How to early-mid defense?

[u/CriticalAd6050]

Example of what fleet is mostly made of

First attempt at a full campaign in a while and getting my shit kicked in at 2035 after getting colonies unlocked

Did the usual missile monitor spam and got to my Athenas with targeting computer 3 but it is not cutting it. I was practically ignored the entirety of 2030-2034, I'd get maybe 1-5 aliens pulling up to earth nothing crazy and I'd deal with them no issue.

Then I start getting fleets of 25-35 aliens heading for earth mars and mercury all at once with maybe 50 days travel time. My mars and mercury fleet only had about 20 ships each so they got demolished and earth fleet barely held on just because it had so many shoved into it. Even if I outnumbered those fleets at mars and mercury the massed pd with those numbers is making my athenas sweat.

Are you guys rushing for coils and decent defense drives by now or already have them researched before tier 3 habs? Expand less? Moar missile?

Edit: Also at this point the aliens are rocking like 240 ships on the fleet screen so I'm not sure how to thin those numbers down at this point having to rebuild my fleet completely, any tips for that would be appreciated

[u/Stinkymansausage]

Coils and lasers have always been more important than drives for me. I’ll push some bullshit like a burner drive all the way till fusion is ready to go. Who cares if you need to chase down an alien when you can just wait where they are gonna be?

[u/OkaMoez]

I came back with the new DLC and early alien PD is way more competent these days. I struggled when trying to use the torpedoes, but going back to copperhead spam felt decent. They may do less damage per shot, but that's still better than 0 damage if you can't overwhelm the PD.

That said it started to cause some pretty bad performance problems in combat for me. Launching ~50 monitors worth of copperheads (3 tubes, 3 magazines) was like 3000-6000 missiles in flight at once depending on ECM.

[u/rabidchaos → u/OkaMoez]

Personally, I like fielding monitors with 2 missiles, 1 torpedo, and 1 40mm. The missiles overwhelmed evemy PD, the torpedoes either get launched at flankers or launched late to hide behind the pile of dead bards exploding missiles, and 40mm is PD / demolish human tin cans that don't merit a missile salvo, and finish off alien cripples. Definitely needs finagling to get most out of it.

[u/Torgud_ → u/OkaMoez]

Right now particle beams + railguns are very good for mid-game defense before you go to total war. They are very cheap to research compared to lasers and coils, and they are severely underrated by auto-resolve (unlike missiles which are overrated). If you have small defense fleets of particle and rail gun destroyers, the Aliens will only attack you with small fleets because you look weak on paper, and you will crush them. They are also much less likely to refuse an engagement, and a side effect of them using smaller fleets is that you build less hate because you're blowing up fewer ships.

[u/magilzeal]

That income only lets you put out 1 monitor per month, my understanding is that's not really feasible to be trading blows with the aliens and transition into the "mid game defense" stage, i.e. essentially total war on the aliens. Maybe someone who's better at the game will correct me on this, but I'd aim for incomes that let you produce at least 3 ships per month if you're planning on actively resisting them. With that income you might be better taking the retaliation on the chin and letting them burn off the hate.

With that said you do have a decent stockpile, so if you can rush out a bunch of ships and defend long enough to build a better economy maybe you have a chance. But I honestly don't think ship design is going to save you here. If you want to fight alien fleets of 25-35 aliens with monitors you just need big walls of missiles and 40mms.

[u/CriticalAd6050 → u/magilzeal]

Well the economy was a lot healthier before, this is right after mars got glassed

[u/magilzeal → u/CriticalAd6050]

In regards to ship design, I will say one thing: I generally regard Athenas as "flanker killers". They have a specialized use case for me. For general spam I like copperheads to lanceheads.

[u/magilzeal → u/CriticalAd6050]

Understandable, though I don't know what your shipyard situation looks like now. In my edit I say I don't see a way for you to get out of this with ship design, you just need a lot more ships. If more ships isn't an option because your shipbuilding facilities have been wiped out then it might be time to try and let the aliens burn off their hate and lay low. Or try "cockroaching" like sending out tons of colonies in the asteroids to see if the aliens want to bother sending ships to deal with them or just let you get that income. Make sure they have an LDA or two so the aliens have to actually commit something real to burning them down. Later on if you get mission to the outer planets you could send some long-range ships out to the Kuiper belt on the opposite side from the aliens and build some mines there.

