Mines, Satellites and Fighters oh my!

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Echo Mirage:
I wanted to hear some of your opinions on the differences between these three units for wormhole defence?

I suppose you have a few things to consider:

- Cost (to research and to build)
- Cost (to maintain and re-supply)
- Flexibility (fighters are reactive and mobile, mines are cheap? satellites can be re-deployed.)

Any analysis would be greatly appreciated, I am yet a young Praetor in the Human Imperium, I could use some battle strategies and unti analysis!

Thanks!

You start the game with satellites. The next two levels are pretty easy to research. Their construction cost is not very much. They are quite effective with the mounts given in the default game. If they could still be scattered in more than ONE frickin' group per location they'd be fantastic. It's just too easy for a ship to get away from a single stack of satellites. Other than this, they are quite good for warp point defense.

Mines are quite cheap to research and to build. The reason they are cheap to research is that there is no purpose to the second and third levels. Small mines are the best thing to use. Don't bother with medium and large mines. They always hit, so what matters is the efficiency of your resource usage. A mine cannot be 'partially' expended. It blows up for full damage no matter what the target is. Large mines end up 'wasting' damage because of the larger granularity of the damage allocated. Small mines do just as much damage but in smaller increments so less is wasted on 'overkill' with small ships. As of this Version of SE IV, there is no technology to make mines more (mine enhancements) or less (ship defense) effective so there are no disadvantages to offset the efficiency advantage of the smaller mines. In fact, the greater numbers of smaller mines are also an advantage against sweepers.

Fighters are indeed expensive to research. They are also more expensive than satellites to build. Their mobility and flexibility are quite excellent, though. They do run out of supplies eventually but a base full of fighter bays is pretty cheap to build. A combination of satellites and fighters is excellent. The fighters can pursue weak ships that try to run away, while the satellites provide heavier firepower to assist the fighters against any powerful ships that appear.