Finally finished that fight I was in with the crummy quality image. I defeated them all...sorta.
The battle went sour almost the moment they got into energy weapon range. They were using mesons, making my fancy armor and shields useless. My main laser corvettes went down, and I ordered everybody to GTFO back to home system. But the enemy ships were gaining.
Thats when I had a thought. "I wonder if I can manually target my PD missiles..." So I switched to my missile PD system and set the targets and pressed open fire. Sure enough, salvo after salvo of tiny size 1 missiles were being fired, 20 per salvo. They were designed to hit stuff twice as fast as the pursuers and had a 80% hit rate. Sure they only hit for 1 each, but 80% of 20 1 damage missiles is 16. More than the individual 800 ton ships could take. Pecking down the pursuer numbers 1 or 2 at a time.
But eventually they caught up to the next croup of fleeing ships, My Aegis class escort destroyers, almost 100% Point defense. And I had a similar thought. "If PD missiles are that effective against them, I wonder how good CIWS and PD lasers are." And sure enough, next 5 seconds. the two Quad PD turrets and the 3 CIWS started tearing those little gunboats new ones. Doing as much damage as the front lines ships' 'slow but pack a wallop' main plasma carronades
So in the end I have 1 Escort destroyer, my EWACS and my empty offensive missile corvettes victoriously fleeing the system. The entire enemy force (excluding a mysterious large EM contact that made no attempt to move toward me during the whole fight) either destroyed or with no engines. I'll come back once I make repairs, reload and replace some of the front lines Corvettes and destroyers that didn't make it and clean up the mess.
Lesson: If you aren't getting missiles shot at you you can use your point defense weapons offensively just like your other weapons. They don't do much damage individually, but a lot of them can add up fast.
@Micro If you used that "Download Aurora" link that shows up in the forum's advertisement pane that's absolutely ancient. The new versions are elseware. Gimme a sec and I'll find and link it.
And yes, thats the version I got first too.
In these threads' OPs Donno Steve's policy on direct links.
4.75 (Has most of the game definitely need all this)
http://aurora.pentarch.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=18304.9 (Came out yesterday-ish just unzip into yout main folder)
http://aurora.pentarch.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=20264.91 (Bugfix for 4.9. Came out today)
http://aurora.pentarch.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2040IMPORTANT: This game does mess with some system dlls. I havent had any trouble but there's a good chance that you will already have some of the dlls. And windows will come up asking if you want to keep your current files instead of using the old ones the game is trying to use. The game will still work fine with the ones you already have.
The wording is confusing. Say yes to them one at a time. Do not say no, or god forbid no to all!