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To be quite honest I fail to see the point in your post.

Adding armour to Nubians is generally considered to be a bad idea. Usually you want to keep your Beamer Nubs as light as possible, to make them move last. Also, in late game most players are running out of Ironium (though personally I'm always out of germanium ) and Superlataniums are very Ironium consuming.

Also, any decent missile ships should fire before your beamers do. Very high-initiative Sapper Nubians could be used to bust enemy's shields before your missile ships fire, but those kind of ships are very expensive in Germanium and prone to die in the 2nd round at latest.

Perhaps your tactic works against your current enemy (and game conditions, you mentioned you had better tech) , but don't expect to survive against any intermediate player. Mixed fleet is the key - beamers take out the chaff and shields, and missile ships finish the job.

[Updated on: Sat, 05 April 2003 14:05]

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The way I see it, you have no chances of surviving without chaff. I took 25 of your Nub1 and 10 of Nub2, enemy had 1000 chaff and 50 BB (Maximize Damage).

First your Nub1 dameges the BB shields and kill all the chaff
Then Nub2 kills 12 BB
Then BB kills 10 Nub2 and 4 Nub1
Then Nub1 shoots rest of the BB shields
BB shoots with the Gatlings
Nub1 kills 9 BBs
BB kills 19 Nub1s
Nub1 attacks, doesn't kill any ship
BB kills rest of Nub1

If you had 1000 chaff of your own, after the battle you'd have 392 chaff left and all Nubians unharmed.


Then I designed a new Beamer Nubian (Nub3), with
15 x Mega-D
3 x Trans-Galactic Mizer Scoop
6 x Complete Phase Shield
3 x Syncro Sapper
1 x Overthruster
9 x Energy Capacitor

So it's 25 Nub3, 10 Nub2 and 1000 chaff (Maximize Damage Ratio) vs 50 BB and 1000 chaff (Maximize Damage)

First your missile Nubians torch 180 of enemy chaff
Then enemy shoots 800 of your chaff.
Then Nub3 shoots ~85 000 points of BB shields
Then Nub3 takes care of the rest of the chaff, AND kills 21 BBs
Missile Nub1 kill rest of the 29 BBs

Thus all of your Nubians are unharmed and you are still left with 200 chaff. So how does this differ from battle with your own designed ships? Not much actually, though you are left with ~200 chaff *less*. However, the Nub3 should be much cheaper, thus you can buy more of them for the same amount of resources that you use to build Nub1s. After all, resources are the limiting factor for AR.

However, if you enemy uses Maximize Damage Ratio orders, the story is a bit different. Depending on the ship movements, you will either lose your Missile ships and 4 beamers, or if odds are favourable, lose 10 Beamers but Missile ships stay intact. There may be other variations how the battle goes, I tested only twice.

Now I must emphasize that Nub3 would not be a good design for Beamer vs Beamer battles, though still much better than Nub1. Against Beamers you should propably use Anti-Matter Pulverizers and Beam Deflectors. Also, jamming would be good against Missile ships.

Perhaps someone else has better comments on the subject - I don't have much recent experience with chaff-killer/chaff-killer-killer counter-designing. I have mostly been playing SD, and often I have a Energy Dampener involved in the battle, plus the fact that my opponents often seem to have much trouble getting their chaff into the battle .

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I don't understand much about chaff, nor do I think any returning Stars! gamers who haven't played for more than 4 years.

How do I use chaff? When should I start using it? What are the guts - what chaff designs are commonly made to counter what capital ship designs? And what capital ship designs are made to counter their chaff designs?

I know way more about economy building through reading threads now than actual battle so something like this could be really useful! I'm looking forward to it!

Alex.

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hey - we play together in zared2, like your post in the private forum

if you want to learn about chaff, send me your email and i will
send you the battlesim files. they show exactly what chaff is good for...

my email is scheffer@spam.mb.uni-dortmund.de, to mail me
replace "spam" with "fem"....

BTW... who did you meet in zared2?

hope its not me ... LOL

robert

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Quote:

It's the best from a poor situation. I like the tech and the minerals... but otherwise I HATE playing AR and I'll bever do it again!!!

Never say bever ...



No really, AR is a fun race to play, maybe it's just this specific design that is bothering you ...
Difficult though to find the right game to play AR ... well, more correctly: you could try it in every game but you need to be lucky to find neighbours that not kill you right away

regards,
mch

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Quote:

<snip ship designs>

What surprises me is that while you say the your enemy is using cap missiles HEAVILY, you are not using any jammers on your ships and you're not using chaff ??
(Of course without free slots no chaff design.)

Quote:

The combination of chaff removal and sheild removal is going to make these battles funny. My only concern is that his missile ships target my missile ships first. But otherwise I'm quite happy. I can feild far far far less numbers (and my ships are cheaper) and still win. There's probably an easy way using chaff, but he's got some majorly cloaked beamers running around for support (he's got an SS ally) so I don't really know what else will show up, but luckily I do know that all my ships target his chaff, then his BB's, and finally the SS ships. Like I said... probably an easier way, but this is just the way things have turned out thus far.

Make your missile ships less attractive than your beamers, check out the attractiveness sheet. Jam one design more than the other, or more shields etc.

