The Paradoxian Federation – Aurora Forum Game II, run by Rendap.

  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Good catch, I didn't look closely at the designs I'll admit...

IMHO Steve should buff the beam fire control range and speeds a bit. I seem to always use 4x setting because unless I invest a lot more in fire control tech than laser tech, my fire controls are much slower in tracking speed, and shorter ranged, than the guns.

I think the beam FC point is that damage also dissipates with range, so now you get larger damage at 'max hittable range' if you go for even bigger gun, even if you can't hit at it's maximum range. (I use lot of 1x range multipliers, for only 'last second PD fire' to save space...)
 
I think the beam FC point is that damage also dissipates with range, so now you get larger damage at 'max hittable range' if you go for even bigger gun, even if you can't hit at it's maximum range. (I use lot of 1x range multipliers, for only 'last second PD fire' to save space...)

As far as I'm concerned, the point of using oversized FCs (2x range, or 4x range) is to boost your to-hit on 10,000 km Final Fire shots... and not to actually FIRE at that increased range. To-hit chances depend on the fraction of max-range at which you engage the target... so boosting your max-range will increase your to-Hit at a set range such as 10k-km. It goes without saying that my PD FCs always use 4x speed.

Having said that... considerations of displacement will often limit me to 1x4 (1x range, 4x speed) instead of 2x4 or 4x4.

The difference in damage at different ranges is nuncipatory for PD Lasers, since missiles only take one point of damage to kill anyway.
 
Aye, but that consideration makes all the difference if you mean to shoot at ships instead of missiles...

...I'd think, first few heavy hits to land may decide the battle I'd think...
Say I have something like this;

Single 20cm C5 Far UV Lsr rof10 r500mm Turret (1x1) Range 384,000km TS: 24300 km/s Power 10-5 RM 5 ROF 10 10 10 10 10 10 8 7 6 5 5
Fire Control S16 192-32000 H50 (1) Max Range: 384,000 km TS: 32000 km/s 97 95 92 90 87 84 82 79 77 74

I think that last figure is for 100,000km?
Against something one would call PD weapons, (say 96,000 km max range equal tech level would have). Assuming neither has decisive speed advance, you can keep the range open long enough for there to be nothing but scrap metal...
Of course, that assumes good enough point defence to survive the closing run against anything with missiles, but I'm thinking of this for Swarm Swatting (which I have never tried yet, so we'll see...)

Edit; also thinking that one might actually hit single wave of missiles twice... :p
 
Last edited:
That said, you'd prefer to have your fire control with a longer range than your beam weapons even for ship-to-ship combat, so that you can actually get some hits at maximum range. The amount of damage done per shot isn't that big a deal if you can't actually hit anything.
 
I think the beam FC point is that damage also dissipates with range, so now you get larger damage at 'max hittable range' if you go for even bigger gun, even if you can't hit at it's maximum range. (I use lot of 1x range multipliers, for only 'last second PD fire' to save space...)

If you're thinking of the 1.5M-km max range for BFCs, which is less than large lasers' max range, that isn't my point. Steve made the decision to cap beams at 1.5K-km to differentiate beams from missiles (I'm told... or did I read that?).

It's that the research costs for 60,000km fire control is 16,000 points, where a particle beam that fires to 100,000km (doing 1 damage the whole way) is 2000 points. A 10cm infrared laser (starting tech) fires to 30,000KM... the starting BFC can spot to 10,000KM. 4000 points of laser research will get me 80,000KM range (12cm Visible Light Laser), 6000 points of BFC research gets 24,000KM... it seems to me that you need to spend a lot more research on beam fire control tech to use the full range of your weapons than you do on the weapons themselves.

It might be possible to argue that space used on getting extra range would be better spent adding more punch at point-blank range; if you can close to 240,000KM you can close to 80,000KM; in the scheme of millions of kilometers it's nothing. Thus you increase laser focal size and wavelength purely for damage, not for range. That said, if you enemy is backing away from you at high speed, shooting at you from say 180,000KM, doing 2 damage per hit, then I'd rather have the extra range than cut down on FC range. After all, each gun set to that FC can fire to its maximum range for the extra tonnage, not just one. If you ever encounter the swarm in a nebula you want as much range as possible, too.

Blue Emu's point about to-hit is also a good one. As pointed out in this thread earlier, Steve W abandoned dual-purpose 15cms for PD-only 10cms in the NATO campaign... but he scaled the BFCs to match the lasers' max range. Consequently the to-hit for the 15cms was significantly better than for the 10cms, which mitigates the effect of having more guns. I was willing to bet that once you account for tonnage and tech, the 15cm dual purpose setup wasn't all that inferior to the 10cm one... particularly when considering the reduced to-hit. To-hit would also be a factor in non-PD applications as mentioned above.

I actually tend to use the x16 normal BFCs for my destroyers mounting dual-purpose lasers. I've never bothered to see how it stacks up versus an extra turret or two though.

Emu, have you encountered AI using ablative armor on their missiles? I'm given to wonder if the AI actually uses that feature. Of course even 10cm low-tech lasers will do +2 damage at point-blank range, so unless the missile is very heavily armored it's still irrelevant :p
 
The 1,5M-km range comes from the distance light travels in 5 seconds, ie ranges past that would require tracking beams over time, which he didn't want to do (ie, yes, differentiating from missiles).
 
