Author Topic: Do you use mobile ships on defense?  (Read 4201 times)

Offline Harry

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Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« on: January 06, 2010, 12:20:33 am »
I have the same problem in every game I play (one game at AI 5/6, two games at AI 7/7): I spread my fleet so thin that I don't have a decisive striking force anywhere.  Consequently, I make very slow forward progress -- less than one new system an hour.  I do more forward slowly -- I haven't ever come to a grinding halt or gone "backwards" -- but my games turn into these epic turtles!  My current game is in hour 14 or so, and I'm getting cross-planet raids of 700-800 ships or so every 45 minutes.  (Do the size of CPAs increase over time if you just sit and turtle?  I am sure the answer is yes!!) 

So, what am I doing wrong?  Should I be relying solely on turrets for defense, with maybe a standing fleet at the homeworld?  Should I just accept that I'll lose 2-4 systems every hour to a CPA?  I can't put 70 tractors on every hostile wormhole, can I?  I forget what the cap is on Tractor I's, but I don't have enough to go around.  Should I be researching tractor IIs or laser turrets or something?  I suppose I could drop back down to 5/5 or some such, but I kind of like the challenge I have now, and I'm not really strapped for resources or energy.  I just have trouble deploying my fleet optimally.  And there's a vicious cycle: because it takes me a long time to make a knowledge raid (or to conquer a planet), I gain knowledge slowly, which means my fleet grows slowly.

I don't *like* a slow pace; I want to attack and attack more.  Knowledge raids, ion-cannon raids, data-center raids, neutering raids -- all those things are the most fun part of the game for me.  But I spend half my time defending or rebuilding.  Any general advice?

Offline x4000

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #1 on: January 06, 2010, 12:23:26 am »
First question: what version of the game are you using?  That is an awful lot of CPAs, way more than intended.
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Offline Harry

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #2 on: January 06, 2010, 12:40:54 am »
I bought the game using Steam, and when I press Shift-Tab in Steam, it tells me it's game version 2.0, with Steamworks enabled.  I've set it to update automatically, and Steam says it's up to date.  Although if I try to manually update from the main game menu, it tells me it can't find the update server.

I checked two recent saved games to see precisely how much time elapsed between my two most recent CPAs.  I exaggerated a bit: 1 hour and 10 minutes transpired between each raid, both with 735 ships.  One was at around the 11:48 mark, the next at around the 12:58 mark.  So maybe it's more like every 70 minutes rather than every 45 minutes.  Is that what's intended?  I spend 10 minutes beefing up my defenses, another 15 minutes fighting off the CPA, and another 10-15 minutes rebuilding (since I usually lose at least one command station or power-supply unit), and then finally turn my attention back to offense.  So I'm spending half my time on the defensive.

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving the game!  But if there is an update that makes CPAs a wee bit less frequent, I want it!  Maybe a lower difficulty would generate them less frequently, but I like 7/7 in all other respects!  And in general, I prefer a bit too hard to a bit too easy.  :)

Offline Harry

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #3 on: January 06, 2010, 12:42:45 am »
Just to be clear, I'm not using the pre-release version.  I figured I'd buy the expansion when it appears on Steam, but I could be talked into it if you think I'd enjoy it more.

Offline x4000

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #4 on: January 06, 2010, 12:43:48 am »
The CPAs are something that I've been tweaking a bit.  The prereleases here in the forums have some updates to that, and I'll put out another one tonight that will include more.  The prereleases are betas, just to warn you, which is why Steam doesn't have them yet.  The next official release on Steam will likely be either this Friday or very early next week.

Also: prereleases are not just for expansion customers.  You can download the prerelease and turn off the expansion, and then that just gives you the beta of the updates for the base game (of which there are many).  The expansion should be out on Steam next Tuesday, barring any delays.

