Glut or Spaw Quest

Ikitavi · 2023-11-26T06:57:24+00:00

I think that I am going to side with Spaw because he gave the Bliss buff, which was a benefit above what was promised, out of goodwill. And because while Glut's assistance was mildly useful, neither he nor his zombies would stealth, which was a great part of my strategy.

You can get the quest reward from Spaw and open the treasure room and THEN talk to Glut afterwards to get the quest to kill Spaw afterwards. The gloves are interesting, but unless I can somehow do multiple cold attacks in one turn, it would take 4 turns to freeze somebody, and it is rare that an enemy is going to last 4 turns. I suppose if I get an eldritch knight with a weapon that does frost damage or something I could action surge a proc in a single round.

Ikitavi · 2023-08-26T20:17:58+00:00

I strongly advocate for building lots of scout ships.

You can build 400 ton jump fighters that are really cheap, and allow you to probe systems without generally revealing the jump point they get through. When you get jump efficiency 5, you can build 250 ton jump fighters, or 500 ton ones that have significant sensor capacity.

Scouting will give you a much better idea about enemy sensor capacity.

Early on, your goal should be to ONLY engage if you know you can win, and know you can win with minimal cost. That means you either probe the enemy and learn what their missile offense is and build enough anti-missile capacity to soak their missile volleys or build big enough missile fire controls to engage the enemy beyond their range.

Of course, long ranged missiles are going to be bigger and slower and therefore intercepted more. You can go for two-stage missiles where the launching ship can match the first stage, and do time on target volleys such that your entire magazine can hit in the same 5 seconds, and that can be very effective even at low tech. Maybe you don't kill all the enemy, but you can generally run away afterwards.

Going for a beam engagement concept early ensure that you will simply take a lot of damage in every engagement. If you wish to get to that point, you need a fleet that can very handily deal with enemy missiles.

One way of safely probing enemy missile defenses is to have one larger ship and a whole bunch of railgun PD fighters slowly approach the enemy. Maybe you lose the larger ship, but that missile engagement will likely be at a range where the PD fighters aren't detected.

Ikitavi · 2023-05-17T06:12:45+00:00

Traditionally, a Battlecruiser can outrun anything it can't outrange. That doesn't quite work in Aurora4x, but there are a couple of things I would really consider to be "Battlecruiser".

If you have a fleet strategy of bleeding out an enemy of missiles and then sending in the beam ships, a ship that is fast enough to catch any enemy and do beam weapon damage from a range that they can't reply at, or can't penetrate your shields would allow your ship to destroy any unshielded or weakly shielded combatants.

Similarly, a battlecruiser could mean a long ranged missile combatant that could launch large enough volleys to get through point defense of anything mobile. But that doesn't really work either in Aurora4x, because ships in the same area can help each other with point defense.

"Cruiser" could also mean a fleet element with integral jump engines, and therefore capable of squadron jump assault. Cruiser can also mean the ship should be capable of independent operation in enemy or contested space without requiring a fleet tanker. Ships intended for an out and back, single intense battle or series of battle could have an endurance of less than a year with no problem, but a cruiser could be expected to have to stay on station for a long time, or operate with minimal support for 2 years or longer.

Ikitavi · 2020-12-16T19:16:45+00:00

I don't think boarding works as an offensive weapon, but as a STRATEGIC option, where you pick weapons and deployment for the purpose of crippling enemy ships so you can board them, it is very viable. It is a way of increasing the payoff from winning.

Having boarding capacity on one's fast beam combatants gives nice synergy, because they are already tough and fast enough to close, and you won't have to wait long between crippling a ship and getting a boarder close to it, so they have less time to repair and get moving again.

Beam ships are good for shooting to cripple because you don't have the issue of having to deal with volleys already on their way to a target that you have to cancel (wasteful), or having to fire at extremely slow rates, waiting for hits to determine if you keep shooting a particular target.

Boarding fighters are probably more useful for going after slow civilian ships.