Emu, have you encountered AI using ablative armor on their missiles? I'm given to wonder if the AI actually uses that feature. Of course even 10cm low-tech lasers will do +2 damage at point-blank range, so unless the missile is very heavily armored it's still irrelevant :p

I have never encountered armored missiles, no. As you point out, though, even the smallest laser will do three times as much damage as necessary, at point blank range (which is where I've set my Laser PD to fire).
 
The 1,5M-km range comes from the distance light travels in 5 seconds, ie ranges past that would require tracking beams over time, which he didn't want to do (ie, yes, differentiating from missiles).

Yes, I know this.

I have never encountered armored missiles, no. As you point out, though, even the smallest laser will do three times as much damage as necessary, at point blank range (which is where I've set my Laser PD to fire).

I wonder if ablative armor is any use at all. Surely you'd be better off whacking the MSP into speed to make the thing harder to hit...
 
I suppose armor would be better in case where enemy has very near 100% hit chance on his PD no matter how fast yours are...
...of course, determining that is kinda.. impossible.
 
I suppose armor would be better in case where enemy has very near 100% hit chance on his PD no matter how fast yours are...
...of course, determining that is kinda.. impossible.

That would of course depend how much armor you had to allocate to prevent being swatted by his point blank PD. Even then you might be better off allocating the MSP to warhead and just trying to overload his PD with missiles; better to fire 10 and have 1 hit doing 4 damage than fire 8 and have 1 hit doing 2 damage.
 
I wonder if ablative armor is any use at all. Surely you'd be better off whacking the MSP into speed to make the thing harder to hit...

The most obvious solution is more fire controls, and time-on-target salvos with missiles of different speeds... timed so that two or three successive fleet salvos (with the slowest missiles launched first) all enter the opponent's PD zone simultaneously.

The point being: each enemy FC can only target one salvo per five-second impulse.

1) If the enemy's PD range gives him five shots at your missiles before they impact,
2) If he has ten defensive FCs,
3) If you are using ten ships with five offensive FCs each,
4) If you fire three waves of salvos, at different speeds, timed to all enter the enemy PD range simultaneously...

... then he only gets to shoot at 50 of your salvos, and the other 100 salvos will reach the target unopposed.
 
Hmm, that's interesting approach..
My solution in past has been just to swamp the enemy PD -> ie as soon as I can make reasonably ranged single stage missile, I tend to swap towards size 1 missiles, with size 1 warheads...
Single firecontrol and ton of missiles.
 
Hmm, that's interesting approach..
My solution in past has been just to swamp the enemy PD -> ie as soon as I can make reasonably ranged single stage missile, I tend to swap towards size 1 missiles, with size 1 warheads...
Single firecontrol and ton of missiles.

It's a trade-off... the more FCs you carry, the less displacement is left for missile tubes. But the more FCs you carry, the harder time the enemy will have targeting all those seperate salvos.

My bombardment forces (specially designed and equipped for attacking PDC-defended planets) like to use variable-speed missiles, to pull that overlapping T-o-T salvo trick. It works pretty well, and mission-specific missiles can be designed and built pretty quickly, compared to warships.

Your method is vulnerable to mass AMM spam... a defensive FC firing twenty or so AMMs per shot. Mine isn't... if I'm dividing my twenty ASMs into five salvos of four (ie: twenty missile tubes, five FCs), then the more AMMs he puts into each shot, the faster he runs out of ammo.
 
It is, on the other hand, it's sort of 'on equivalent tonnages, and under 100% enemy hit chances, some of my missiles will land since he runs out of AMM's'..
IE. since my ASM are same size as his AMM, I should have just as many as him. (Also big part of the reason why I use beam PD, I despair at guessing how many AMM's I would need, larger designs I might carry some, to have additional defensive depth in case of 'heavy alpha strike' though I haven't yet seen AI use one really...) Hm, maybe we should stop filling up and take this elsewhere ...
 
No Need. I'm enjoying the discussion and taking notes as well... :)
 
I think people should stop going off-topic with discussions about whether aurora mechanics discussions are off-topic or not. :D

To stay on-topic - if you are going to build any salvagers you'll need someone with decent factory production bonuses there as well.. and no, I'm not volunteering, thank you very much.

When do you think we'll have the next big engagement? Got any targets in mind? Do we have any designs targeted at taking on the Swarm yet?
 
@ Vain - I have no knowledge of this "Mercy" you are referring to. Is it similar to Mystery Meat?

Generally speaking I agree with the points made on the Beam FC ranges. It does not make sense with the size you have to get in, but if you look at the Missile FC, it is the complete opposite. In the resent designs, we have a 100mio+ km range from a size 1 resolution 120 FC. I don't think I can get 200k km from the largest Beam FC we have.

I don't know how to correct this, but that's just another point to why Missiles are so overpowered... :)

And I haven't seen any armored missiles either. All missiles hit by one of my strenght 1 AM's have died - no survivors and I have checked it in the logs.

@ Randy - We have several targets lined up all ready, but we need to get jump gates built. At the moment we have targets in Wolf 358 or 359, can't remember which, where we need to get rid of a AM-PDC. I'm thinking about sending the old F1's in close to soak up some missiles again... :) Maybe some F2's as well.

And as stated before. I have no problem with design-, philosophy- or other Aurora-related topics "hi-jacking" the thread, as long as people are behaving themselves and remembering it is only pixels on a screen... :D