sun1404 wrote:
CSCs only raid Ares convoys passing the system they are in. You can see Polars with defense wings in systems without CSCs, and there were never any CW strike forces sent to destroy them. In fact, there never were any strike forces except the player, which I think is not a case one would describe as 'frequent'.
That's the limitations of the current build of the game. There are also no scouting patrols in game, yet they clearly exist given the fact that the CSC can detect the incoming Ares squadrons and capital ships when assigning the player a mission.
Also, the CW have unlimited fuel, replenished with time. The Ares have the advantage of rich resources, so there's no reason to believe they cannot fuel a Phobos for long range missions. You don't need all 25000 tons of fuel anyway. A few hundreds are more than enough.
To load up a Phobos for a long range mission, you have to get the fuel to a shipyard first. This is done through the Ares supply lines, which are vulnerable. In addition, though the Ares are a very resource - rich faction, they do not have infinite supplies, and must allocate them effectively. Scheduling some polars to transport that fuel means they can't be doing something else, like supplying raw materials to build ships or performing routine resupply to the outer outposts. Setting everything up to build up fuel for a mission like this is certain to be noticed, and can be prepared for a long time in advance.
If it fights. The Phobos is quick enough to do evasive maneuvers for long range KSC cannons. If the Britannias comes close, they take the risk of APA or lightning turret fires.
A Phobos cannot reliably dodge a KSC. Even a playership can't do so consistently. The projectiles are simply too fast and fired too quickly. Furthermore, the difficulty of evading fire goes up exponentially as the number of directions it is coming from increases. A Britannia can dodge cannon fire from a single Phobos, but that Phobos cannot evade the return fire of five Britannias all striking from different angles, especially if it's trying to line up return fire at the same time.
The delay is negligible. Five APA shots are not enough time for any tactical actions.
Gating in, seeing the Phobos waiting there, and gating out can be done faster than even one shot can be fired. In addition, ships directly inside the stargate are safe from harm. There's no merit to your tactic here, it simply won't work.
A ship can barely gate in before an APA recharges. As I noted, any ships that survives will be picked off by the turrets. At point blank the turrets are not that easy to avoid. You can get at least half the wing with APA. The rest can be destroyed at the next stargate.
You assume ships blindly follow through the stargate, immediately spread out, and wait to be killed. You cannot claim the Ares are supremely competent villain - sues immune to the fundamental problems of logistics yet assume the Commonwealth Fleet, who have been fighting them for years, lack any sort of basic common sense.
The mission send you to destroy a commune inside the system with the CSC. They may be able to communicate across system, but this does not show they scout outside the system.
What's stopping them from doing so? We have significant evidence stating that they can, and none stating that they can't.
The ROMs working isn't explained, but considering one can use a system map ROM to explore Huaramarca, I'd say the ROM doesn't just update you with a map, but more like attempt a rough scanning of the system.
Read the item descriptions, that's not correct.
Even if they just update your map with a pre-made one, knowing where a permanent station is and knowing where a fleet is gathering is not the same.
Granted, but their ability to detect the 'unknown hostiles' all of which take less time to prepare than your ideal attack force, implies that they would have no trouble doing so.
The Ares have Deimoses, which have quicker regen shields, and I did mention fighter wings which can absorb some damage.
The ones in game, including those on missions, lack fighter squadrons escorting them. They're designed to operate alone, and the logistical difficulties of keeping fighters larger than a Sandstorm fueled across even system - wide distances shows why.
Also, hit-and-run tactics are not exactly sustained engagements.
That is not what I described. Gunships that get damaged can pull back while others continue the engagement.
The assault squad would need to also regain any damage before going in for another hit. Their shields are about the same strength.
Multiple attackers, one defender. The gunships aren't likely to incur much damage in the attack, given their ability to evade fire, and even if one were forced to retreat, there would be several more continuing the fight and continuing to wear down the capital ship's armor.
Out ranging the turrets means sacrificing accuracy.
It really doesn't. Any player who's completed the game knows that it is not only possible but essential to hit targets accurately from distances exceeding 80ls.
Fighter wings can close in and force the squad to retaliate or retreat, while the bigger ships follow in and deal with anything left.
The fastest Ares fighters aren't that much faster than a Britannia, and those would be Sandstorms, which can be quickly and easily destroyed with missiles. Other fighters would need to break formation to engage, and could thus be either avoided or broken off and engaged separately depending on their persistence.
The KSCs doesn't outrange the turrets by much anyway.
They outrange them significantly. I've tested it myself.
There never was any evidence that a shipyard can only build one kind of ships. You can see mixed wings of Sandstorms, Tundras, and Chasms at any Ares Communes and Shipyards.
One type of special ship appears to be Ares doctrine. Sandstorms and tundras are ubiquitous, but each Ares shipyard has either a pair of Deimos's, one Phobos, or several Chasms. They are capable of building multiple kinds of ships, but appear to favor maintaining only kind at a time.
The Chasms, if I remember correctly, leads the assault of Point Juno, meaning the Ares have methods to get the ships faraway.
There are two Communes right in the system.
The Tundras only have the risk of hitting friendlies in the case of skirmishes. Long range attack squads can be easily targeted and attacked without the risk of hitting friendlies.
Tundras lack the maneuverability and projectile speed to effectively fight at long range against anything faster than a CSC or Aquila.
The fleet needs not to be completely invulnerable. Just indestructible by mere assault squads.
That is what invulnerable implies in this instance. Invulnerable to anything the Fleet has.
