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A) Open Warfare: Shoot them as soon as we can.

15 (48.4%)

B) Cold War: Establish borders, and try to out-grow them.

16 (51.6%)

C) No War: Let's share the solar system.... For now.

0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 31

[a1s]

Do lasers double the fire control range? I've never heard of that before.

Because lasers don't double the fire control range. From what I can recall, the two are independent of each other.
[/quote]

You are right. My bad.

[Bremen]

On the other hand, an advantage for lasers I just thought of:

Habitable planets have atmospheres. Uninhabited ones usually don't, and PDCs get bonuses to fire control range; a PDC with heavy laser weaponry on a mining colony could be brutal.

[Sheb]

Putting a PDC on a moon can also block any ship from approaching the planet.

[Bremen]

Putting a PDC on a moon can also block any ship from approaching the planet.

That's true, on Earth. Unfortunately not only is Titan already a moon, it orbits at 1.2 million km, which is long range for even endgame lasers. Any other moon in the Saturn local area could be millions of km away and out of laser range when we needed it.

Edit: On the other hand, even if we defended Titan with meson bases, our orbital shipyards could be blown up from out of meson range. So there's no perfect solutions.

Some possibilities:

(If we use lasers)
Put Laser PDCs on another moon and hope it's in range when needed (I believe PDCs are undetectable until they fire or use active sensors, so we could even hope for a sucker punch if they fly past the moon without knowing it had PDCs on it).
Comedy option: Put laser bases on all the moons. They have to come into range of some of them.
Missile Armed PDCs on Titan. Might well be worth the expense and inefficiency, but would mean developing missile tech in addition to lasers.
Orbital defense base: Could use lasers from Titan orbit, but lacks the PDC benefits (stealth, no maintenance, longer range, free armor)
Mobile fleet: Just duke it out without support from defenses and hope our fleet wins

(if we go Mesons)
Meson PDCs, and hope they don't have range to blow up the shipyards
Lots and lots of gunboats.

So, basically, I think with mesons we could defend Titan better, but lasers would be nice for defending our mining colonies. I'm actually starting to lean towards lasers and a battlefleet strategy.

[a1s]

Speaking of atmospheres, can we get the environmental stats on this universe's Titan? And any colonizable (non-black in the system screen) celestial bodies?

[Daltesh]

I didn't realize that lasers could shoot from low atmosphere planets. In that case I think it's a pretty good idea to have them for a primary beam weapon, since the range advantage works very well for PDCs which are capable of holding the fire controls with ease.

But despite that, I still think we should invest a bit of research into construction, but not mining. We have twice as many mines as construction factories and we have a backlog of minerals, so there's no real hurry. Instead I still say we should do gas powered reactor and ion engine research with our lead scientist. Researching gas reactors and ion engines would, according to my calculations, take just over a year. And it would give a hefty 50% bonus to speed for any vessal equipped with it, or let us have 50% less engines on a ship to let us use the tonnage for other things while retaining the same speed. It's really quite a hefty advantage and still relatively cheap at this level.

Engines can boost our armor, they can boost our weapon, and they can boost our economy. Speed makes us harder to hit, makes it easier for us to close range and hit our enemy, and lets our freighters actually transport stuff without taking a year for a round trip.

[Sheb]

Titan is twelve degrees and got a 3 atm atmosphere. Mercury got anti-greenhouse gas aplenty, with a total atmosphere of 0.7 atm methink. All other planets are vanilla.

[Bremen]

Have you decided how you'll handle missiles?

[Sheb]

50% Geosensor.

[Daltesh]

I support this decision because it should make things more interesting and knife-fighty. It also means that engines are even more important since our to-hit would be startlingly low as it is. Plus with good engines chances are our gunboats could outrun enemy missiles. This leads to an interesting tactic of using anti-missile fighters following along with the giant enemy missiles, reminiscent of old space fighter games where you have to destroy the enemy torpedoes inbound on your mothership. Except at relativistic speeds.
If it weren't for the pitiful to-hit chance, I'd love to see slow and heavily armored missiles.. Maybe we'll get MIRV drones at least.

AMMs and will require 50% geosensors as well? And MIRVs will need 50% in both the main body and the sub-munitions? And if it's not too much trouble to ask, have you figured out the engineering on the carriers yet? 700% annual seems high.. Sorry if it looks like I'm trying to cause problems, just trying to figure out how things will work.

[Sheb]

MIRV will need geosensors in both main body and sub-munition, yes. I won't know for the carrier until tomorrow evening. As for AMMs, I'm split. Not imposing 50%geo sensors would nerf missiles even more. But what about offensive use of AMMs?

[Daltesh]

If a MIRV is, say, size 20 with 5 weight in submunitions, that would give it a total of 12.5 tons of geosensors. This would make me recommend against MIRVs personally, they're cool but they'd be horribly inefficient in a game where victory might be won with a handful of ships. As for AMMs, you could just say that they are specifically designed to track and destroy missiles, and as such their blasts are ineffective against actual ships. Then just disallow anyone from firing them at non-missile targets.

[Bremen]

If a MIRV is, say, size 20 with 5 weight in submunitions, that would give it a total of 12.5 tons of geosensors. This would make me recommend against MIRVs personally, they're cool but they'd be horribly inefficient in a game where victory might be won with a handful of ships. As for AMMs, you could just say that they are specifically designed to track and destroy missiles, and as such their blasts are ineffective against actual ships. Then just disallow anyone from firing them at non-missile targets.

I assumed that the MIRV body wouldn't have to have geosensors for the payload.

I favor imposing the same limitation for AMM as for normal missiles; this will actually maintain the effectiveness for AMMs at the same rate they have in the base game. Though I think that nerf makes missiles essentially useless; they'd probably end up costing more than the ships they could destroy, so I suggest we don't pursue the tech.

[Azkul]

Forcing missiles to have 50% Geosensors effectively makes missiles useless. They would only be useful at all if missile research was free.

15% is a better number.

[Bremen]

I'm assuming that was kind of the intention.

If a mild nerf is wanted, my suggestion would be matching warhead weight with geosensor. This makes all missiles effectively do half damage, but be otherwise the same.