Galaxy Combat / Structures / Loot

[SirEmi]

The last three days I've been very busy with the galaxy structures combat. It's a whole new area of combat, with fighters / missiles and station weapons, and it's finally complete now.

I am now writing a new guide page dedicated to the galaxy structures and galaxy combat. I will post the link later today.

A few tips and tricks on how galaxy combat works:

- When you attack a structure, the space station will enter combat. It will grant the fleets in orbit the bonuses selected in the station maintenance area.
- You can scan a structure prior to an attack, if you have the Subspace Scanner technology. The basic chance to discover any info is 10%, modified by each tech level with +5%, and also modified by the enemy cloaking tech by -5%. Scanning takes 10 turns.

- Station combat: the station has weapons, missiles and fighters. The station will fire all available arsenal in the begining of the battle. Depending on how many fleets you attack with, the station will use it's attack on other fleets too. For example, if you attack with 2 fleets of 10 bil HP each, the station will attack the fleets until it exhausts it's attack, in this case if it has a 15 bil attack, it will go for first fleet and do 10 bil damage, then second fleet for the remaining attack. The attacked fleets can not retaliate.

After weapons, if the station has missiles, it will fire them. It will use missiles depending on how much damage the missiles did, so if it has 50 bil missiles with 3 attack each missile, if the missiles did 30 bil damage, then the station used 10 bil missiles. The attacked fleets can not retaliate.

Fighters: Last station resort, they attack for their tech damage, do their damage, but the attacked fleets can retaliate and destroy some of them.

Note: Increasing the tech level will make the fighters and missiles more powerfull.

- Emergency warps, looting, spilled minerals into space. After the station attacks the fleets, normal galaxy fleet combat commences. The attacking fleets go for the defender fleets. When there are no more defender fleets, the attacking fleets will go for the station. If the galaxy fleets have 10 or more fleets, it is possible the station would not be attacked, but a second attack will get to it.

When the station structural integrity is failing, it will try to escape via the emergency warp bubble... provided it has a module installed for this purpose, it will activate it now. The module is destroyed in the process. If it doesn't have the special module, it will be destroyed.

Stations / structures in warp bubble can be redeployed via the system building room, they show up under Undeployed structures. You can deploy them just like building them, however they have all the modules / resources on them. Of course normal building conditions apply, no reavers, or other commander fleets.

After the station is out of the way, the attacking fleets will proceed to loot the mining facility, if there is one. They will capture 10% of the minerals in the cargo holds, and an engineer specialist will transfer 100% of the credits in the facility to the attacking mothership.
70% of the minerals in the cargohold will be spilled into the system space, producing more asteroids.

Note: The way the combat is setup to be more realistic, it is is possible to attack your own structures / fleets. Also, if you find an undefended station and place system fleets of your own then try to attack it, the fleets you placed in system patrol will trun against you and aid the enemy. It has something to do with the sovereign of the system, the station will capture them and trun them on you

I have also noticed some systems contain 2 stations, the second station and mining facility will be placed in warp to be redeployed by the owner, as having 2 stations in a single system makes it confusing when trying to attack them, you could attack one or the other, so we're keeping one station / mining facility per system. Those commanders that will have the structures placed in warp will receive a message with intructions on how to redeploy it from the system building menu. The structures will be intact, all modules / weapons / resources installed.

Guide page with this info and more is in progress, more info on cloaks and stuff... 

 

God Speed commanders! 

[Remfer]

this is great but confusing...can't wait for guide

[Magicat]

After using several hundreds of CP, thousands of turns and Billions of credits to equip a station with Armour, Fighters, Missiles, Cybertronic Computer, Shield Generator and Structural Integrity Scanner, then mining vast resources (using thousands of turns and millions of credits) to get the materials to increase the tech levels, then spending 10 Billion plus credits on 400 million plus fighters and 400 million plus missiles to make it reasonably strong.

3 separate attacks by the same commander, and  in less than 3 minutes all that was left was the message
"Your station in system ******** was not equiped with emergency warp and was destroyed."

It seems that there is no way to reasonably protect a base station and no way to stop someone attacking innumeral times till all the stations resources are exhausted then destroying the station.

Not crying over the losses, it's part of the game. But was an expensive way to learn, in turns, credits and hundreds of CP used.


As a separate comment, anyone can attack a station from anywhere in the ranking with their full mission fleet, there is no counter attack capability.

All you have to do to beat a station is to send ships with minimal attack capability and large HP untill it exhausts its fighters and missiles (btw the station uses it's fighters first and missiles last) then make a separate attack with p-ships and the station is finished. Then you can loot the mining facility and use the credits to replace your losses.

Nice upgrade, but i think i will give it a miss in the next round.

Modified - got the maths wrong on costs first time round. Thanks for spotting it russell 
 

[Russell]

sorry but i dont think you spent 10 trill, cause i dont think i have yet, and my power is 4 times yours

[FOO]

Russell, by using all your turns/cash/cp on developing a station, means that your total fp is affected because all resources are put into research and building, not fleets. Think about the amount of credits that could have been earned if those resources had been used for missions/encounters.

If station building is to be an integral part of the galaxy and game play, it is far out of reach of most players. The costs are way too high and, unless someone spends 3/4 of a round researching all the tech required to make a station defensible before constructing it, it would be a waste of time considering the costs associated with it compared to the limited returns. Not to mention the fact that because there are limited resources available to mine, by the time you are in a position to build, you would be hard pressed to find somewhere worth mining.