You don't see gathered fleets destroyed by mere strike forces in modern warfare, do you?
Actually, many countries use precisely that strategy as their naval doctrine. How well it would work in practice is as of yet unknown, but the major counter developed thus far appears to be the use of attack helicopters, which, if we are treating the Centurions and Britannias as gunboats, has no analogue in the Transcendence universe.
Not in wars between comparable powers, at least.
The fight between the Fleet and the Ares is quite clearly asymmetrical warfare. If every Ares ship in a late system was placed next to the CSC, the CSC would be destroyed. The CSCs seen in game are not, in fact, destroyed, implying that direct, symmetrical battle is not occurring. Further evidence of this is the likely role of the Aquila cruiser. Equipped with an AOE based launcher and two KSCs(two hardpoints are present but not used, and a 500mw reactor is enough to supply the 460mw required to load the ship out with four KSCs, so it is unclear whether they typically field two or four turrets), it is clearly not designed for fighting the Deimos or Phobos directly, as many seem to assume. Rather, it is designed perfectly to quickly destroy patrols of lighter ships, enabling the Fleet's CSCs to better remain undetected. The Commonwealth Fleet lacks both the production capabilities and the personnel required to fight the Ares in massive fleet battles, and its leadership is smart enough to be aware of this. Therefore, they have built their naval doctrine on the basis of stealth, versatility, and agility.
The coordination problem is unlikely in the scenario of space fleets. Humans today have the ability to communicate across the Earth, even a conference holding hundreds are possible. In space it's even easier to transmit signals.
Coordination not only requires short range tactical information, but also logistical coordination across systems. In addition, distances in Transcendence are shown on an exponential scale. Communicating across a system is shown to be difficult, given the fact that the player cannot contact their autons if they are too far away.
The player mission completes at vision contact, because that's the last thing the player need to do at the site. They then need to return to the CSC to really complete the mission.
You contradicted yourself.
The mission complete indicator shows that the information has been relayed. The player must return to the CSC to claim the reward(Fleet EXP), but the mission is completed whether or not they do so.
Not to mention this is an in-system mission, whereas the Ares scoutings are not. Intersystem communications are not possible, or rare at best, considering the canon story and gameplay.
Intersystem communications are rare for factions that aren't the Fleet. Decker coordinates the Fleet across their entire operational territory, and an operation involving 4 CSCs is mentioned in passing, which would not be possible without an extreme degree of competence in that area.
They always need a messenger ship.
Carriers tend to have a lot of those.
We've stick mostly to gameplay for informations about how things are in this discussion. Using the 'that's just how it's programmed' argument isn't really reasonable.
Oh? Korolov and the Fleet both show the ability to detect targets across long range despite no scouting patrols appearing in game on their behalf. Some things must be assumed to exist without being shown due to conservation of detail, or many things cease to make any sense.
If you want to make it realistic and not stick to what we see in-game, it's also unreasonable that the APA, a siege weapon, or any capital ship weapons, would have a shorter range than a skirmish weapon like the KSC.
They don't, but they are more difficult to hit with due to the slower projectile speed, and the ships fielding them are less able to aim them. The weapons are designed for fighting CSCs and Aquilas, not gunships.
It's also unreasonable that any capital ships, even a flagship like the Phobos,
The Phobos isn't a flagship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagship
It is stated to be a dreadnought, it acts like a battlecruiser, but it is not by any definition a flagship. The only flagships present in game are the Terra, the Kronosaurus, and possibly the ICS, depending on how the Iocrym work.
would be unequipped with any point defense technologies.
I'm assuming you mean anti - missile defense. The lightning turrets are their point defense against ships. They lack missile defense, but those are rare and expensive in Transcendence. Even the Commonwealth, which builds the only two missile defense systems in the game, only places one on their largest and most expensive warship.
Or that a pilgrim like the player should be accepted into the fleet at any rank higher than privateer.
The Commonwealth Fleet has long since lost at least some of its military discipline, given the fact that the Rogue Fleet exists and the hospital ships are taking donations from passers by. In addition, in a world where the gods are inarguably and actively capable of intervening directly through attacks capable of instantly destroying all but the most powerful and well shielded warships, I'd imagine pilgrims, or at least the ones that survive long enough to reach Ares territory, are treated somewhat differently in Transcendence than they are in real life. Furthermore, the nature of killing, fighting, and warfare are all very different in Transcendence than in the modern world. Housing complexes feature state of the art weaponry(for their section of space, at least, as implied by the flavor text in Rigel), cargo ships have turrets capable of destroying pirate gunships in a matter of seconds, and the Corporate Hierarchy not only posess a fleet of cruisers capable of destroying virtually any warship, but an entire group of mercenaries equipped with warships and armament rivaling those of the military. The division between civillians and the government is less like that of the 21st century USA, and more like that of the 19th Century USA.
There's also the fact that the player must have membership in the militia(or the I.D. of someone who did) to dock with one of their ships, but that's the boring explanation.
That's not how the mission is set up. The target is a single commune and the orders are phrased in a way that implies the mission Decker called for is an attack on that specific commune.
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The target is a single commune because it's not really a good idea to order a lone ship to destroy a whole lot of communes as a mission.
Poor phrasing, my fault.
What I meant was they order you to target a specific commune, not just any commune in the system.
The orders are phrased in a way that implies the mission the CSCs captain called for is an attack on that specific commune. It implies nothing about what Decker said.
CSC Captain wrote:This mission is straight from Admiral Decker himself.
