So I've been playing for a bit and now that I get ship design and general operations, I've got a quick question... how do combat ships work?
There's tons of different fire control items, and both Gauss cannon and Rail Guns, and lasers and a suite of other electromagnetic weapons... and Missiles, which appear to be completely impenetrable.
What does a ship need to use a specific kind of weapon, and how many of them?
First off for all weapon systems you need an active sensor that can see the target ship/missile. This does not need to be on the same ship or even anywhere near the ship with the weapons mounted. Contacts by active sensors are shared between all ships.
Secondly for beam weapons (which includes every other weapon except missiles and plasma torpedoes) you need a beam firecontrol. You can adjust the range and tracking speed at the expense of increased size.
For missiles and plasma torpedoes you need a missile firecontrol which is designed from the same page as your active sensor. If you want your missile firecontrol range to match up with your active sensor it needs to be 1/3 the size of the active sensor. Also remember missile firecontrol cannot shoot at anything samller than it's resolution (save missiles which require a resolution 1 firecontrol). Also note that missiles that have their target move outside of the range of the firecontrol or if you loose active sensor lock on them will cause the missiles to self-detonate.
Beam weapons are fairly varied.
Lasers - get long ranged fairly fast at larger sizes. Do their damage in a single deep stike to armour so can penetrate weak/medium armour in a single shot. Damage at close range gets fairly high but falls off with range quickly.
Cannonades - space shotguns. Very high damage at point blank ranges and larger sizes, but unlike other weapons there is no way of increasing the range of smaller weapons, you have to use the big guns if you want longer range. Also power hogs. Can't be turreted.
Particle beams - Don't suffer reduction in damage over their range, so best used in ships that try and remain at(or just under) maximum range. Research expensive to increase the range significantly though. Can't be turreted.
Railguns - 4 shots from each weapon. Fast damage falloff and never gets to high damage per shot. Low power requirements compared ot other weapns. Can't be turreted.
Mesons - ignore shields and armour but only do 1 point of damage at any range.
Microwaves - Do heavy damage to shields and ignore armour. Will only cause damage to electronic components, such as sensors/firecontrols. Good if you want to board an enemy ship, so they can't fire on your boarding craft.
Gauss Cannon - Very short range. Can be designed to fire multiple shots. Always does 1 damage. Can be reduced in size for a reduction in chance to hit. No power required. Good as final defensive fire point defence once the number of shots fired has been increased.
For beam weapons mounted directly onto a ship their tracking speed is the higher of the racial tracking speed or the speed of the ship. If you place them into a turret you can specify the desired tracking speed, at the cost of increased size. Your beams will use the lower of the weapon or the beam firecontrols tracking speeds.
All beam weapons aside from gauss cannons also require power. You need to match the power generated by the power plants on the ship to the capacitor rate for the weapons. So if you have a weapon that requires 6 power with a capacitor of 2 then you need your powerplants to provide 2 power.
Fire controls can be linked to multiple weapons and it is often a good idea to have a single firecontrol linked to multiple weapons(turrets with multiple barrels are usually counted as equalling the number of barrels so you may want to assign a firecontrol to each quad turret) The exact balance depends on the weapons purpose. You may only want a single/small number of firecontrols linked to your main weapons as they will usually be shooting at the same/small number of targets. Weapons intended for point defence tend to do better with a higher ratio of firecontrols to weapons as each fire control can only target a single incoming salvo.
Missile launchers are usually best assigned to firecontrols in groups of multiples of 3 +1. This is due to the fact that the NPR's tend to fire salvos of 3 anti-missile missiles at your salvos so using 3n+1 missiles will force an extra salvo to be devoted to shooting them down even if thay have a 100% hit rate.
Lastly you have ECCM modules that counter the enemys ECM. You need to have one for each firecontrol that will be shooting at an ECM'd enemy.
Once a ship is built you need to go into the battle window and link the ECCM's to each fire control and each fire control to it's weapons. Don't have autoassignment enabled if you want your point defence to work properly.
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Topic: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games (Read 2809028 times)