Mr. Blitz's Tribe Patchouli challenge

Probably mis-spelled ‘Pachouli’. But that was one very cool challenge.

In my victory over it I got lucky, your ‘carrier’ cruiser that had the nasty rocket fighter swarm escort decided to go off somewhere inneffective for most of the battle. My fighters managed to wipe everything else besides it out, and I think I won on percentages rather than actually winning - there was no way I could have taken that thing out with my remaining fleet.

My question though is how you managed to get your cruisers for the most part to keep a very decent stand-off range. I suspect you set the engagement range artificially high?

Oops… maybe that one cruiser … the 1 with fighter escort …was off doing something it shouldn’t have been doing.

As for the rest of the cruisers, they’re set to fight at pretty much 400-600 meters over their main weapons’ maximum firing range. So, If I’ve got multiple warhead missiles, i’ll set the maximum engagement ranges for 1600+ over the 1160 max range of the missile launchers. If it’s proton beams, i’ll set the range to 1200 or so.

If it’s a cruiser with cruiser lasers, i’ll set the range to 100.

I give them all keep moving orders, and haven’t experimented with formations or escorts - well, mostly no escorts beyond fighters escorting bigger ships.

Anyway, maybe the order for the ‘cruiser with fighter escort’ is at least a bit off, in the patchouli challenge. It sounds like that lone cruiser should be set to close at 100 meters, to explode and free its fighter escort; and instead that cruiser is wandering off randomly.

It seems that this game might need to differentiate between “advance in formation” and “fight in formation”. These exploding sacrificial carriers to release fighters shouldn’t really be necessary, and instead the fighters should be able to use “advance in formation”.

iiiinteresting, I’ll have to experiment with longer engangement ranges and fast ships too.

Lately, I’ve been finding that to get really concentrated fire, the ‘keep moving’ order can be removed, then all of the ships set to engage at their weapons’ max engagement ranges. Once that range is reached, the entire friendly formation gets concentrated as all of the ships stop on a line. Being so tightly packed, it gives them more firepower as a group, than is typically gotten from a bunch of ships set to keep moving at long range engagement settings.

For example, take a group of multi warhead missile cruisers and set them to engage at 1160, or just 20 or 30 meters less. Have ships with proton beams engage at 700, etc.

If lined up really tightly to begin with, ships of a given frigate or cruiser class will move across the map and; by the time they get to combat, the mass of them congeal once again, and put out some splendid fireworks.

I’ve been having some success with this by employing plasma and/or rockets, too.

This tactic is all about putting the most outgoing firepower into the smallest platform (area), and keeping it alive longer than the other side.