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[Rince Wind]

I think I'd use 2 or three fire controls. You have 5 turrets with tracking speed 12 and rather short range (fine for PD, less so for fighters if they use anything but gauss or a lowtech railgun. I doubt anyone uses plasma carronades.), damage will drop to 1 pretty quickly, so even against fighters you definitivly need a couple of hits if they aren't right on top. In that case your to hit is lowered as well.

I was gonna say something about only 3 layers of armor, but then I looked again and saw those shields.




I'll need some as well. There are about 100 enemy AMM launchers at a planet I want to invade. So it is either multistage missiles (which release as many size 1 missiles are possible about 3m km from the target) and lots of them, or better PD (I had 20 each of regular sized and 50% sized 4-shot gauss in 16k tracking speed turrets and about 45 railguns with ~7k tracking speed. Not nearly enough.) coupled with shields to break through to beam range. My next gen (magneto plasma) fleet will do about 9500km/sec, so they are basically standing still for the 70k km/sec missiles.



Edit: Wait, you have strength 10 shields that take 300 seconds to recharge. No, that is mostly useless I think, at that stage I'd invest the tonnage in armor. Your shields can take about 1 1/2 of the usual spoiler missiles, 2 1/2 if they use rather small ones.

Editedit: Your FAC has 2 missile launchers, you'll need a lot of them to break through any missile defence. They won't operate far from a base anyway, so you could try and see how many box launchers you could cram in instead to increase throw weight. And if the defence isn't that strong you can just use one or two of the FACs at the same time, or use them to engage multiple targets.

All your ships are rather slow for internal confinement in my opinion. My ion engine fighters go 8500, the magneto plasma ones will do 13500km/sec (I researched a higher engine power modificator in the meantime as well).
Line ships in my current campaign have more than 50% of their weight devoted to engines, though that is faster than I usually go. Normal for me is about 40% of the weight.

[EuchreJack]

Well, you can always go for ship(s) with tons of armor, big active sensors, CAWS, and PD that travels slightly in front of the fleet and tanks the enemy missiles, supported by flimsy missile boats travelling behind.  The key is that the missiles penetrate the enemy armor leading to kills.

But it is not really a conventional design or strategy.

[Rince Wind]

And it is really gamey, especially if you make those ships commercial, I want to avoid that.
Supposedly the AI doesn't fall prey to this tactic as easily anymore as well. In Steve's current fiction an enemy fleet ignored his fleet after not getting through the PD of a similar fleet in another system and went for his jumpship, which was stationed alone at the jump point.

[EuchreJack]

Well, if you designate the ship your Battle Barge, its not so bad.  I'm inclined to call it my Hammer ship.

I'll have to remember the risk of losing the jump ship as you described.  Might as well make the Battle Barge "warp capable". 

[LoSboccacc]

an enemy fleet ignored his fleet after not getting through the PD of a similar fleet in another system and went for his jumpship, which was stationed alone at the jump point.

while flashing 'you disappoint me, father'

[Akura]

I increased the number of engines, so now the average speed of all the ships is about 8200km/s, but they all lost fuel endurance as a result. I would have gone for more, but the size, fuel, and engineering costs were spiraling out of control. The first ships will be rolling out of their slipways in about... 2-3 years.


On the more civil side of things, I put so much effort putting people onto Europa and the various colonies in Alpha Centauri that Earth has a population shortage of about 70 million, which is only going to get worse as I continue to expand the shipyards and maintenance facilities. It's bad to the point where I'm pulling people off Europa(surplus 106m people) to colonize Earth.

I can only imagine the poster advertising that colonization campaign: "Earth needs you! Colonize today! Because your government f*cked up."

[Rince Wind]

Do you still have financial centers on earth? Those don't need ressources so can be placed anywhere, and it might free a couple million workers. Research labs are the same but take longer to relocate. I have more than 100 on Luna (And 38 on a venusian planet some jumps out with around 90mil people in orbital habitats. The things you do for a 100% bonus to defence research.)

I used to have the same problems as you, so I only allow the civilans to build some ships when I think I can use more and I don't have many colony fleets with automated orders anymore.

In my game I evacuated people from Europa as well, though only to Ganymede or Callisto. I forgot some terraforming installations there and they kept adding water vapour. So despite carrying off more than 100 million people the remaining ~150mil must live on ever shrinking island. Current capacity: 82mil, but people don't seem to be dying from lack of space, so I stopped bringing people to the other moons. Europa is the location to pick up colonists from though (used to be Mars, 500+ million people, and all they do is work in finance).

Now I have a more serious problem though, all AI opponents are gone and there is nothing in the intelligence window either. Already posted a bug report. Luckily I have a save only a few years back.

[Akura]

I only have 20m Financial workers on Earth. The vast majority of workers are employed in the shipyards(186.56m) which I've had to expand considerably to build these ships, followed by research labs(85m) which are being run at full capacity. I could move them, but my main cargo fleet is currently engaged.

I haven't seen much need much need for financial centers... at least until I saw the expenditure on shipbuilding. Just starting that increased total expenditures by a third.

[EuchreJack]

Two thoughts:

1) Colonizing other worlds and then bringing them back to Earth is actually a great idea.  The birth rate on a new colony is like 10% whereas the birthrate on Earth is like 3%.  So you get more population per year by having as many off-world as possible.

2) Shipyards, from what I recall, can be towed, if that is something you've got the ability to do.

[Hanzoku]

One thing to keep in mind in this version of Aurora is that planets also have a maximum population cap. You won't hit it straight away on Earth, but eventually you will hit a hard limit on the number of bodies you can cram onto this world, and at that point you'll be forced to start using colonies for other purposes then generating warm bodies.

[Rince Wind]

Earth can hold 12 billion people though, that takes a long time!

There is a bug with towing shipyards that it consumes a lot more fuel than it should. And then you need the minerals at hand to build ships. That is why I recommended financial centres and labs, there is less setup needed.
If civilians are active you can use them to bring labs or financial centers to other colonies. Luna is especially easy because it is so close.

And 20 million workers that can do something else is giving a boost to everything that is still on earth. Right now everything runs with reduced efficiency. Your research is slower, your shipbuilding takes longer, you make less money from the financial centers and so on.

[Aseaheru]

 Ooh, Quill finally got a series going again. Thats nice.

[Akura]

Finally got my meager fleet out on its shakedown run, going from Earth to Alpha Centauri-B III, the main colony in Alpha Centauri. Took nearly twice the initial prediction(5.4 days, took almost 10) to reach there and used 5.9m liters of fuel one-way. For reference, the ten or so refinery platforms at Uranus produce ~40m a year.

On the plus side, Earth now has a surplus of people again.

[Rince Wind]

There is a bug that when you use Lagrange points the remaining time from the LP to the next target isn't calculated in the travel time.
I think it'll be fixed in the next version.


How big is your fleet? 6 million ltr of fuel sounds like quite a lot for a first fleet. Larger fleets do indeed guzzle fuel at an alarming rate.

Tugging can also be hard on your reserves. My tugs use about 20 or 25 million litres to get 5 orbital habitats (with a capacity of 1 million people each, mind) to their destination 6j out.
My older tugs needed to stop for fuel on the way (I usually sent a tanker to a gate about half of the way).

[coleslaw35]

Oh thank god, Steve has finally introduced automatic colony governor assignments and will, at some point also implement naval command automatic assignment. This is huge for me because I hate managing governors/commanders manually and ever since I started playing Aurora I've always wished it was automated just like naval and ground commands.