Space Empires V PBW game?

[brianeyci]

Time to visit the Archmage.

There actually is a waypoint button to corral ships out of your home system. Looks like you have an invincible home turf.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Looks like most of us seriously underestimated drones. I just got my attack force creamed by them. I ran some sims and there's no effective counter to drones loaded up with armor. Since they're not using anti-ship warheads, they can ram anything, not just ships, they're faster than anything save fighters, they get defensive bonuses, and it takes almost as long to bring one down as to bring a ship down. I thought that fighters set to max range strategy might be an effective counter, but it's not, since they can't do very much damage to a drone with 560 armor. The only good news is that shields do count when being rammed, so at least it takes more than one drone to take down a shielded ship, and drones are fairly expensive at about half the price of a frigate versus one tenth for a fighter.

[brianeyci]

Half the cost of a frigate isn't that big a deal, given he can shit out a hundred every couple turns from his base space yards and maintainence on a drone is a lot less than a frigate.

I kind of saw this coming, not the drones, but you losing. Unless you were really lucky I didn't see you subjugating or killing Alan at all. A player on defense not only has terrain, satellites, mines and weapons platforms, but as a last stand he can emergency build 100 frigates from his base space yards. Any kind of offense at this tech level is doomed to failure, unless you have multiple players throwing everything they have.

The perfect answer, is of course, armor skipping fighters. But you have to cozy up to crystal freaks for a few hundred of their fighters. Can the Praetor's ego stand begging? I've wanted armor skipping fighters for a looonng time.

Looks like drones weren't a waste after all. Good thing we banned anti-planet warheads or they'd be even more broken. I am not sure whether drones ramming planets with armor use the same broken formula, but on the safe side we should just ban drones ramming planets entirely if they're this powerful.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Luckily, drones are pretty much defensive only, since you need carriers to attack with them, and the carriers can be creamed by warp point defenses before they have time to launch many drones. Anyway, it's true that there's a pretty big defender's advantage, but building up defenses like crazy is not a great strategy, IMO. If you have a respectable amount of defenses on every planet, that's a lot more expensive maintenance with regard to maintenance and build cost / time than a fleet of ships. Better to just stick a couple of WP's on each planet to prevent someone from taking lots at once and fortify only the border systems heavily.

Anyway, I knew it might not pay off, although if it didn't I thought it would be because of mines. I didn't want to hold off any more so I didn't bring any minesweepers, and that turned out fine, but I hadn't counted on the drones. Based on the first encounter with the colony ship, I thought he was fortifying with fighters, and in the sims my ships could take out a very large number of fighters without much effort. Anyway, armor skipping fighters are OK until someone starts putting shields on their drones, too. The main weakness of the drones is that they all zone in on the same ship, so until they catch that ship they're taking fire from the whole fleet. From what I've seen, the best way to fight drones is just to throw a lot of ships at them. The more ships you have, the less will fall to the drones. Anything else I simmed simply gets creamed, especially stationary defenses and including fighters at max range.

So hats off to Alan Bolte for figuring out a good strategy! I would have rather won, of course, but having a human opponent do something unexpected and getting crushed is its own type of fun.

[brianeyci]

Yeah congrats on the first war Bolte.

You don't really need to have huge defenses, or even a particularly large standing fleet. I'm actually thinking of keeping large numbers of ships mothballed or even with 1 turn left in a base space yard rather than an armada sitting around sucking money every turn. An invader would have to beat two times the number of ships they're attacking with, maybe three... standing Starfleet, the ships I have on hold, and another final fleet around Earth from what I could make on emergency build. The Federation's so large I can afford to trade space for time to make a reinforcement fleet. I expect this tactic to work well into the mid-game, until everybody has dreadnaughts.

I've got a handful of weapons platforms on every planet. The idea isn't so much defense as it is prevent "chain" attacks and use population as a screen. Even five weapons platforms and a bit of troops could hold off a rather large invasion. The main problem is fighters destroy weapons platforms and troops, so anybody dropping fighters could beat that.

Soon I'll be using sector view to reposition all my facilities as "walls" around my weapons platforms, with the WP's in the center. Anybody who invades the Federation had better be prepared to blow up facilities, which are set to "do not hurt" or else their troops will just cluster around the facilities picked off by my weapons platforms with greater range weapons. You've been warned.

EDIT: The main problem about fortifying only border systems heavily is cloaks and warp point openers. In a smaller game where you can keep tabs on all the players, sure, but there's got to be someone rushing for it. Even though it'll take a hundred turns, this game won't be over soon, and I don't like the idea of Earth being naked. A lot of us can't fortify border systems because we've got treaties to keep borders demilitarized. Combine it all and keeping the majority of your forces in your home systems makes sense. If someone wants to waste a huge fleet to capture a few dipshit colonies, I would let them, and come back with a massive counter attack.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

There's also the MAD principle that I tried to use on you in the first Star Trek game but was stymied by bad timing. MAD meaning that when you see an incoming attack fleet, you don't even try and stop it, but rather have your own attack fleet make a beeline for their now-undefended home territory to force a truce or at least give as good as you get.