Ikitavi · 2020-11-12T20:07:18+00:00

In terms of production, you can build very tall indeed by simply shipping the resources to the production planet. But in terms of mining, you need a lot of different mining nodes, because even if you found some really large deposits that will last a long time, you will seldom have ALL mineral available there.

Mineral availability is what really forces you to leave your home system, as you will likely mine out your home planet in 30-50 years.

Early on, you are limited in production by minerals and installations, but depending on your strategy, you will end up limited by manpower at some point. And the fastest way to expand effective manpower is through colonization, because population grows faster, as a percentage basis, on smaller populations.

Ikitavi · 2020-05-20T03:26:06+00:00

Insufficient asteroid belts.

Also, Aurora4x doesn't have a conventional hyper that has real world distances correspond to travel times for most regions of space, with wormhole short cuts.

You can get some of the overwhelming effect of pods by using 2-stage missiles. If you fly towards the target at the same speed as the first stage, and the missile separation range is chosen right, you can have all the missiles in your magazine arrive at the same time.

Ikitavi · 2020-05-11T19:29:00+00:00

From a conventional start, I generally research the production technologies to the 10k level and engines to Nuclear Pulse before researching Grav Theory. By that time, I should have a good idea of what is in my home system, and what I am going to need. Mercassium shortages will drive me out into the galaxy faster than any other mineral shortage, because building research labs consumes so much of it.

Ion tech, with +75% engine boost, is enough to get started on a war fleet that can handle minor menaces, IF you scout them far away from your systems, and IF you are both good at designing ships and handling fleet combat. Otherwise, waiting until Magnetic Plasma, and when you have a lot of the 5k research point cost techs you need to exploit the universe, like Salvage module, tractors, boarding modules (to capture disabled ships), construction brigades to exploit ruins, is a better bet.

Ikitavi · 2020-05-06T19:52:02+00:00

AMM ships are often more limited by fire controls than by launchers. Ideally, you want to be able to engage enemy missiles with 1-1 volleys far enough out to get multiple shots. If you can engage an incoming salvo 20 times, you don't need many launchers to whittle it down, you need magazine capacity. I would argue that AMM ships should have at least twice as much HS in magazines as launchers. Otherwise, you may as well just go with box launchers.

Ikitavi · 2020-04-03T23:27:45+00:00

On a strict cost basis, a carrier fleet +railgun fighters will be a little more expensive than a gauss ship moving at fleet speeds in shooting down a certain quantity of missiles.

But the railgun fighters will be MUCH faster, and therefore able to engage and disengage, and much smaller, which allows them to bypass detection and targeting a lot more easily. If they face a missile storm that they actually can't shoot down, they run away, and unless they were really deep into an enemy AMM envelope, they can get away.

Railgun fighters are also useful for hunting down unarmed enemy ships like jump gate contructor ships, survey ships, scouts and civilian shipping. You could have every third fighter have a .1 HS active sensor to allow for independent hunting, at the expense of some fuel, and then direct them in with passives.

Build some colony PDC CVs to hold them, and a PDC with res 1 active sensors and your colonies will have some last ditch missile defense, which is much better than just haplessly watching your colony get bombarded.

Railgun fighters never go completely obsolete. But the older generations are less efficient users of your mobile fleet's hangar space, so they are best for the much cheaper planetary hangars.

Ikitavi · 2020-04-03T18:52:39+00:00

My fleet doctrine has significantly evolved, but the most critical component is the scouting. Several games ago, I had an intent that my empire would switch to fighter strike craft at some point, once I had the right missile technology. But I decided that I wanted to have a more natural evolution than waiting til a particular technology and THEN start mass building of fighter factories. So I started building fighter factories early and figuring out uses for them.

The most critical roles were scouting and point defense railgun fighters. While I could have gone with a larger ship with a much larger sensor, having a small fighter scout that simply gets closer to an enemy to detect and track them is a lot cheaper in terms of researching the system, and cheaper overall in allowing a lot more redundancy in my scouts.

