Oh, look, a Blue Emu Aurora AAR! I wasn't around for the last one but I did read it after the fact so I remember it fondly. Happy to follow along in this one.
As I have a fair amount of experience with C# I can also chime in on a few topics, such as...
Not sure how many troops one "unit" of Riflemen (or Artillery, or Machine Guns, or Supply troops) actually represents.
Officially, there is no rule about this. However, unofficially Steve has set the sizes for various components based on estimating the real-life transport requirements. A single 5-ton rifleman (INF+PW), for example, represents not only the man and his gear but also the various other logistical needs to transport and support each rifleman. For single units the numbers sometimes seem a bit weird but once you start putting formations together they usually come out to sensible sizes.
In general with C# ground units I find that larger formations are the best. To invade and conquer NPR homeworlds you regularly need multi-million tons of ground forces, and with small formations such as 1,000-ton companies/small battalions you quickly run out of ground force commanders to control every formation. Many players use a 5,000-ton baseline formation size, myself I usually use anywhere from 10,000 to 25,000 tons depending on my roleplay setting which usually means my base formation size is a regiment or brigade level. I'm happy to suggest formation organizations on request but I think it will be more fun to see what Emu/the thread comes up with since C# gives so much flexibility for roleplay.
Also keep in mind that with automatic promotions you will have three ground commanders of a lower rank for every one of the next higher rank, e.g. 3 Majors per Lt. Colonel, and so on (this is different from naval commanders which have a 2:1 rank ratio). This is a change from VB6 which used a 4:1 ratio, so you will want to adjust your formations from 4 subformations per higher HQ down to 3 per. This feels IMO restricting and I prefer the VB6 rank ratio, but it is what it is.
I pointed out to him that Thrust Augmentation (increased engine power, such as the +25% tech that we just finished researching) consumes fuel at a rate of the fifth power of the square root of the degree of augmentation... Fc = F * z ^ (5/2) in other words... and asked him "Under what circumstances does that actually IMPROVE the ship's speed and range?"
The catch is that an augmented engine will always burn hotter and use more fuel per kilometer traveled... it will be less fuel efficient by that "fifth power of the square root" relationship... and all that extra fuel must be carried inside the ship's tanks and increases the ship's total mass, thus slowing it down. So you might initially think that augmented engines can NEVER give you a longer-ranged ship. But that's not quite correct. Because augmented engines have a higher thrust-to-weight ratio, an augmented engine can be made SMALLER while still delivering the same total thrust, and that extra mass can be used to carry the required extra fuel!
So there is a narrow design window where you can actually INCREASE your ship's cruising range by using engines that are LESS fuel efficient... as strange as that might sound... as long as the gain in thrust-to-weight ratio is greater than the mass of the extra fuel required. Up until now (ie: in previous game versions) we've never bothered exploring this possibility, because it would have required designing and comparing different engine size / thrust augmentation / fuel bunkerage ratios before settling on a design that worked, and that would have wasted many research points. But in the new C# game version, prototypes are free (!), so no research points are spent until AFTER we've done the comparison and approved a design.
Actually the math has been done, in both VB6 and in C#; I'll spoiler here in case you prefer to experience the joy of scientific discovery for yourself:
To summarize the results for C# there is an optimal ratio of engine size to fuel tank size of 3:1. For example if your ship uses three engines of 25 HS size each (75 HS total), the optimal design has 1,250,000 litres of fuel (25 HS x 50,000 L/HS). Once you have this ratio you can tweak the boost of your engines to get the desired speed and range. Alternatively there are ways to design an optimal propulsion system for a given speed, range, and set of tech levels. I should note that in practice players usually prefer a higher ratio of engine to fuel size, since this is a bit less efficient but conserves fuel which makes logistics much easier.
In VB6 there are similar results, however the picture was greatly complicated by the hard limit of 50 HS on engine size which leads to a lot of breakpoints for larger ships.
Is there a reason that you only have a crew support for 2 years and a 3.5 years MTTH. I normally try to keep them around the same at about 5 years.
For the reasons Emu gave I usually prefer to keep maint life at about ~2x deployment time. Particularly on smaller ships which are more subject to extreme variance in maintenance failures it is very possible to get unlucky and run out of MSP ahead of schedule.
Success!
Hyme has made an excellent mineral strike on his very first assignment, Earth's own moon.
Luna
Duranium 4,257,829 Acc 0.9
Boronide 2,722,995 Acc 0.2
Sorium 2,283,695 Acc 0.9
Corundium 1,197,514 Acc 0.4
I hate you.
