Carrier Battles Mod

[Ed Kolis]

Yes, there is a setting in Settings.txt; I think it's called "Planet Defense Modifier" or somesuch...

[Suicide Junkie]

That is an interesting idea.

It should be noted that tiny planets can easily have hundreds of thousands of hitpoints already, due to troops acting as planetary armor.

1% hit rates would require tens of millions of damage points to be thrown at the planet in order to clear it. Not a bad proposition, actually. Rollo's AIs seem to be fairly good at dropping troops, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem for them.

[Will]

It would also have the effect of drawing out battles more. I see a huge parallel between the inspiration between Carrier Battles and WWII Pacific theatre. Battles over tiny islands would go on for months at a time, and it wasn't really an option to just bring a few warships alongside the island and shell it until all the enemy resistence suddenly stopped. It was necessary to send troops ashore, and systematically root out all enemy strongholds, which still took a long time, but was generally faster than trying to pick them off at a distance

Then, Planetary Bombardment Missiles become the equivalent of nukes, ICBMs. No precision necessary, just fling it in the general direction of those English pig dogs, and let the massive taunt defeat them

[Suicide Junkie]

A refresh of the download link for those who want to try this out:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...?Number=408927


Hmm... Nukes & ICBMs?
PBMs are very very slow, easy to pick off if you have air defenses still. And they'll only kill a couple turns worth of infantry or tent to twenty tanks each.


Game Update
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Turn 55.
The Terrans and Ukra-Tal have lost their homeworlds permanently.
The CueCappa and the Vikings have stagnated, and there aare now six races that are about 50% higher score than them.
The CueCappa have lost a lot of ships recently... A small attack on my borders, followed by a huge attack that wiped out most of my assault fleet that was gathering. Unfortunately attrition is not going their way, since they are not building new ships very fast at all.

I think the EEE homeworld may have been infected with a plague... their population is dropping steadily for the last 20 turns. I suppose it wasn't glassed, but is merely rioting.

[mac5732]

for the AI mod, where can i find delux v1.94, for the mod?

[Fyron]

http://www.spaceempires.net/home/downloads-cat-10.html

[Suicide Junkie]

Well, this was embarrasing. I sent Alpha fleet to attack a combined CueCappa and Viking fleet massing beside a fresh military base in Cue space.

All I got was one measly Cue carrier.
The vikings had made an end run around my forces, smashed my entire anti-Cue defense net with only a single fighter casualty, and were charging drunkenly through my system.

I initially thought they might attack my thinly populated military base in the system, and gathered all my damaged ships to it.
However, instead they went to liberate the old viking colony that I had captured earlier.

The Vikings were back to claim their own, and the Cue were still a threat in the outer system. Most of my attack fleet was chasing down the vikings, and I scraped every ship in the system together to make a two pronged assault force.

The vikings arrived on day 12, swept away the defenses easily, and landed 180 stormtroopers.
Very very fortunately, I had troops left over there, since my assault transports were heavily damaged in their next operation, before they had a chance to remove all the troops. The ground combat stalemated.

My two fleets arrived on day 30, and it was a quite the battle. Viscious exchange of missiles, and my skirmishers took a solid beating holding back most of the viking horde.

One problem noted: The vikings have a destroyer with 40mm DUCs and 20MM torpedoes, that repeatedly attacked one of my shielded skirmishing cruisers, doing minimal to no damage.

The viking dogfighters did get through on my flank, and chewed up my guys pretty good.

In the end, I defeated them with relatively little losses.
We had equal numbers of carriers, but I had 20 more support ships. The extra point defense, assault guns and cannon-fodder-ism pushed the battle through to a solid victory.

Suggestion summary:
- Design/strategy fix on the 40mmDUC / 20mm Torp destroyer
- Try to increase the number of support ships in the fleets. Or, increase the number of DF attack fighters. They did good. Reduce the point defense missile fighters they don't seem to have much effect.

However:
- I think I will increase the point defense missile speeds. Right now they are weak.
- I will reduce the hitpoints of said missiles, to aid in targetting priorities against them.
- Offensive missiles will be made slower. They seem to be a bit too powerful.

This may make those defense missiles more useful, but I would still reccommend installing them on ships instead of fighters. Ships can fire one missile at each incoming target, whereas fighters fire the whole stack at once.