Protecting Planets

[toy4x4]

How do you protect your planets? Weapons Platforms, Satellites?

[Tarkin]

Hello,

I am glad you brought up this subject. I have had mixed results with satillites. I am as green as they get when it comes to SE IV. Although I was fairly good at SE III.

In the early part of the game [When I'm still around:-)] I will build sats with missles for an early defence for my colonies. Sometimes they will do quite well against the enemy. Other times it is as if they are not even there [I play Strategic only BTW]

I have no experience with Weapon Platforms as of yet.

[Will]

To protect planets, go beyond the planets themselves.

The best defense in my experience is an agressive offense and several layers of defensive measures. Make a few large attack fleets (10-20 ships) and raid enemy targets. Put mines on all the warps to your systems, including between your own systems. Station fighter Groups/satellite Groups over warps along with mines. If enemy ships aren't destroyed by the mines, they probably will be by satellites/fighters. Have fighter Groups on patrol as well, along with a few capital ships. Have a "sensor buoy" satellite in every system (Large sat., 1-comp,1-tachyon_sensor,1-LR_scanner,1-shield,1-ecm). Have satellites in orbit of planets armed with missiles and Point-Defense. Use weapon platforms that are all shields (damage absorbers) and with weapons. Have some fighters on the planet as well, and it would be a good idea to keep some troops too.

Now, with all this, it would take a while to put up all defenses, but they make it a lot more difficult to penetrate into your space. Basically you will want to use standard fleets for defense of outer areas and "automated" defenses for your inner colonies/shipyards.

[AJC]

Mines are great for early defense - especially for colonies out on your frontier.

Add weapon platforms with PD, seekers and a beam weapon or two.

This will usually help to keep early colonies alive until you can mount a more potent defense

[capnq]

I don't have much experience to go on yet, but I personally use a mix of Weapon Platforms and Satellites. WPs are bigger than sats at the same tech level, and don't have to be launched after they're built. OTOH, sats can be placed at warp points and don't run into the planetary cargo space limits that WPs do. I like mines, too, but have only used them effectively in one game so far. That same game was the only time I've built fighters, but they never actually saw combat.

(My biggest problem with SE4 is that Malfador keeps releasing patches faster than I can finish games. I've decided not to install Patch 4 and start a new game until I at least find the Last race I haven't made contact with in my current game.)


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Cap'n Q

[Baron Munchausen]

I've discovered something about how sats and WPs can work together, quite by accident. The usual way to take out a well-defended planet without losing a lot of ships is to stand-off and fire swarms of missiles until the WPs are destroyed, then you can move in and deal with the sats without being pasted by Massive-mount direct-fire weapons. Well, I have modded my config files, and I recently ran into a planet with lots of satellites containing POINT-DEFENCE. This created a problem for my waves of missiles. The range of the PDC was enough to cover the planet no matter which direction I sent the missiles from, but missiles can NOT target satellites! If I went in close enough to target the sats with other weapons, I'd be exposed to the high-powered ground-based weapons with much greater range than my ship-based weapons. In this case, there were not enough PDCs on the sats to completely overcome my missiles, and I eventually destroyed the WPs and closed in to finish off the planet. But if there had been more -- like sats had been deliberately filled with PDC instead of just some added as secondary weapons -- things could have been very different. I think this is the clue to a very powerful defense strategy. Build satellites full of PDC and only a few with standard beam weapons and/or missiles. Put your heavy weapons on the planet and your anti-missile defenses in orbit. If you have the time and resources to build this up it could be a deadly combination.

[Windborne]

Satellites and weapon platforms are deffinitely a must for your major planets, but for major systems the best defense is fighter Groups, huge fighter Groups.

Fighter fleets don't cost much to maintain and can move at decent speeds between planets to meet the enemy fleet wherever it hits your system, especially useful when an opponent is opening new (undefended)warp points into the heart of your empire.

[This message has been edited by Windborne (edited 10 March 2001).]

[pathfinder]

hmmm, I use all those assets. Fighters, wp's (some with PD) and sats (some with pd, some missile and some gun, especially PP sats).

[Marty Ward]

Mines are also a good planet defense. you can build them by the 1000's and only deploy them when needed. They even take up less space than fighters do.

[Windborne]

I never could find a spot in the rulebook that said whether mines exploded only for enemy ships so i've been loath to place them around my planets or warp points I might wish to use.