Venus
Duranium 20,576,882 Acc 0.8
I really hate you.
October 10th, 1952 - Our Logistics research team has completed that tech we were waiting for, Trans-Newtonian Cargo Shuttles. This will speed up the loading and unloading of our Freighters, Colony Ships and Troop Transports. We can now design our first Commercial vessels.
Both ships are rather slow (560-565 kps) but that's what we get for building ships with such primitive engine technology.
For the early game, slow freighters are acceptable as the limit on colonization tends to be infrastructure construction. However as the game goes on, travel distance becomes the bottleneck and you will likely want to put a larger amount or size of engines on your cargo ships so they can make trips over 10s of billion km more quickly.
Perhaps a non-missile build is in order with only using missiles for our capital ships. Also, it's probably too early to ask, but are there any terraforming plans so far only Luna seems like a good candidate. I suppose you could terraform Mars and several moons for population growth/tax income purposes.
Personally I would like to see a good mix of missile and beam ships. I do feel like C# has brought the different weapon types into much better balance from the perspective of "everything is worth playing with" so it is always fun to see variety in ship designs.
It's too bad that Mars has nothing to mine. Do you have any plans for Mars?
EDIT: Mars? Perhaps turn it into a planet-sized investment bank. All factories building Financial Centers.
This is the way.
We are also researching Plasma Carronades to use as an anti-ship STO weapon.
Plasma carronades are an excellent research track for upgrading your ground forces as well. Note that unlike VB6, ground units do not automatically upgrade and you have to re-develop new units in your various unit series when you improve the technology. Ground forces attack stats improve when you upgrade laser, railgun, particle, or plasma techs, and plasma are by far the cheapest so you can rack up some very high attack stats relative to enemy armor.
Also blowing up survey ships with a 45 cm boomstick is great fun.
So here's a question:
There's plenty of turtling we can do right here in the Sol system. We've found some good mineral deposits and we could spend the next thirty years exploiting them and getting all our ducks in a row. While we research weapons techs.
... or we could research several theory techs, one practical tech, retool a shipyard, and break out into the galaxy.
The benefits of going interstellar are obvious. The main drawback is that we are basically defenseless, and will remain so for decades.
Any views on this subject?
Ion tech is usually a good point to go interstellar. I usually judge by the economic situation, at 2.5b starting pop you will consume resources very quickly on Earth even with a conventional start, so early expansion is advisable to ensure you have new mineral sources... unless, say, you were to get incredibly lucky and get high-accessibility duranium and corundium deposits on the Moon, or something absurdly improbable like that...
When the civvies first start a commercial mine on an empty body (a comet or asteroid), they automatically get a small Garrison company to guard the work site. If I don't have the relevant techs researched already, then they give me the techs needed to form and equip that sort of Garrison company.
It's worth noting that you can modify the garrison templates in the ground forces window, and while this could be considered an exploit it is the only way AFAIK to upgrade the garrison units over time to use the latest techs. Otherwise, even calling them a speed bump in the face of an alien invasion would be generous.
Is the service sector capped to 50%, or can it grow until Titan has 0 workers?
It's over 50% already. I suspect that it isn't capped. This would underline the futility of trying to establish any large colonies in very hostile environments.
Small outposts, yes. Huge multi-million-pop cities on Venus, no.
This also gives you a strong incentive to eventually terraform the body up to class-0, reducing the Environmental workers to 5%.
Service sector is capped to 70% and grows with population.
Since Agricultural workers are a fixed 5% + 5% for each point of colony cost, this means that any planet with colony cost >=5.0 has a hard population cap beyond which the worker population is zero. A planet with a sub-5.0 CC will have a local maximum, then manufacturing population will actually decrease as you ship in more colonists, and then will always show an increase in manufacturing population once the 70% cap is hit which happens at ~240m population IIRC.
For bodies with CC <= 1.50 there is no local maximum and manufacturing population always increases. This means that a few levels of the CC reduction tech can make your life a lot easier in terms of economic planning.
Higher tech Carronades are more massive and do more damage per hit. 30cm is already a 12" bore, though... pretty big.
You and I have very different definitions of "big".
Which is better for my front line inf:
[...]
or something different?
I read that only med anti air and med art work from support and front positions. Heavy anti-air and heavy art can only target units from rear, support and front. Light art and light art can only work from the front positions. Is that true or is that false information?
Usually for basic infantry formations I use PW as the majority of the formation by weight, and then CAP, LAV, and LB elements for supporting arms. In addition to the HQ element it is also good to have some LOG-S as these are the most efficient units for delivering supplies to your formations (and then you can use LVH+LOG or LOG-S supply dumps with the Series/Replacements mechanic to keep them supplied for longer battles).
