Best satellite design?
 

I want to start a little dicussion on satellites. What do you think is the best weapon to put on one? It seems to me that if you are using them to defend a warp point, the allegiance subverter is the absolute best choice.

CW

Re: Best satellite design?
 

One more question: If you put 2 combat sensors on a ship will you get a 120% bonus?

CW

Re: Best satellite design?
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by CW:
One more question: If you put 2 combat sensors on a ship will you get a 120% bonus?
CW<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
only one combat sensor or ECM is effective per vehicle, so the answer is NO


and the best weapon to put on one ??
maybe the Null-space projector, but then you'll get a pretty expensive satellite. I generally don't use sats. or mines, or any unit that i can't move,
i love moving things http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

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Q: When he went, had you gone and had she, if she wanted to and were able, for the time being excluding all the restraints on her not to go, gone also, would he have brought you, meaning you and she, with him to the station?

A: Objection. That question should be taken out and shot.

Re: Best satellite design?
 

hmmm, now you got me thinking about satellite designing damnit http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

well, here are my thoughts,
since satellites don't move, i think a long range/high damage weapon would be very effective.
Allegiance subverter could work, but what if it fails, then you're sats are defenseless.

and if i'm not mistaken, there should be a multiplex trackong component on each of the sats in a stack, or else you can only fire on one ship at a time.

Before phased shields are being used, you could also fill them with phased-polaron beams, but those sats wil eventually become obsolete.

/offtopic
what rank comes after corporal, and when do you get it, i almost got 100 Posts, is that enough for a promotion ?

[This message has been edited by LemmyM (edited 15 June 2001).]

Re: Best satellite design?
 

I rather like "disposable" things. Just hope that I don't get a ticket for littering in space some day! http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif Once I deploy the satellites they are simply forgotten, especially since they don't cost anything to maintain. A simple small satellite with a combat sensor and an allegiance converter is very cheap at 1050 minerals and 80 radioactives each, and I can pay for 2 of them for a turn worth of maintenance for a cruiser. More than that, what's better than fighting the enemy with his own weapons? (Sorry girls! All of my computer game opponents are males somehow. I'd love to change that though!) By the way, what does the Null-space projector do? It is not in the demo.

CW

Re: Best satellite design?
 

null-space projector skips armor and shields, and does reasonable damage, but the reload rate is 3

Re: Best satellite design?
 

Just some more of my thoughts on satellite employment... I think satellites are useless beyond the first round unless you have some ships to cover them, since they can't move and your opponent can avoid them, but then satellites exist because ships are expensive. This is not to say that they are exclusive of each other, as satellites can be very effective force multipliers IF you have ships too. However I prefer the no-brainer-low-management approach and use them like mines (AND grab my ship support locally from the enemy! http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon10.gif ).

CW

[This message has been edited by CW (edited 15 June 2001).]

Re: Best satellite design?
 

Plasma missile satellites appeal to me -- PMs are fast, do decent damage, and have long range, while incoming missiles can't even target satellites let alone hurt them.

Of course, they don't hit fighters and can be beaten by PD, so you can't use them as the ONLY defense, but they're handy.

FWIW, 'tho, most of the satellites I've built are recon satellites -- sensors, long-range scanner, and cloak. Sprinkle throughout your own and adjacent systems, distributed to get good scanner coverage and some redundancy (since a clueful opponent with a scanner may notice and target recon satellites, and I don't recall being able to fit a scanner jammer on the satellite).

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

Re: Best satellite design?
 

Unless you're playing devnullmod or similar, sats are only really useful on warp points, in which case you want high damage weapons. Since range isn't initially an issue at warp points and you can't pursue the target with sats, you have to hit it as hard as you can on the first combat turn. Screw range, stuff reload times, you want to twat it on the first shot. Once you've crippled it you might need something longer range / more frequent fire rate to finish off your enemy, so throw in a few beam weapon sats or something.

I usually design a long range and a short range sat and deploy them more or less equally. In my current vs AI game (devnullmod, 1.35) I used warp sats to fend off the crysonlite for about 50 turns even though their weapon tech was way ahead of mine: I was escort, they were cruiser. I was DUC II, they were Shard cannon X. They had PDC, shields; the works, but about a dozen small external CSM sats with a few DUCs thrown in kicked their arses royale, turn after turn. OK, that's against an AI, but it was still well worth investing my surplus resources in=-)

Design lots of different sats and pile them up on warp points. The more you have, the more chance of killing something and the less chance of being destroyed.

Basically, variety and mass is the key. Sats have no maintenance so you can just keep on building more whenever you have a resource surplus. CSM I might be a crap weapon but if you're firing 30 of them in one combat turn at range 5 then you're looking at some serious damage.

Unless you have several armed space stations or the sat mounts of devnullmod, then they're not much good over planets, but for warp points (until you develop fighters anyway), sats are my favourite defence.


Of course eventually you'll hit the max units in space limit but that's another story...


BTW, this post comes with my standard "been down the pub on a Friday lunchtime" disclaimer=-)

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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"Uh, I think so, Brain, but balancing a family and a career ... oooh, it's all too much for me. "

Re: Best satellite design?
 

I haven't really figured out what the LR scanner do but I just put it on my ships anyway. So, what does it do? Does it let you detect ships in the current system? Let you see what's on an enemy ship? Or what?

CW