Base fleets and missiles need to be linked to your base credit production, so your base can automatically resupply or be set to build more fighters/missiles. That would help make bases more defensible and help to look after themselves so you dont need to be online 24/7 in your system to resupply. This would also mean that more resources would need to be left on station, making them worth plundering.

Building a base as a newb, or at the beginning of a round would be a good way of gaining resources to boost your hp, att etc. But the cost makes it impossible, especially the need for so much cp and turns, let alone the amount of creds.
I think the scaling of turns/cp/credits needs to be changed for the initial start-up research, especially when stations are still only producing a very small income. And those facilities should remain untouchable till the tech tree has been researched enough for defensive abilities and/or production lvls.

[SirEmi]

There are a number of strategies to defend the station better...

- Intall an emergency warp module (saves your station & modules & fighters & missiles, but no the mining facility)
- Install a cl0aking module, or more. (Notice the cloaking tech costs 0.5 of the scanning tech? Only you and your alliance can see a cloaked station, and they have to match the cloak modules with their scanner tech in order to break the cloak and attack)
- Station missiles don't get used unless they do damage, e.g. to use 1 missile, it has to do at least 3 damage, 6 damage if you have T2, 9 damage for T3, etc.
- There is no cap on missiles and fighters on the station, if you have the credits, buy huge missiles / fighters numbers and upgrade your missiles tech, that should give plenty of firepower to the station... should make attackers think twice and scan first 

[FOO]

Yes, that is true Sir E, but in order to get to that sort of tech level, unless you are top 20 or better, the overall cost is way too high. I havnt even tried to figure the amount of turns and stuff to get to the point of being able to successfully defend a station, and I know you can reinforce your system with sytem fleets. It works out cheaper to spend your cash on system fleets, use your turns making creds, and putting cp into useful things like resupply, hp etc.

[Bugboy]

Sir E, what you are saying means that those in the top 10 can afford the tech and missiles/fighters, while those who are below them can't afford the turns and creds, or even dream about having the cp.

[lostedchylde]

IF ONE OF MY ALLIANCE MEMBERS builds a station can i deploy fleets in system to protect it?

                                                                         

[Magicat]

Russel you were right, I must've had a senior moment 

I only supplied the station with: 528,370,886 Missiles and 511,901,226 fighters, costing 7,925,563,290 credits and 5,119,012,260 credits.
Total  13,044,575,550 Credits.

Seems i need a maths lesson lol.

[SirEmi]

IF ONE OF MY ALLIANCE MEMBERS builds a station can i deploy fleets in system to protect it?

Yes, you can build a station and get yout alliance members to deploy fleets in there. You could even set the full 30% fleet support bonus to attack and use power fleets (mines) to give the attacker a nasty surprise

If you manage to get cloak and emergency warp tech, the cloak will protect your station against alts scanning, and the emergency warp will save your missiles / fighters and station. You can also choose to not get fighters / missiles, so you should only use minerals. Now if you manage to mine enough minerals until the station is attacked, you should be able to turn a profit, and not waste any credits at all...

I have a station with 2 cloaking modules and no fleets and it is still mining for around 3 weeks now, got a good stash so far with no attack yet, this will completely hide your structures from all non-friendlies with no anomaly eighter. Anomaly will only be there if you assign fleets to the system with a cloaking device...

The emergency warp is great if you want to build a deathstar station but keep in mind to install another one after you redeploy the station, or have multiple installed, as it is destroyed once it is used.

[SirEmi]

The Guide has been updated with a new step 14, The Galaxy and research /  structures / structures combat info.

http://www.spaceo.net/guide/

God Speed!

[ars68]

I know I'm the oddball here now... but wouldn't it be much much easier, and better, all around, if you reduced the starting cost of a station to a point where anyone can use it?  then should they so choose to defend it and such, then it gets it into the expensive part.

just a bit of guessing here, but it seems this would mean a lot more stations, and thus a lot more targets, and thus a lot more ways of getting the resources to build your own.

right now it's so expensive (I knew it would be even before I left for a while) that you will only have literally a handful of them... not from people not wanting to make one, but simply because it is so expensive they are way out of their budget range.

note: I'm not saying making the deathstar capability cheaper, or even the fighters and missles cheaper, but -just- the station itself (and maybe mining... since that does seem to be the major only reason of even getting it... and since it is lootable)

perhaps then you would see an increase in it's use, not only by small players, but bigger players as well...

[SirEmi]

Yes Ars that was also my idea to make it accessible for the new and old commanders. From my calculations, it only takes 1947 turns to build a space station, or 32.45 hours if you mine with your mothership. Then 1536 turns for the mining facility or 25.5 hours.

That's a total of 58 hours for the station and mining facility, around 2 and a half days of turns. If you manage to get some good tech level and some cloaking modules on the station, you shouldn't need any defence for some time.

Then, the idea was to use the mining amount and not waste any more turns to build the other stations and mining facilities, maybe the mining production will be increased a bit later, I'm just gathering data and observing how it developes for now...

[Dont blame my main]

I made a space station at the very beginning of the round, and found out it is not providable enough for the turns it needs to be build.