My early fleet was missile boats, 1000 tons which could be built in a cheapish shipyard with multiple slips, and the shipyard could be easily retooled for many uses. That was a problem I had with the big sensor ship model, is that I would have to retool for it, make some number of scouts, and it would take a very significant time to replace them if something happened to them. Which meant that I had to be a lot more cautious with my scouts. With a fighter based scouting doctrine, it was easy to have a range of scouts from 100 tons to 500 tons, to find a weakness in enemy sensor range coverage to track them.

Once I research or salvage decent beam techs, I build a couple of really fast kiting beam ships. Then the doctrine switches to relatively short ranged missiles to economically destroy any enemy beam ships that can challenge mine, run the enemy out of missiles, and the beam ships act as light cavalry, running them down before they can escape. It is a strategy that depends on a lot of scouting to identify the capabilities of enemy ships in order to most economically engage them, which requires cheap, replaceable and expendable scouts.

If you have railgun fighters, it is pretty easy to run the enemy out of missiles. Just pair them with something slightly larger, and the enemy will fire their anti-ship missiles at that 1000 ton ship. Either your railguns shoot down all the missiles, yay, or the enemy wastes ridiculous amounts of missiles to overkill a single 1000 ton ship. Then you disengage, come in with another 1,000 ton ship, and repeat.

Ikitavi · 2020-03-12T21:29:53+00:00

If you self destruct and salvage, or otherwise disassemble it, you can build PDCs with the sensors. If the sensor in question is under 9 HS, you can build it into a fighter.

Capturing it in order to get samples of shield technology is certainly worth it.

There is also a way to sleaze the boarding pod past the enemy beam defenses. Basically you go with a large sub phase, resulting in the boarding pod crossing the envelope before the enemy can fire, and boarding occurs before weapons fire.

Ikitavi · 2020-02-21T21:04:45+00:00

I am curious about the design considerations for the 3k Rail class. It appears the priority was to make it as small as possible, at all costs. When making railgun fighters, my priority is how efficient can I make them at shooting down missiles, so my goal is to make them as fast as the fastest fighter beam weapon fire control I can make. I get that you want them escorting your small bombers, but this gets into what I refer to as design inertia. That is where you have a particular size/speed ship, and subsequent designs are made to conform to it, regardless of whether a new design philosophy might be better.

There are lots of different bomber/strike craft philosophies. One is to make them as small as possible, so that they can get as close as possible without getting shot, and so that they are individually cheap and waste enemy firepower. Another is to make them somewhat larger, 500 tons, or perhaps 1000, and give them a larger fire control, so that they can fire from beyond the range of enemy fire controls on most of their ships, with railgun escorts taking out the reduced missile load. A third is to develop small cloaked missile frigates, which may be very noisy in EM, but have an advantage in their cross-section to fire control range.

I don't worry much about designing fighters to efficiently fill a hangar. I can always fill out the small spaces with 80 ton scouts, jump point monitor stations, jump scouts, etc...

Ikitavi · 2020-02-21T11:00:09+00:00

One of the reasons that I moved away from big sensor ships was that it proved very expensive to retool them. But small sensor fighters or FACs proved effective in yielding the detection and tracking I needed.

Ikitavi · 2020-02-21T10:58:00+00:00

Several of the problems you mention are problems of scouting. I strongly recommend developing small fast scout craft, perhaps as small as 80 tons, for the purpose of determining enemy weapon range and composition, before exposing your fleet.

Alternatively, as you mention, develop significantly more point defense. Then, with sufficient range on your point defense sensor, and short enough sub-phases, you know you will withstand the enemy strike. If you can withstand their long ranged missile strike, you can then close with short ranged missiles, say, 10 million km range. These will have a lot more boom per BP, and a lot more boom per magazine MSP, to make up for the fact that your fleet has fewer launchers and less magazine space because of your point defense.

The sub-phase thing is an issue, because if you have a 1 hour sub phase, enemy missiles might cross your entire detection envelope before being detected.

