Bay 12 Games Forum

so...we must increase production.
what about research in more shipbuilding/production and build off more pdc? pdc's with REALLY REALLY long range. (like the big bessy of artilleries)

We have more important things to research than increased shipbuilding speed. Plus, seeing as we're producing small ships, more yards is a better strategy than faster yards.

And range in Aurora doesn't work like that, you can't just infinitely increase range by building bigger guns. Range is limited by tech, not expense.

Wrong. 10cm lasers are size 3, so fire rate 2 gauss gives same pd fire, however lasers require power reactors to run, while gauss do not - so actually rate 2 gauss gives better pd fire/size ratio. There is one big downside - gauss cost muuuuuch more minerals to produce, which makes shipbuilding longer if you dont pre-build components.

Mine aren't =)

Which is to say, there's a tech path to reduce the size of lasers, but there's nothing similar for gauss.

I think signature reduction is a bad idea. It will delay our much more capable new ships, make them more expensive, and all it will give them is some slight amount of strategic stealth, they'll never get anywhere near firing range without being spotted. So there's no point in it.

Similarly, I maintain jump point tech is a bad idea, since we can't compete with the AI without missiles, or at least building lots of warships dedicated to anti-missile work (which would be useless against our real enemies).

Ok, here's my try at orders:

Space Orders:
Keep all ships at Titan. Battle contingency orders: If the enemy attacks titan, fall back and try to lure them into range of the PDC. Then, if Titan's sensors can detect a particularly large ship, similar to our troop transports, have the gunboats try to kill it, ideally flying around the enemy fleet if the transport is holding back. The destroyers and carrier should just try to stay out of enemy range if they can, maybe they can hide in deep space or something.
Industrial Orders
Build 2 of the new PDCs (design below) using 100% of construction capacity, then build factories with 100% of capacity.
Keep building gunboats, add slipways to the gunboat yard.
Research Orders
Put 35 labs on research rate 280, it should be almost done. Then develop better reactor tech, better engine tech, then better armor tech with the same scientist. The remaining 5 labs should go to Ali Sulaiman who should work on developing improved command and control.
Other Orders
Design a new PDC. It should be absolutely bare bones; no armor, no sensor, no fuel capacity (WHY?), no hangars or barracks. Just 3 meson turrets, 1 fire control, and necessary additions (crew quarters and maybe a bridge if its over 1k tons).
Once better engines and armor are done, design a new gunboat; try to give it a little armor while keeping it otherwise basic and fast. Retool the gunboat yard for the new model when available and begin refitting to the new class (the refits should be cheap and fast; if not, build new hulls instead). Three layers of armor would be ideal, and should let them shrug off a few hits from smaller particle beam weapons.

What are the current orders?

By the way, is there any edit to the year-long order, or can I finish the year?

For the love of god don't build any Hebrons.

Other than that, since people kept changing my orders I've kind of resigned myself to advisor/last sane man

Shields are a bad idea. Even if we already had the tech, they have 1/3rd the durability of the same weight of armor and only recharge very slowly (takes 5 minutes to recharge, a combat round is 5 seconds).

This is pretty much what I expected to happen. I kept saying "Don't provoke them, we haven't been building ships!" but no one listened

I've kind of been leaving this thread alone because it seemed obvious my plans were not popular, but my suggestion would be to stay the course. The battle did show that the gunboat concept is useful; they were able to close the range in the face of fire and hit with Mesons; if we'd had a full force of gunboats instead of dividing our forces (which I repeatedly argued against) we probably would have won. So, keep building gunboats, maybe add slipways to the yard. Finish engines then develop better mesons, since we've been forced into a badly planned war.

What it did teach is that our (non-gunboat) ships are completely useless; the enemy are far faster and longer ranged than our ships. Really, they're useless to the point that we might as well just scrap them. No point in building anything but gunboats.

can someone tell me how to actually make sorium harvester ships DO THEIR jobs?
...
i have ship A with sorium harvester on.
it trasmits fuel from the gas to itself...but how do i give it to a colony? (when i try to dump 90% into a colony, it just goes there and waits)

I think there's a contingency order that's something like "unload 90% fuel at nearest colony and return". Try setting that to Contingency: Fuel full or whatever and see if it works.