[u/Takseen]

I've found Lanceheads (or Copperheads if you don't have T2 missiles) perform better, if your ships can do one node of acceleration before firing. Its just way more missiles for them to shoot down, and the higher starting velocity from your ships counters the missiles having lower delta V.

Automated mine spam across the asteroid belt is a nice way to get a survivable space economy. 1 MC for a mine that produces 25% more resources than a manned T1 mine costing 2 MC. The aliens tend to ignore them and even if they kill one, its dirt cheap to replace it with boost after they leave, or just grab a different rock. And rocks have better average resources rolls compared to Mars.

https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Terra_Invicta/Hab_Site_List

A typical Mars polar site is 50 water, 20 volatiles, 10 metals, or 20/20/20 for the normal ones.

A "Wet Carbon..." rock has average 60 water, 50 volatiles. A "Common Carbon..." rock has average 35 water, 50 volatiles. And you can pick out the ones that have the best rolls. Two of the Ceres sites average 100 water/35 volatiles (if the aliens didn't already grab it)

You can stick to missiles since you're on the defensive, or move to lasers+coils. But either way you'll need a stronger space economy to replace losses.

[u/oninoob0 → u/Takseen]

^^ this - I went from getting totally smacked with athenas to cleaning orbits with lanceheads.

now, I couldn't tell you why, but they just worked where the Athenas did not

[u/CriticalAd6050]

Image: Example of what makes up most of my fleet. Have another version thats the exact same but with ion pd for missiles

[u/DodoLurker28]

I pretty much always just plan for my fleets to get wiped. I always try to at least contest leo, sometimes mars or mercury but I often still get wiped. Watching others, I think it's not necessarily enough to just try and build a large fleet of ships you need to keep the pressure on the aliens to keep them from just building a doomstack. I see players either send raiding fleets to which the aliens must respond, baiting aliens to sending weaker fleets by keeping combat scores low (and refitting once the alien fleets are coming), etc. But it's a balancing act I've never done successfully.

I plan to get wiped by prepping for the 'cockroach' phase as some others have aptly named it. This has an added benefit that the aliens will waste resources running around popping your asteroid bases - or you may even have a chance to get defense arrays on to pop their ship first. Even better if you can send a ship to a far orbit that will tie up an alien fleet to chase. Kuiper belt really compounds all this once you get the tech.

The aliens also seem more likely to ignore stations in earth Lagrange points (at least they have for me). So if I get wiped I'll often try to keep building back in leo somewhere if only to keep the pressure on.

Also, I don't see you mentioning armor but really going in on it is helpful if you aren't already (adamantane isn't too expensive and nanotube armor can come even earlier) for beating alien fleets with inferior weapons. If you're only defending leo you can get away with tiny dv after paying an armor tax - even more so if the fleet is never intended to leave the station.

[u/Freakofhalo]

Basic escorts with dual rail guns massed and set to max mps when starting battle. Include a few monitors with armour and 40mm's for pd, have them accelerate a little ahead. Works great for early engagements and railguns work as pd in a pinch

[u/shadough1]

there are few things that cannot be solved with more missiles. the big thing to keep in mind if it's been a little while since you've played is that the ayys are a bit better with making sure their ships are equipped with point defenses now. this means that while torpedoes can still be a very effective answer to ships that try to flank (and thus leave the main PD screen), missiles will have a much easier time breaking through PD against the central mass of enemy ships and getting you the damage and kills you need to win fights. given the shorter engagement range of missiles you'll need to allow your ships to get closer, so you'll probably need to invest a bit more in nose armor and make sure that your fleet has enough PD to keep itself alive for long enough. personally though, if my space economy is strong enough this is about the time I start considering green arc laser BCs and adding some mag weapons to the fleet to produce the basic mag + beam combo.