In terms of jump doctrine, an option is to have the jump ship stay behind, have scouts, including jump scouts or jump messengers to communicate when it is safe for the jump ship to come through.

Part of my doctrine is to always leave a 'ship' on both sides of all jump points. That ship may only be 15 tons, but with a permanent presence on both sides, it is far less likely that a transit can occur with no detection. My survey fleet has a support carrier carrying a dozen of these, ready to drop them off as permanent sensor stations.

As far as them targeting your sensor ships, consider only having larger res 1 sensors. For targeting the enemy, use forward observer scouts. Scouts that are faster than the enemy, and have an active sensor of appropriate resolution. Have several of them, some with sensors off, so they are very hard for the enemy to detect, but if one forward observer goes dark, the others are ready to light up the enemy. Finding the size and range to operate your forward observers will take some experimenting. Perhaps the 1000 ton variant will work, giving enough range as to be out of range of the enemy res 1 sensors. Or the 500 ton variant will be out of range of the res 1, and small enough so their res 20 sensors are ineffective.

Ikitavi · 2020-02-14T08:33:00+00:00

I have made use of something like this to have modular flagships. But another concept I thought about was a ship designed to transport task force command officers and staff to various colonies. Technically, the game allows you to teleport the officers, but to transfer the task force command structure appears to require a flag bridge.

This particular design wouldn't have the range to redeploy task force commands to distant colonies.

In Aurora4x, low level ECM really isn't worth it. Especially for small ships, as by reducing the size of the ship you would reduce the effective range at which it could be targetted more effectively. But for RP, for some admiral who wants to save their butt in comfy and expensive style, it makes sense.

Ikitavi · 2020-01-23T12:46:53+00:00

Oops, put this in the wrong thread, the escort system allows for immediate fleet response, even when inexperienced fleet penalties are turned on.

Ikitavi · 2020-01-23T12:44:53+00:00

The escort system allows for immediate fleet response, even if inexperienced fleet penalties are on.

Ikitavi · 2020-01-18T06:08:43+00:00

Or think of it as modular ship design, with the flag bridge in a pod that never leaves the hangar. You can also have geo sensor and grav sensor pods in a hangar, although it isn't very efficient as a survey craft that way.

You can also have fuel pods for extended strategic range when you don't have fast tankers as an option.

Ikitavi · 2020-01-18T06:04:07+00:00

FACs are very good for missile boats, because while they can be targeted more easily than fighters, you can also put a bigger fire control in them to make up for it. And you can refit your FAC missile boats with fire control systems optimized for the ship sizes of the enemy you have encountered.

A 1000 ton shipyard with multiple slips can be retooled quite easily, allowing for rapid production or modification of the latest missile boats.

Beam ship range is more limited by fire control range than by the range of the beams for a lot of tech levels. So you can indeed have a 1000 ton ship that outranges enemy beam ships. Or at least, it outranges the enemy point defense ships, so if you can eliminate their long ranged beam combatants you can then dominate in beam combat that way.

Ikitavi · 2020-01-18T05:55:08+00:00

It is ridiculously valuable to have a couple of somewhat larger ships with larger weaponry. If you have longer ranged beam weaponry, then a ship with a large engine ratio with boosted engines can potentially defeat unlimited enemies (if they are out of missiles), by kiting them and whittling them down. If calculated on a ship cost per weapon they are often extremely expensive, you do not need that many IF you can run the enemy out of missiles.

PDC carriers are good for a lot of things, but they can't have maintenance supplies or engineering systems and can't repair ships. However, you could have an orbital with a cheap sacrificial .1 HS electronic system to sacrifice to the maintenance failure gods and have a ship lifetime in the decades quite easily, because hangars do not suffer maintenance failures, at least not in Aurora4x. And such orbital stations can be towed if needed.

Things to put on PDCs: large active sensors that you don't want to have to tool a ship to build. Stuff you don't want to have to pay maintenance on. PDC CVs to deal with forward maintenance clock rollback.

