. Right before my ships fired again the enemy got off a second shot and actually did some decent damage to my cruisers armor. The enemy were then finished off by my second volley of lasers. Judging by the gouges in the armor the enemy had pretty strong beams, each hit going about 4 deep into the armor belt.
I've not proceeded past this point yet. I haven't decided to return to earth to fix the missile problem or to press on using the few remaining fighter bombers(I'm pretty sure my gauss cannons and lasers can't hurt PDCs?) to scorch any PDCs. Since I lost so many I have plenty of missile reloads for them. I'm hoping to at least pick up the life pods before leaving, otherwise I've lost a considerable % of my officer corp! There are also other groups of ships flying around, but I think they are commercial ships.
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Topic: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games (Read 2808705 times)