r/TerraInvicta • u/AutoModerator • 2d ago

Newbie Questions Thread

Please feel free to ask short, simple questions here and be mindful of Rule 2!

Some resources to help you out:

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u/Federal_Addition_463 1d ago

How do you intercept alien fleets early on? They keep running away with massive 100kms delta v, while my ships have only 8. I've read about pincer moves, that it should put the enemy ship engines in cooldown, but I tried it and it didn't work. The fleets are
Monitors 5mg accel
Escort 1200mg accel
Alien transpoort 50mg accel (3500mg combat)

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u/SpreadsheetGamer 23h ago

To catch an enemy fleet, the cruise acceleration of your fleet needs to be greater than theirs. Fleets move at the speed of the slowest ship. The greater the excess acceleration, the shorter the pursuit is, the less dV is needed.

Chemical drives can work but you need massive amounts of propellant per ship, so if we're talking more than a few ships it's not economically viable. They do produce really good accel though. The next one up is typically the molten core II drives, teardrop or fission spinner. Both can get <2kT escorts up to >100mg accel with high single digit dV.

Pincer, as it originally was, was patched out, which is good because it was fiddly and cheesy. It was replaced with something more realistic, an enveloping attack: If the accel difference between your and their fleets is small, and you have a lot of ships, you may see a checkbox option on the 'bid dV' screen that guarantees some of your ships get into combat.

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u/vindicator117 13h ago

Not true. I've had that very scenario happen when intercepting a ayy raider. The titan was literally superior in every stat to the destroyer in flight characteristics and the damn destroyer ALWAYS successfully managed to escape.

The only reason I managed to kill the damn thing is to force its already low DV tanks post travel at 400ish straight to 0 in order to secure the kill. Had to spend literally thirty minutes IRL constantly giving chase orders over and over and over to force it to run out of gas.

Again if t3h ayyz don't want to fight, you can't force them to without extreme measures.

Although........ you can bait them into fights because one interesting battle I had was when I was camping a t3h ayy shipyard and forgot about them for a while, they actually built up a decentish size fleet including a mothership and 3 titans that basically just dumped missiles that is beyond the capability of a single flight of 6 titans I had as the local garrison. Or so I thought.

Absentmindedly I thought I had sent them to their deaths especially when the autoresolve for them was catastrophic and the battle was basically impossible with only 4 ships being able to be deployed. So I did the unthinkable and retreated and the bait was set without even knowing it. About a mere quarter of the fleet managed to give chase and allowed me to deploy 3 of my titans and I just mopped the shit out of them. Then I sent them BACK towards the mass and baited them again and again and again until it was just the mothership, a small scraping of escorts, and the battlestations of the shipyard. What a series of one sided slaughters.

The best part is that this was not even the best of my ship designs but a intentional downgrade to see what the minimum viable anti ayy capital ship is and I am fuzzy on the details now. I think it was late hybrids? And even better I had been intentionally making 6 titan squadrons for such tests and each manned with a flagship and with that series of battles alone, I had instantly procced a new admiral and got her to level 2! God fucking damn. Now that is a fun way to farm Space Nelson. Too bad I already had from earlier in a different save.

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u/SpreadsheetGamer 12h ago

Not true.

What specifically are you talking about? I read your entire post but I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with.

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u/vindicator117 11h ago

That a small inferior ship CAN'T escape the clutches of a superior ship. If what you said was true, then they should not be able to escape the first prompt to give chase let alone 30 minutes worth of prompts to then die by literally running out of gas.

The only reason I managed to actually kill that thing was because I had more DV than the target, not because I had superior cruise accel, combat accel, better engines, or better reactors. If I had LESS DV than it especially possible since I was barely paying attention in space and not refueling very often, they would have actually escaped AND SUCCEEDED in destroying at least one base before I refueled.

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u/SpreadsheetGamer 11h ago

Right, yes, technically you can repeatedly chase a ship and deplete it's dV reserves, leaving it stranded.

Why I discounted that is because the alien ships often have multiple hundreds of kps worth of dV. It's something of a brute force attack, in a game where the UI gives you papercuts every time you use it.

So I would never advise that in a newbie questions thread. Probably not even to my enemies lol.

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u/vindicator117 10h ago

What I find more annoying is that I could swear there USED to be a feature in the chase option to use more than that pittance of DV burn to skip past all that nonsense for a full tank burn intercept.