Hope that helps!
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Offline Harry

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #5 on: January 06, 2010, 01:05:35 am »
Cool.  I'll take a closer look at your posts about the pre-releases.  But if the official expansion is coming within a week, I might just wait, as I'm already having ridiculous amounts of fun with the current version.  We'll see.  Buying the expansion is certainly a no-brainer!

In any case, I imagine my problem is the old adage: "he who defends everything defends nothing."  I should probably work on focusing on forming an offensive fleet in one location, and then relying on turrets plus some mobile defenders to cover my backfield.  Maybe I'm not getting the most out of my turrets?  I've never researched any turret tech.

Offline x4000

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #6 on: January 06, 2010, 01:15:40 am »
Oh, no turret tech?  That is probably a big part of it, then -- even the mark II turrets of basic and mlrs are about twice as effective as their lower-level counterparts.  Laser turrets are also really popular, and highly effective (and the lowest tier is cheap on knowledge).  For longer range stuff, missile turrets are also really great, although I tend to use them less mainly because of their cost.  Also, my favorite secret weapon is spider turrets: given that they deal engine damage, they can absolutely stall incoming waves (though, in 2.0 there are a few idiosyncrasies with that that were fixed in the later prereleases).

You might prefer the prereleases in general just because of the various shifts that have been made to fine-tune the balance and to make things a bit faster in general (your ships move faster, enemy ones do not, FRD is more effective, etc).  Since you're new to the game and want the expansion through Steam, I'd suggest just waiting and getting it through Steam when it comes out next week (or whenever you want, after that point).  But, I'd still recommend the non-expansion part of the prereleases given your quandary here.  It's got three months' worth of bugfixes and balance tweaks in it, if nothing else, for your purposes.  Generally I prefer to release the updates monthly, but for various reasons that hasn't been possible while the expansion has been inwork -- but these are the updates you'll get through Steam next week whether you buy the expansion or not, essentially, just an earlier version of them (with more bugs still to be fixed from them, etc, though).
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Offline Lancefighter

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #7 on: January 06, 2010, 01:21:42 am »
I personally tend to leave the mk1 version of all my ships on FRD mode at my home planet. Sure, this cuts down the size of my fleet... but I am willing to take the loss of units in my main fleet for a little bit of safety :)
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Offline Harry

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #8 on: January 06, 2010, 01:39:23 am »
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Oh, no turret tech?  That is probably a big part of it, then -- even the mark II turrets of basic and mlrs are about twice as effective as their lower-level counterparts.  Laser turrets are also really popular, and highly effective (and the lowest tier is cheap on knowledge).

Sounds like I should invest in some turret tech, lol!  I'll try that.

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But, I'd still recommend the non-expansion part of the prereleases given your quandary here.

Ah, OK.  I gather I can download & install them now and they won't "confuse" my Steam installation.  I noticed a thread saying the pre-releases would appear to disable Steamworks, but I could re-enable it by adding a parameter to the .exe's properties file.

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I personally tend to leave the mk1 version of all my ships on FRD mode at my home planet.
Makes sense.  But how about all your other planets?  Do you just defend those with turrets, and mass your Mk2 and Mk3 ships in one attack fleet?  I've been trying to defend every planet with ships, and I guess there just aren't enough ships for that.

Offline carlosjuero

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #9 on: January 06, 2010, 01:40:32 am »
Cool.  I'll take a closer look at your posts about the pre-releases.  But if the official expansion is coming within a week, I might just wait, as I'm already having ridiculous amounts of fun with the current version.  We'll see.  Buying the expansion is certainly a no-brainer!

In any case, I imagine my problem is the old adage: "he who defends everything defends nothing."  I should probably work on focusing on forming an offensive fleet in one location, and then relying on turrets plus some mobile defenders to cover my backfield.  Maybe I'm not getting the most out of my turrets?  I've never researched any turret tech.

The main thing to remember is to not open up too many frontiers that need defending. Once you have the exits to a planet secure, pull your defensive fleet to a planet that is on the border of more AI worlds. Don't conquer every world completely, consider leaving some as just research raid targets (keep the worlds bordering your homeworld clear and settled though for a safety barrier).

