Fighters are tractor beams

[geoschmo]

No, I am not saying the fighters would have longer range weapons than the ships.

The original point as I understand it was Empire A has long range weapons and sets strategy to max range to take advantange of their greater range. But Empire B launches fighters. Empire A's ships in an effort to attack the fighters with their PDC, which are shorter range than there own Long range weapons approach into range of Empire B's weapons and get shot.

The workaround suggested was to set Empire A's ships to not fire on fighters and count on the opportunity fire of the PDC alone to take care of the fighters. But my question is will that work? It will likely keep empire A's main guns from firing on the fighters, but will it keep the ships from moving to get the PDC into range? If so why would they have moved to begin with? They would have stayed at max range and shot the fighters with the main guns and only used the PDC when Empire B's fighters strayed into PDC range.

Does that make sense? At least my question I mean. I may be making an incorrect assumption, but you get what I am asking?

Geo

[ July 31, 2002, 16:33: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[tesco samoa]

geo that makes sence to me.

I am still trying to figure out why the ships would move into pdc range when they have longer ranged weapons.... Is the PDC weapon first in the order of fire ???

[LGM]

It seems to me the only counter is to not use point defenses on your ships. That really sets you up to be vulnerable to missles since point defenses are the only thing that stops them. You need to utilize PDCs off-ship:

Launch Satelittes with Point Defenses as you widthdraw with no point defenses on your ships. The fleet will leave behind Satellites as it moves back to max range. This will work somewhat against missles. You want to have more storage capacity than lauch capacity. Use a single Satellite Bay with one or two Cargo Storage III components. Sat Bay III + Cargo III is 370 KT. That would be 3 large Sats or 4 smalls. For 50 KT on every ship, you can spread a lot of point defenses out there. Of course, you take on the micromanagement of building hoards of satellites to do this and you have to stop and gather them up after every battle. You could have supply ships to transfer satellites to the warships between battles and leave some behind to gather up those deployed. This will probably work better at warp point battles. Otherwise, you could increase to 2 cargo components so that you can launch for 5 to 7 turns before your run out of sats to launch.

[ July 31, 2002, 18:27: Message edited by: LGM ]

[Crimson]

Hi, I always figure that when u use max range weapon type attack, they alway pick the max range of the shortest range weapon your ship has, does that make any sense. Highest common range. To fix this all we have to do is mod pdc with longer range, made up damage numbers

50 50 40 40 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
or
want would this do ?
50 50 40 40 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

Just think out loud

[LGM]

Another counter would be to change weapons to more effective weapons like Null Space and hope that your better speed allows you to fire first.

Personally, I think that Long Range weapons like Wave Motion guns are for non Talisman players to be able to hit better at long range (-30 modifier). I tend to use Null Space with the Talisman and that matches up nicely with the max range of Point Defenses (both range 5). If you do not have the Talisman, you want to get as close as you can to increase to hit chances.

Asside from using missles early on, I have found it very difficult in SEIV to use a Range advantage to stay out of the enemies range effectively. I figure that Range Advantage helps me get the first shot, which is big in SEIV. However, a Range advantage can be bad if weapons fire slow and miss a lot at long range.

[LGM]

Crimson's mod looks like a good idea. Of course, many of us typically play standard set games.

[Suicide Junkie]

The main problem with crimson's method is that PDCs will waste all their shots on the first missiles/fighters to move, doing 1 damage. The closer missiles can then thrash your ships with impunity.

[capnq]

What about "Use Type before Targeting Priorities", with fighters near the bottom of the list? Would that make any difference?

[tesco samoa]

who else is seeing this.... and what are the ship configurations and stragety settings ...

Lets see if there is a trend or just an unlucky combination ....

[Q]

I am not sure if I understood this correctly:
You are saying that the strategy "maximum weapons range" is overridden if the ship faces fighters and has PDC. Then it will move into PDC range.

That's something I have never experienced and I made a small test with an attacking ship that has anti proton beam and PDC against a group of ships and fighters. The attacking ship stayed at maximum distance (= range of the anti proton beam) and never came to use its PDC.