Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Academy » Just Chaff
| Just Chaff |
Fri, 23 January 2004 20:09  |
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 zoid |
 | Ensign |
Messages: 348
Registered: December 2002
Location: Murray, KY - USA | |
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I just read the "Late Game Chaff" thread and didn't find much about chaff there, so here's a new chaff thread.
In the last game I played, my SD partner's first chaff ships emerged as scouts armed with colloidal phasers and the FM engine. I thought it was rather extravagant chaff because I always designed mine as scouts with the QJ5 engine and the xray laser to minimize costs.
In my current game I am playing an SD (watching my previous partner inspired me to try it). I built my typical chaff design, but as I gathered a large BB fleet to defeat the combined fleets of the enemy partnership, I had trouble in the testbeds. From all appearances it looked like my fleet was superior, but I couldn't get my testbed to give me consistent victory for one reason or another. I finally realized two contributing problems:
1) Testbed had max tech. Miniturization made my minimized-cost chaff design unattractive enough so that it failed to perform it's function as decoys. I figured that since nobody in the real game had max tech the testbed was giving me inaccurate results, but beyond that I realized at some point my chaff would be completely ineffective as our technology levels increased.
2) The more immediate problem was that my enemy's missile BB's were equipped with shield sappers. In testbed battles where everything seemed to be going wonderfully (up to a point) it all went to hell when my range 3 beamer BB's got within firing range of the missile ships. I'm rubbing my hands with glee in anticipation of my large stack of beamer nubes finally destroying his troublesome missile BB's, but since his missile ships are armed to the teeth with battle computers, his sappers fire, stripping away the shielding from my BB's. No problem, I've got chaff, the enemy missile ships have been shooting them but there's still plenty left, and in a moment those damned missile BB's are going to be dead, right? Wrong. With no shielding my BB's were more attractive than the chaff, and his missile salvos fired before my beamers ever got to shoot, wiping out the whole stack.
I found that my previous partner was onto something. Sure, building hordes of colloidal phaser-equipped scouts was painfully expensive in theory, but in practice it didn't hurt too much. The good thing about it was that even with max tech there will never be another ship (at least I couldn't come up with one in my efforts) that were more attractive than the range 3 chaff even after miniturization. Additionally they remained more attractive even after the shielding had been stripped away from my main battleforce, which is PRECISELY when you don't want those Armaggeddon BB's shooting at them more than ever.
As an extra bonus, I've found the range 3 chaff make great minefield sweepers. I send 15-20 of them individually into an enemy minefield and the minefield disappears. My opponents have nothing smaller than a cruiser to dispatch out to kill them. That's costing them one cruiser to counter each chaff and they seem reluctant to do it. They can't just send chaff to kill my chaff - they have range 1 chaff.
I also have this fantasy about my chaff actually killing something with their range 3 weapons sometime, but so far it hasn't happened. That's okay, their only REAL duty is to die - anything else is above and beyond the call of duty. That's why I name them "Heroes of the Empire".
So far the only downside has been the cost, but it doesn't bother me anymore. I can still field thousands of them and I'm not missing the minerals or resources, but I sure am enjoying the benefits of this chaff design. I don't foresee ever building cheap chaff again.
As a curious side-note, when crash-sweeping a minefield with these I noted that the mineral salvage left from these ships varied quite a bit. They all had unique destinations in the minefield, but when each single-ship-fleet exploded the number of minerals left behind varied widely, and many times there was more mineral debris than the things had cost to build! Unfortunately, when I sent some freighters out
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I'M NOT AN EXPERT AND I'M OFTEN PROVEN WRONG. TAKE THAT INTO CONSIDERATION WHEN YOU READ MY POSTS.
Math?  Ummm, sure!  I do FREESTYLE math.Report message to a moderator
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