Next game we do, I think I'll be using pre-defined starting locations. SE V is simply terrible at deciding where to put people (SE IV was just as bad), and it invariably crams way too many empires into a small space, even on large map. By selecting starting locations, we can make sure that everyone has roughly the same number of systems to play with. There would still be luck involved with the number of good planets you get, of course, but the point is not to eliminate luck completely, just diminish it.

[Kingside_Bishop]

Why do you need carriers to attack with drones? Can't they go through warp points?

[brianeyci]

MAD doesn't work well in SEV because of the distances involved, no warp move, the inability to chain attacks (drop troops, move off a hex and load troops doesn't work or I wouldn't trust it, look at all the people with cargo problems), the problem with supplies and the strength of weapons platforms. Even a backwater world with ten weapons platforms can hold off a fleet that doesn't use planetary bombardment because WP's don't get hit first. Population acts like a meat shield.

So warp point first strike or cloaked fleets on homeworlds should be devastating. Keeping the fleet in the home system makes sense in that way. Mines could stop cloaked fleets but then again they could just soak the mines, and mining every warp point is expensive. For really large empires like the Federation, keeping the fleet close at home makes sense. Once I see a major invasion, I'll sally out, but not before then.

[Alan Bolte]

I've been wanting to do that since SE3.

[ColonialAdmiral]

So should we place a moritorium on the Anti stellar manipulation facilities? (I can't remember what they are called, but his prevents people from cutting themselves off and forcing a stalemate)

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Why do you need carriers to attack with drones? Can't they go through warp points?

Yeah, but don't they have a mind of their own once launched? You can't order them to go through a specific warp point, right?

[Kingside_Bishop]

Why do you need carriers to attack with drones? Can't they go through warp points?

Yeah, but don't they have a mind of their own once launched? You can't order them to go through a specific warp point, right?

You can, now. In SE:IV, this wasn't the case -- once you launched a drone, the only thing you could do was give it an attack order. But in SE:V, drones can be given specific orders, just like a ship. Move here, warp here, attack this, retreat to waypoint 1, etc. They still use up supplies every turn, and they can't be recovered -- but they're still much better than they used to be. Especially in the Balance Mod... they're cheap and fast like fighters, can use starship sized weapons and defenses, and are themselves immune to many starship weapons.

[brianeyci]

So should we place a moritorium on the Anti stellar manipulation facilities? (I can't remember what they are called, but his prevents people from cutting themselves off and forcing a stalemate)

No. I personally think warp point strikes are cheap as hell. And I figured out how to warp move. Just need a fogged of war map from someone.

Nothing wrong with system gravitational shield facilities as long as there's at least one way into your empire. Personally I plan to make that one way through a wormhole that lets in only 400 kT ships, and fortify that wormhole like hell. I've got one that leads straight to Earth.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I don't think warp point size limitations are implemented.

[GuppyShark]

Ow, I think I just found Cov's system of doom.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I think wars in SEV will come down to attrition. A fleet that's been mothballed for a long time will get more and more obsolete even as it gets larger, and resource limitations dictate that you can only unmothball so many ships at once. So if the attacker can follow up with another wave right behind the first one and other one right behind that and either outproduce or outclass the defender's fleets, he can continually capture systems and eventually win.

[Covenant]

Ow, I think I just found Cov's system of doom.

I told you not to come down that far!

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Will people be able to take their turns today, or should we postpone the execution until tomorrow night on account of the holiday?

[ColonialAdmiral]

I'll get mine up tognight. I will be gone over this weekend, so I need a replacement. Sorry it's so late, but if nobody wants to, I'll just set my ques for long term. Thanks.

[GuppyShark]

Ow, I think I just found Cov's system of doom.

I told you not to come down that far!

Good for the goose, good for the gander. Or so I thought!

[Covenant]

Ow, I think I just found Cov's system of doom.

I told you not to come down that far!

Good for the goose, good for the gander. Or so I thought!

Yes but I specifically told you not to head down that way. I'm not allowing colonization of home sectors, or cross-traffic through them. ;p

[GuppyShark]

Duh, I had no way of knowing I was jumping into Chazzawazzamanizzle until I'd, umm, jumped into it. You also never said I couldn't jump into the system, just that I wasn't able to send ships THROUGH it.

[serious]Cov misunderstood me - I jumped a ship into Chazza and it crashed my system, I thought that meant I'd hit the System of Doom. Hence my earlier post.[/serious]

[Covenant]

Oooh. Is see.

Really? That crashed you? Huh!

[ColonialAdmiral]

Sounds like you have the best damned defence mechanism in all SEV...

[GuppyShark]

Hey Arthur,

I assume "Because I missed a turn" isn't going to be a good enough answer for the mail Arthurius sent me?