Space Empires IV Gold Game

Alan Bolte · Post by **Alan Bolte** » 2005-12-07 11:16pm

Drones really aren't supposed to be useful for the same things fighters are. They're long-range missiles that can carry weapons in addition to or in place of warheads. If your drones aren't ramming the enemy, you're probably trying to use them wrong. At least, that's my understanding of it.

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2005-12-07 11:25pm

Alan Bolte wrote:Drones really aren't supposed to be useful for the same things fighters are. They're long-range missiles that can carry weapons in addition to or in place of warheads. If your drones aren't ramming the enemy, you're probably trying to use them wrong. At least, that's my understanding of it.

Drones are just fast, huge missiles. For the most part in stock SEIV, armor was more effective than warheads to mount, if more expensive... but one excellent use for drones is to plow into fighter formations. A single decked out small drone should be able to plow down dozens of fighters, and with their superior speed, probably will land the first (and last) blow.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2005-12-08 12:15am

That's in stock, though. It takes almost 300 points of damage to destroy one of my shuttles, so I don't see a drone taking out dozens of them.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2005-12-08 12:24am

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:That's in stock, though. It takes almost 300 points of damage to destroy one of my shuttles, so I don't see a drone taking out dozens of them.

I verified it, it takes ramming a drone into a fighter stack and the fighter stack only loses one fighter.

I wonder if the bugstill works...

FAQ wrote:6.1.14 A ship can do considerable damage (usually destroying it) to a fighter group by ramming it. Bug?

I'm gonna try it

. One thing is, the simulator is not exactly how the combat works. I don't remember what exactly is different but one of the big differences was fleet and ship training. So even if this bug doesn't work in the simulator it might work in the game. Going to have to set up a test game tomorrow. If it works, you could concievably take out a 10 or maybe a 100 wing fighter group by ramming a 5k skeleton ship into it.

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2005-12-08 02:39pm

I'm trying to figure out why the fighters glassed the Dominion planet and the troop transports sat there doing nothing. I set the fleet's orders to "capture planet" and set the max damage to inflict on planets to 20% to make sure that couldn't happen. Do orders go out the window just because fighters were involved, or what?

Alan Bolte · Post by **Alan Bolte** » 2005-12-08 02:42pm

That's gonna be fun to RP...

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2005-12-08 02:47pm

I dunno but I never bother with giving a fleet orders. I tell all strategies to break formation.

I would create a separate "fighter" strategy, put them on it, then a separate "capture planet" strategy and put transports on it, and make sure for all strategies they break formation using individual orders rather than fleet orders.

I never figured out a good way to combine a capturing fleet with a war fleet. What I do now is I build a heavily shielded medium or large transport and tell non-transports to avoid targeting planets entirely. That works, but if your transports get shot down you're fucked. Usually though a planet is not that heavily fortified but obviously we'll run into that later. In other words I don't bother to shoot the planet at all and just drop troops. Maybe if you create a "bombard planet" strategy and only bring it down to 20% damage. Fleet orders definitely won't work but I'm not sure why.

Also for late game, planets have inherent multiplex tracking 10. So if you have more than 10 small transports, maybe 10 of them get shot down by weapons platforms but the 11th transport makes it and drops troops. Maybe you need 21 transports just to make sure. Right now I'm building one very large transport heavily shielded (1000 shields) instead of swarming but maybe later even heavily shielded transports won't work if there's a shitload of massive weapons platforms.

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2005-12-08 03:07pm

How do you put individual ships on different strategies? I've never heard of that.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2005-12-08 03:14pm

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:How do you put individual ships on different strategies? I've never heard of that.

I don't mean individual ships I mean individual ship classes, pardon me.

Hit strategy and you see the optimal firing range button.

Brian

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2005-12-08 03:32pm

Brian's right. IIRC, unarmed transports have a default strategy of "Don't Get Hurt" which means it'll run into the corner, regardless of fleet strategy or enemy defenses.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2005-12-08 03:40pm

Ah, I see. Guess I just never noticed that button.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2005-12-08 07:38pm

Now I know I'm into this game too much. I ride in a van all day, and I've now explained the game and everything that's happened to both the morning and afternoon drivers. The morning driver couldn't stop laughing when I told him how I accidently blew the colony all to shit instead of capturing it.

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2005-12-09 10:41am

Hey, whenever there's one person left who hasn't taken his turn and I see him posting in some random thread, I have to restrain the urge to tell them to stop posting in said thread and do their turn. So you're not alone.

Post by **Dalton** » 2005-12-09 01:23pm

Trogdor wrote:Hey, whenever there's one person left who hasn't taken his turn and I see him posting in some random thread, I have to restrain the urge to tell them to stop posting in said thread and do their turn. So you're not alone.

Yeah, I'm sure U235 is just about ready to unleash some monstrous image upon me as retaliation...

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2005-12-09 01:29pm

You been PMing to hurry up with his turns or something?

Post by **Dalton** » 2005-12-09 01:51pm

Trogdor wrote:You been PMing to hurry up with his turns or something?

Well, I IMmed him once in the past and made a comment in another thread for a different turn recently. I don't like rushing people though.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2005-12-09 02:58pm

I need to change the name of one (possibly two) of my homeworlds, as it doesn't really fit. Which planets in the Federation are really important, besides Earth, Mars, and Vulcan?

Typhonis 1 · Post by **Typhonis 1** » 2005-12-09 03:00pm

Tellera homeworld of the Tellarites and Andor. interestingly enough accoerding to the TOS Alpha Centauri had a humanoid civilization that humanity met. TNG Betazed stands out as does Trill.

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2005-12-09 03:00pm

Andor and whatever the Tellarian home world is called, I guess. All least you've got a few. The only names I've got available that I know of are Romulus, Remus, and Cheron.

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2005-12-09 03:10pm

Trogdor wrote:Andor and whatever the Tellarian home world is called, I guess. All least you've got a few. The only names I've got available that I know of are Romulus, Remus, and Cheron.

Pick a planet, any planet

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2005-12-09 03:32pm

New Andor is already the 4th one, but I didn't mention it because I wasn't sure and wanted to see if anyone else would mention it. So that makes New Tellera to replace New Bajor. Bajor wasn't even known in the TOS time period and was never a major Fed world anyway, but I couldn't think of anything besides Earth, Mars, Vulcan, and Andor when I named the planets.

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2005-12-09 03:38pm

Bounty wrote:
Trogdor wrote:Andor and whatever the Tellarian home world is called, I guess. All least you've got a few. The only names I've got available that I know of are Romulus, Remus, and Cheron.
Pick a planet, any planet

Whoa, thanks!

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2005-12-09 06:24pm

*groan* waht a disaster five mauraders just got killed by 30 fighters and my troop transport with 1000+ shields and 400 troops just got shot out of the sky.

Brian

dacis2 · Post by **dacis2** » 2005-12-09 06:24pm

I'm getting Connection Errors from the mod website. Are there any other download mirrors?

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2005-12-09 06:30pm

dacis2 wrote:I'm getting Connection Errors from the mod website. Are there any other download mirrors?

It's here I think Atrocities took down the site because it was too expensive.

Brian