Best satellite design?

[CW]

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! ).

CW

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

[Taqwus]

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).

------------------
-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[dogscoff]

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=-)

------------------
"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. "

[CW]

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

[dogscoff]

LR scanner lts you see what comoponents / cargo / damage etc an enemy ship has. The first level has a range of 1 square on the system map, level II 3 squares (I think) and level III more.

Well worth investing in, especially if you're an intel freak lik me=-)

------------------
"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. "

[Master Belisarius]

CM: With the Long Range Scanners, you can see the enemy ship design (if the ship have not the Scanner Hamer or the Scatered Armor).
Very useful in simultaneous multiplayer games.

[Lemmy]

me agreeing with dogscoff for a change

LR II scans 3 sectors away, and LR III scans 5 sector away