Pick a path and conquer through that path, fortifying the other paths with a good fortress defense (turrets, force fields over wormholes to your space, engineers in FRD to keep the turrets alive as long as possible [mk ii engineers are great for that]).

Keep your main invasion fleet manned up, consider bringing forward a Mobile Repair Bay w/ space tugs to each front line fortification world, that way you can always pop back, repair and restock.

The way I do it is to first select my starting world as having as few entries/exits as possible, then I conquer any direct connections and settle them - once I start expanding past that I make 'fort' worlds.

With turrets, remember not to place them too close to the wormhole - units are temporarily invulnerable when they exit anyway, place tractors in clusters that can cover the wormhole from a good distance (make sure to research the Tachyon beam turret for those cloaked annoyances), consider researching gravitational turrets for ships that can avoid tractor turrets. I like to put a cluster or two of sniper turrets out of direct range of the wormhole for extra coverage.

The only worlds you should worry about heavy defense (Besides the home world) are the ones that a) have warp gates left in them (leaving them there allows you to 'know' where incursions may start from) and b) worlds that border many AI worlds. If you fortify those worlds with mobile force fields and turrets, then those defenses should give you time to pull back forces to deal with more persistent incursions (as well as build reinforcements if needed). A great thing to research is the Warp Sensor - it will show you which wormhole waves/attacks will come through (doesn't work for cross planets I don't think though - but with those you can usually guess where they are coming from by taking a quick index of what AI worlds are bordering yours).

The fewer fronts you open up, the less stretched your defenses will be.

Offline x4000

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #10 on: January 06, 2010, 01:47:47 am »
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Oh, no turret tech?  That is probably a big part of it, then -- even the mark II turrets of basic and mlrs are about twice as effective as their lower-level counterparts.  Laser turrets are also really popular, and highly effective (and the lowest tier is cheap on knowledge).

Sounds like I should invest in some turret tech, lol!  I'll try that.

It definitely can help.  Remember: turrets are better than their counterpart fleet ships in pretty much every way except one: they are completely immobile (well, and also more expensive).  But, they have kick-butt range and very good attack power, etc.  I wouldn't go with a 100% turret defense, because often you need ships to chase down stragglers, but the turrets can make up easily 75% of your defenses on most planets.

I tend to have turrets as my primary line of defense on all my border (and other key) planets, and then have a smallish "defensive fleet" that I move around in FRD mode as waves come in.  Assuming my planets are not too spread out, and a given wave is not too huge, that will generally handle it.  Then my larger offensive fleet goes out the rest of the time and does its business -- unless it needs to be recalled for defense, which happens more or less frequently depending on the game.

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But, I'd still recommend the non-expansion part of the prereleases given your quandary here.

Ah, OK.  I gather I can download & install them now and they won't "confuse" my Steam installation.  I noticed a thread saying the pre-releases would appear to disable Steamworks, but I could re-enable it by adding a parameter to the .exe's properties file.

Yep, no issues with that, although you do have to add that one command line parameter.  The FAQ in the prerelease thread has the relevant notes, it is quite easy.

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I personally tend to leave the mk1 version of all my ships on FRD mode at my home planet.
Makes sense.  But how about all your other planets?  Do you just defend those with turrets, and mass your Mk2 and Mk3 ships in one attack fleet?  I've been trying to defend every planet with ships, and I guess there just aren't enough ships for that.

Generally not, no.  The other nice thing to try to do is take planets that protect one another -- so, if there is a chain of three planets, and they are good and resource-bearing, take all three and then just defend the end one.  If ships slip through, you'll have to clean up that on the interior planets, but otherwise those are at no risk.  Also, if you're worried about it, you can put turrets at key junction points (like wormholes) to catch any such stragglers.  Main thing is to have a smaller fleet standing by, waiting to do something if you decide that is needed, rather than to have huge standing fleets all over the place.  When you have more turrets in place, too, that will give you a lot more security than you have now.