For bombardment: LB and MB can both be fired from the support echelon. The difference (other than size and strength) is that LB can only target an enemy front-line formation, while MB can target a support-line formation (counter-battery fire). MBL and HB can fire from, and target, the rear echelon. Note that this makes LB look a bit silly to put in a front-line formation since it cannot use its bombardment ability, but it is cheap and does well against infantry and light vehicles/static units so it is not a bad choice.
For anti-aircraft: LAA will fire in defense of its own formation. MAA will fire in defense of its own formation or an immediate sub-formation. HAA will fire in defense of its own formation, an immediate sub-formation, or at any random fighter involved in the battle if there is no other target. The echelon of the formation(s) involved is not relevant.
I tend to build more redundancy into my units... integral supply in case the higher HQ gets taken out, two Bttn HQs instead of one in case one HQ gets destroyed, etc.
It's important to note that adding extra HQs to a formation does
not improve commander survivability, since it also increases the chance for the HQ element to be shot at. It is a viable approach for keeping the chain of command intact if a HQ unit is destroyed but personally I don't find it worthwhile.
It's hard to tell when you're "getting close", though, because the water vapor in the air condenses to liquid over months and years.
Suppose the stats read that the planet now has 3.5% ocean coverage, and 12% of its 0.5 bar atmosphere is water vapor. How much ocean will that be by the time the rains stop, a couple of years from now? Do you keep adding water vapor, or stop?
Actually, the water vapor condensation happens "instantly" but only in 5-day (by default) construction cycles. So, not over months or years, but every 5 days an equilibrium is reached. This may be changing in the next update though, I don't remember the details but it has been discussed.
Here is our design for a Science Vessel that can explore for both jump points and minerals.
Personally I would prefer to keep geo and grav survey ships separate, because in many systems especially with Real Stars (== a lot of dwarf star systems with few/no planets) a geo survey is not needed and carrying the sensors around only slows down the grav surveys. Not a big issue, though.
First, our Storm-class Frigate:
This is an escort vessel, intended to shoot down incoming missiles, like a Phalynx anti-missile system. It should do that very well. The speed is a problem, so we'll upgrade the engines at first opportunity. Fires nearly five shots per second (actually, twenty-four shots in each five-second impulse). Only one point of damage per hit, but then missiles only have one hit point.
There is way too much fuel, something like 4:3 ratio with the engine size and warships really do not need ~100b km ranges. At ion tech I usually settle for 20b, although 30b is reasonable. Probably here I would use 60 HS of engine instead of 40, and cut the fuel to 500,000 litres.
Similar comments on most other ships. This isn't early/mid-VB6 anymore, we can't send a ship to Andromeda and back with a few old beer bottles filled with sorium anymore, so the range requirements should be reined in a bit in the interest of bigger engines, bigger guns, and bigger holds to stash all of our loot in when we start conquering people.
Our Fighter:
Nearly 9000 kps. Packs 28 per carrier. Fires the above missile, using a Fire Control that can lock onto an ECM-4 target at 47 m-km. For reference, the Prix in Ad Astra were ECM-4. More than half-a-billion km cruising range, allowing out-and-back strikes at a quarter of a billion km range.
While I remember the Streaks fondly, building a larger fighter (using most or all of the 500-ton limit) would allow a much greater volume of fire without really losing very much in terms of avoiding detection by sensors as the missile range probably outranges any anti-fighter sensor you will encounter. A 500-ton fighter can probably mount 5 or 6 of the size-6 launchers instead of the single launcher you have on a 175-ton fighter.
That said, fighters are already super effective against NPR fleets so a little inefficiency is good for game balance.
What about Rocks? Yes or no? Or very heavily armored fighting ships, a sort of Heavy Cruiser / Rock hybrid?
Personally my vote is to do something different than Ad Astra, just to change things up. The NPR AI is also much improved since the early-mid VB6 days so I'm not sure a Rock class would be as effective. Fighters are definitely still effective though.
Really rotten luck with the first couple layers of survey results. I maybe don't hate you as much now.
Alpha Centauri is probably going to be our best bet for early colonization. It almost always has a fair number of good planets, so if there is a decent asteroid belt or some comets it should probably be a priority target.
If you're still taking roleplay applicants, I'm happy to stay safely at home as a scientist while everyone else gets blown up by the Prix. As an unvarnished opportunist my preferred field is whichever one is most likely to siphon funding from Avernite as long as it is not biology.