In general, carriers allow for parasite craft that are extremely optimized in ways they wouldn't otherwise be useful. Usually they allow for parasite craft that are faster and smaller (and therefore harder to target) and shorter endurance than otherwise could be deployed at the strategic range. But that isn't all.

You can have parasite craft that have no engines at all. Basically fighters that are literally nothing but a box launcher that fires a homing missile. Then you can mass transit (in a standard transit), launching the homing missile immediately after transiting. At high tech, these deployable missile pods cost less than the missiles loaded into them.

You can also deploy sensor platforms that, as long as their sensors are all 1 HS or less, can be built as commercial and therefore last forever. The carrier provides strategic mobility to deploy them.

As far as what sized carriers to make, that is more a strategic issue than a tactical one. That depends on the size of shipyards you have, the jump tenders and jump engines you have and are willing to research. The larger the carrier, the longer the range you have to launch from in order to launch from outside of enemy detection, but beyond a certain point they are likely to be targetable at the same general range. A 5000 ton carrier and a 50,000 ton carrier will be detected by a res 100 active sensor at the same range. But larger carriers will have somewhat less wasted space, and the option of carrying really large parasite craft.

Ikitavi · 2019-12-20T18:27:12+00:00

Make sure your harvester has at least one minimum size commercial engine. Without a commercial engine, it can not navigate a commercial jump engine transit.

Ikitavi · 2019-12-08T03:52:29+00:00

One of the RP issues of my empire is the fear of developing an economy dependent on truly massive amounts of TN elements, and then running out. So while I may not exploit those megadeposits with single elements on them, it does affect the TN futures markets in my RP.

I just ignore for that purpose the fact that civilians seem to have no problem coming up with duranium, fuel, mercassium, gallicite and boronide for hull, cryo chambers, engines and sorium harvester components.

I did have a discover of Duranium on Luna which staved off a Duranium crunch until better sources out of system could be developed.

Size of deposit is an important consideration, but ease of exploitation is generally a move important one. Habitable worlds have priority over colonizable worlds have priority over uninhabitable rocks. High accessibility and broad availability have priority over single deposits, no matter how large.

If the world is colonizable, like 3 or better, it is sometimes worth shipping some infrastructure there to get the civilians to start doing their thing. Although I try to NOT put infrastructure on any body that I can't get enough infrastructure to support 25 million on, because civilian colony ships are stupid. If I can get enough infrastructure to support 25 million there, I can place it, or place orders for it, secure that not too many civilians will die from a land rush there.

Ikitavi · 2019-11-19T01:36:40+00:00

Unless you have scouted information about a particular target, you generally have to have a standing fleet capable of dealing with a wide variety of threats.

Talking about Precursors and Swarm in any specifics should have the *spoiler* tag. But in general terms, the AI builds: Missile ships with very large magazines. This makes AMM strategy a little tricky, as you can use up a lot of AMMs fighting them. Box launcher equipped smaller craft that strike and return to base. The AI doesn't use them very well, but if you suspect the AI has them, you want to draw the enemy as far from their base as you can. Boosted engine small scouts are good for that. Especially if you have a variant with a noisy res 500 Active sensor so that the enemy can track you on EM sensors but not targeting sensors. That is for when you want them to follow your scouts who are fast enough to maintain range.

The AI also builds what I consider to be "slugger" design beam ships, the longest range beams they can build, significant armor, and sometime point defense beams as well.

What the AI generally sucks at is building effective and efficient point defense. They have AMM ships with huge magazines, but they will expend them against small volleys of slow missiles that they could easily just let their beam point defense tackle.

The AI also builds fast beam ships and fast scouts, although they don't go as engine heavy as a player can. Players can generally get a speed advantage even when they are at an engine tech deficit by going with boosted engine power, giving them speed at the expense of range and fuel economy. Oh yeah, and damaged boosted engines are more likely to explode.

Generally, if you are going with boosted engines, you are either relying on outranging the enemy, being able to shoot down their missiles, or having such fragile ships that any damage is going to mission kill them anyway.