Also, I should note that for most small incursions (special forces and the like), turrets can usually clean those up 100% on their own.  So mainly the fleet ships that are mobile would be for waves.  So then if you can do gate-raids to keep the number of hostile wormholes (W on the galaxy map, if I recall) to just a planet or two, then you can mass your defenses there with some confidence except when it comes to cross-planet attacks.  But, you were really having way more CPAs than you should have.  A new prerelease will be out within an hour with the latest CPA tweaks, you might appreciate those. ;)
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Offline x4000

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #11 on: January 06, 2010, 01:51:06 am »
The main thing to remember is to not open up too many frontiers that need defending. Once you have the exits to a planet secure, pull your defensive fleet to a planet that is on the border of more AI worlds. Don't conquer every world completely, consider leaving some as just research raid targets (keep the worlds bordering your homeworld clear and settled though for a safety barrier).

Pick a path and conquer through that path, fortifying the other paths with a good fortress defense (turrets, force fields over wormholes to your space, engineers in FRD to keep the turrets alive as long as possible [mk ii engineers are great for that]).

That's also good advice.  Often if I capture an ARS at some really far-off planet, I'll just capture it and then abandon the planet once I have the knowledge off of it (unless I particularly need the resources and feel like I can defend it).  Keeping a smaller core base of operations, with a minimum surface area, is definitely a good thing.  Those would most equate to "walls" in other RTS games, I'd say.  Those and tractor beams.
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Offline Lancefighter

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #12 on: January 06, 2010, 01:58:55 am »
indeed, minimising the attack surface of your systems is a good way to protect them - i once went an entire game only suffering attacks because of a backdoor-hacker type AI on my home planet. Each other planet I made sure to destroy the warp gates near it ASAP. It really is nice to be able to concentrate defenses on a single, known point.
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Offline Harry

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #13 on: January 06, 2010, 02:09:39 am »
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The only worlds you should worry about heavy defense (Besides the home world) are the ones that a) have warp gates left in them (leaving them there allows you to 'know' where incursions may start from) and b) worlds that border many AI worlds.
Thanks for all your suggestions.  Hmm, it seems I always have several worlds bordering several AI worlds, as most paths have branches, and the branches have branches.  But maybe I'm being too worrisome about "keeping" every system I own -- I seem to do OK with metal/crystal, and obviously some worlds we conquer just so we can capture the Adv Research or Adv Factory, not for resources.  So maybe I should loosen up about abandoing some worlds to their fate.

In any case, my problem hasn't been warp gates; I've never had a problem fending off warp-gate raids, and usually my turrets do handles those.  My problem has been the massive cross-planet attacks.

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once I start expanding past that I make 'fort' worlds.
Hmm, I see -- you have a "starting" empire of 3-5 worlds, then just cherry-pick systems to "conquer" after that, plus do raids?

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Remember: turrets are better than their counterpart fleet ships in pretty much every way except one: they are completely immobile


I didn't realize this.  My basic and MLRS MK1 turrets seem to fire very slowly, but maybe I don't pay enough attention to what they're doing.  They do often kill small warp-gate raids with the help of tractors.  In fact, I don't have any problem containing warp-gate raids; it's the massive 700 ship CPAs that kill me.  If the prereleases have tweaked that, I'm going to run and download them tomorrow.  :)

Offline x4000

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Re: Do you use mobile ships on defense?
« Reply #14 on: January 06, 2010, 03:04:37 am »
The latest prerelease with a bunch of CPA adjustments:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,2918.msg18200.html#msg18200

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Hmm, I see -- you have a "starting" empire of 3-5 worlds, then just cherry-pick systems to "conquer" after that, plus do raids?

That's pretty much what I do, myself.  Although, I tend to collect more like 8-10 planets in kind of a "strand with clumps" pattern, with then cherry picking after that.
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