OSG-28

[RFS-81]

Do we have any consensus yet as to who we're going to attack? IIRC, Ianus would prefer to go after the Darloks rather than nuke and replace Bulrathi colonies. This makes sense to me, but first, we should see if Monch won't accept a new NAP. It's a quite hard decision, but I also think we should attack the Darloks, for the simple reason that we have a chance to steal Bulrathi technologies with our spies, but stealing them by conquest will be insanely costly, and for the Darloks, pretty much the reverse is true.

Another question: If one of us has the chance to win a diplomatic victory (i.e., when we have less than 1/2 of the votes), should we go for it, or does anyone want to aim higher?

[haphazard1]

Do we think our fleet is capable of cracking the Darloks' defenses? A big part of the reason for attacking the bears was that their missiles and shielding were less advanced than the Darloks. Actually conquering their worlds would be very very difficult and costly, but we could probably crack their defenses and glass them from orbit more easily than we could the Darloks'. And then we could resettle the soil enriched, very large terraformed planets.

Not ideal, perhaps, compared to gaining tech from conquests. But adding several very large worlds to our empire would give us the pop and production to really pull ahead. Or at least to hold our own, with enough pop to prevent a council defeat while we continued teching.

But if we think we could crack the Darlok defenses without taking huge losses, then that would be an option, and we could deal with the bears later. Really, we just need to absorb one or the other of our neighbors, to gain more pop and production and hopefully gain contact with the remaining races. Either one will do. So it is a question of which one we think will be an easier target.

On diplomatic victory, I will take pretty much any victory at impossible. Right now I do not think we need to worry about lucking into an easy win. If we see a possibility of such in the future, we can discuss what we want to do.

[DaveV]

Here's a quick report. The ship specs shows the Theory with auto repair; I'm not sure what happened on the tactical screen.



Bulrathi tech:



Darlok tech:



I won't be able to play the rest of the set for about 10 hours; I'll check the thread before playing.

[Ianus]

Ha! So much for the Bears having weaker shielding! At least they don't have strong missiles, but with Personal Absorption Shield we definitely won't be conquering them any time soon. I think that the best course of action will be to blitz straight west through the Bears recolonizing as we go until we have contact with the other AI races, and then re-evaluate from there.

[shallow_thought]

Are there tools around for estimating the number of ships you would need to crack a planet? I noticed that RefSteel quoted some numbers earlier.

Lacking the OSG, my understanding of some of the algorithms is hazy. The manual has a decent description of beam weapon calculations for ships, but doesn't really describe bombs or planets very well.

[haphazard1]

Ouch on the force fields tech for both of them. And the bears having personal absorption shield...nasty gropo advantage they would have. Hmmm, anti matter bombs, too, so they could be conventional trouble as well as death spores if they come after our planets.

The bears do still lack stronger missile tech. So I vote for attacking them, and glassing their planets before resettling them with our own people. If we see an opportunity to invade a smaller world (if small still means anything with all that planetology tech) we might coordinate a big invasion force, but that seems unlikely. We can try spying to steal some tech once we are ready for war/at war, maybe grab something that way.

[RefSteel]

I think shields (ours and the enemies) are massively overrated, honestly. Their death spores and Mass Drivers don't really care what shielding we use on our bases and ships respectively, and as for their shield tech ... we have Omega Vs. Even if those Class V deflectors were Planetaries (they're not) we'd have more than enough firepower to blow through them. The reasons the bears are easy targets and the Darloks very difficult ones is the 'lok computer tech: Three extra layers of ECM and 5 extra battle computer levels (+2 more from their superior missiles).

Darlok factories will be way easier to conquer intact if their bases ever go down, and as I mentioned, tactics do exist that would get the job done - assuming our designs actually function on the tac screen of course! - there isn't one right answer, and we'll need good execution no matter what we choose.

[RefSteel]

Are there tools around for estimating the number of ships you would need to crack a planet? I noticed that RefSteel quoted some numbers earlier.

Could be, but none that I know of: I just do the math. Also my calculations were assuming no asteroids. With asteroids, we lose fewer ships on the approach and that snowballs a bit in our favor.

Bear bases shoot three Hyper-Xs each (sorry; my fault they have even those) with attack level 4 (2 for their best Battle Computer, +1 for Battle Scanner, +1 for Hyper-X) against our Doom Drive destroyers' defense rating of 7 (see design screen). That means 50% + (10% * ( 4 attack - 7 defense )) = 20% of their missiles will hit, dealing 8 damage each since we have no shields. It takes 3 hits to kill one of DaveV's bombers (missile damage doesn't roll over) so we'll lose (on average) one bomber for every fifteen shots they take - i.e. for each turn in which we're fired upon by 5 bases.

Our ships move before their bases, so if we can ignore their fleet (e.g. because we've got repulsor ships screening it off) our ships will take roughly one volley from the planet before dropping two full payloads of bombs. If that's enough to destroy all their bases, there are your minimal losses.

DaveV's bombers have BC4 for a level 4 attack; the bases have ECM2 for class 3 defense against bombs, missiles, and spores. So we'll hit with 50% + (10% * ( 4 attack - 3 defense )) = 60% of our bombs. Minimum Omega V damage is higher than their shield level, so average damage is simple: Min damage + Max damage, all divided by two, minus their shields. So (( 20 + 50 ) / 2 ) - 6 = 29. You can see why I'm not worried about their shields with these pretty toys. Their duralloy bases have 75 armor each, so it will usually take 3 bomb hits to kill one; sometimes 4 on a series of bad rolls, or 2 on a couple of good ones. Multiply that out and you can see that every set of 5 bombers will generally kill about one base per volley.

Assuming we want to kill them in two volleys then, we need 5 * 55 / 2, rounded up a bit to account for lame luck = ~140-150 bombers, plus 11 to survive the volley they'll take flying in (assuming they can't fly around the missiles altogether) would be 150-160. So my estimate above was an underestimate, which makes sense because I didn't take into account the fact that bombs don't carry over from base to base either.

Uhhh ... I hope that made matters clearer and not more confused! I guess I could write a spreadsheet damage estimator tool, but ... not today.

[haphazard1]

Thanks for walking through that in detail, RefSteel. It is helpful for us less experienced players.

So an attack is definitely possible, if we can put together enough of a fleet. Which should be possible, just a matter of enough turns ship building so we have enough bombers plus enough of our repulsor-equipped ships to keep the bear fleet from interfering. I foresee much spending at Mentar on ship construction....

[RefSteel]

I dunno - building a huge fleet at Mentar alone would give the aliens lots of time to develop yet more defensive technology. Also, there's absolutely something to what Ianus suggests. One thing to bear in mind about my perspective is that I never use the Wait button, and a good tactitian who does use it and knows how to do so to best advantage can (if I remember correctly) hit the planet twice after taking only one volley even from Stingers - meaning for instance that with three ~identical stacks of bombers, two of the stacks could bomb twice, taking no hits first, while the third stack retreated. Always assuming other ships or good intel can deal with or avoid the enemy fleets. That Darlok ECM is a killer though: It doubles the effective number of bombers required per base if we use DaveV's design, and militates in favor of a larger hull with a Battle Scanner. (If I remember Wait button tactics correctly, such a design could hit the bases twice before taking a single hit, and the scanner would increase its hit probability by a third - but I might be remembering wrong: It might be that Stingers are just fast enough that they'd hit nevertheless.)