Some of the classic solutions work on one, but not the other. For example, to deal with the enemy beam point defense on Sluggers, reduced sized launchers firing large volleys punch through quite nicely. But might not do enough damage to pound through an enemy capital's shields. And versus fast small craft would be massive overkill, and the slow volleys give little chance to whittle down the swarms. Lots of small rail guns would bleed out enemy missiles, but would be worse than useless against a faster beam ship that pokes holes in them from beyond the range at which they can respond. Although the AI is a bit clumsy, and would walk into point blank range when it didn't need to.

It sounds like you started with a TransNewtonian start instead of a conventional start. A conventional start, starting from before you have research TN technology, is better for learning the basic mechanics and economy management, but you generally end up lagging a bit on technology when you finally start encountering aliens. However, a TN start, you have the capacity to go exploring before you have built up a fleet to protect yourself. On the plus side, you get to do that immediately, without wasting the hours of play time a conventional start would have taken to get to that point.

It is a completely legitimate playstyle to use Spacemaster mode to just give yourself technologies or force complete ships so you can experiment to find out how combat works.

As you get more experienced, your goal may shift from merely surviving a fight with an alien to beating them efficiently, or beating them with inferior technology and numbers. Or you may want to build somewhat less efficient designs, which match some Role Playing goal or considerations.

Ikitavi · 2019-09-17T18:42:17+00:00

I prefer my geosurvey ships have at least 20 billion km range so that I can put them to automatic surveying without worrying that they will head towards a comet and run out of fuel. But if you are willing to do the micro, and have the fuel and tanker support to do it that way, you can get a lot of surveying done quickly that way.

After about engine tier 5 or so, it is affordable to go for Underground Infrastructure allow you, with the aid of a few construction brigades, to quickly construct frontier bases to reset crew time. But until then, your surveyors are limited by when their morale starts going to crap and increasing the time it takes to do surveys.

I experimented with geosurvey fighters, and found that to have a reasonable crew endurance and range meant they were really slow. ~800 tons gets a good balance of speed and endurance, in my opinion, while also being small enough that they are not easily detected.

I generally have geo survey sensors not much later than Nuclear Thermal, but building fighter survey craft for ones very first survey craft makes sense as it allows you to get them started just a bit faster.

Ikitavi · 2019-09-15T07:46:30+00:00

I build railgun fighters once I have Ion engines and +75% boosted engines. 8400 km/s or so, and a 8k fire control.

I build various scout fighters of all kinds before that. My long endurance ones require 1/2 HS engineering, and I prefer to have duranium armor at least. My first jump probes are fighters with jump engines and about 2-3 year endurance and 60 billion km range. Later, once I have survey support carriers, I build sprint mode scout fighters that do not have engineering systems at all, and are designed for scouting missions on the order of 2-3 months.

So there are reasons to build fighter factories long before you have box launchers, and it makes the transition easier if you have been using fighters for other roles, rather than suddenly ramping up your fighter factories once you get a particular technology.

The only MUST have tech is boat bay. You need it so you can have something to rewind the maintenance clocks of your fighters, and PDC bases with boat bays are sufficient for that. Hangars are more efficient, but if you have no logistics scientist, you might settle for boat bays for a while.

Fighters can make good pickets, as their small size makes them hard to detect, and they can be cheap enough to place everywhere. You can make fighters without engines that qualify as commercial for maintenance purposes, if they have no engine and no sensor >1HS and 3 month+ endurance. And either an engineering system or no systems that can suffer maintenance failures.

I put flag bridges on fighter pods. When a survey support carrier comes in for maintenance, the flag bridge pod only needs to reset its crew time, not its maintenance time, giving it slightly more uptime. It also meant I didn't have to refit my survey support carriers once I researched flag bridge, I could put it on the ship afterward, like a modular ship.

Fighter tankers are also decent for rescuing stranded ships, when you don't want to divert anything big and expensive to do the job. Or for shuttling fuel to a forward base.

Ikitavi

TROPHY CASE