Quote:

Above all else... "Maximise Damage" is a TERRIBLE idea on BB's with missiles UNLESS one of your weapon slots has sappers in them.

Missile ships should never have maximize damage orders not even if they carry sappers. They need to stay away as far as possible from the enemy ships, missile ships are all about range.
Placing sappers on missile ships is only done keeping in mind that they will only be used as a last resort, afterall the missile ships are in range of enemy beamers at that time too. Only "valid" use for a mix of missiles/gatlings/sappers I can see is for BBs, and than only in the small slots where only 2 weapons fit in (for reasons check out the "Order of firing and empty slots" thread). Either you leave the slots empty or you put something "cheap" in them.

Anyway what I wanted to say was that it seems that your whole strategy depends on the battle plan that the enemy is using, over which you don't have any control. If he is smart he'll give his fleets orders to disengage (missile ships and chaff), they'll stay out of range of your beamer nubs which take a nice pounding without jamming and without chaff protection.
Can't do the numbers from the top of my head (so this is all maybe) but it's possible that all your beamer nubs die fast (missile ships have 2-3 free slots? not sure about the moves the ships have), leaving some chaff alive which will distract the fire of your missile nubs while the enemy BBs return fire killing them too, leaving you with nothing ... same fleet design, different battle orders ...
Although the enemy missile ships might leave the board to soon, can't check right now ...

regards,
mch

[Updated on: Tue, 08 April 2003 06:46]

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vonKreedon wrote on Tue, 08 April 2003 21:33

I almost never put jammers on ships based on the logic that if I put computers on my ship I fire before someone who put jammers in the same slot, plus my computers counteract the enemies jammers. So I fire first and with the same effect as my enemies ships, but he has less ships by the time he fires. This seems to work as expected, so why do people put jammers on ships?

Missile ships or beamers? The init war is something you can't keep up, it will suck up all your germ, and those wonderfull beamer RS deflector nubs just couldn't care less not getting the first shot

A reason to use jammers is to keep your main line ships less attractive than your chaff. And once your chaff is gone jammers do have their use!
I fought an enemy lately who had huge stacks of nubs (teamgame and the stacks of my team were bigger ) they were unjammed and once their chaff was gone (after round 1) their nubs started dropping like flies Fun to see, too bad I only saw this in test beds since they surrendered before we had any titan battles

If you want exact numbers of how interesting jamming is, ask Zoid

regards,
mch

[Updated on: Tue, 08 April 2003 16:51]

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Micha wrote on Tue, 08 April 2003 13:51

If you want exact numbers of how interesting jamming is, ask Zoid

Fat lot of good asking ME is going to do ya. My buddy Micha must be capping on my astounding mathematical prowess (or lack of).

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Yeah vonKreedon,

Mich is right.
When you enter the nub era, and you have +300 nubs in stacked without any jammer, they'll sign their deadpact even before entering any bigger battle.
The ini war works fairly well in the BB era, but not in a nub design. Better take some more time playing around with a testbed bro.

Cya
Gunter

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I never use computers on a nubian. Never ever...

...unless I'm IT. I'm a firm believer in gateable ship designs - if it can't be gated then it wont be where it's needed!!

I like to stick with beamers mostly. I like beamers. They have less issues and flaws than missile ships and are harder to exploit... if you exclude the range thing

When I do use missile/torpedo ships I *try* to keep them light anyway. Sometimes you can't and it's just tough luck. I sit and cry but it doesn't change the fact that my missile ships get lost in the gateway.


But to make a point about the whole computers thing....
Missiles and torpedo's CANNOT be jammed below their base value - at all. This is one reason why I prefer Omegas to Arms. The omega hits 80% of the time everytime. The Arm doesn't. In other words all those slots you use to: get the first shot/get the accuracy up/get the accuracy up WAY to high because your enemy is jamming; can be used for other things like armour, jamming, deflectors etc...
In other words increase the survivabilty of the ship at the cost of POTENTIAL damage. I say potential because I'd rather have 4 out of 5 Omegas hit my target guaranteed than have 1 out of 4 Arms hit guaranteed. I learnt this one when I fought a beamer heavy IS ( jammer 50's rock \m/ )

I hate the BB era - it sucks. There's just too little variables for building BB's. They're my LEAST favourite ship design for attack craft. I mean you either have to use range 3 beams or missiles/torps. Anything else gets ripped apart. Which is why computers on BB's is good. Computers on anything else - waste of G (unless you're specifically using missiles and your enemy isn't using jammer's).

I find cap missiles (bar the jihad early on) far too easy to counter with a couple of jammers.

The init war for me is almost non-existent. I like to avoid the BB era since it is of huge cost and of such poor ship design.


I'd like to play a game where the only ship designs you can use are the bombers, freighters, miners/minelayers (SD) and the nubian (at tech 0 with lower base armour me thinks - maybe edit the BB, CA and DD to be indentical to nubs but with lower base armour?). It'd be interesting to see the ship designs people would make if they had very little restriction on what they slap on the ship - do you go all out weapons? multi-purpose? etc...
That and it'd be funny to see Nubs with X-rays and beta's.

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freakyboy wrote on Sat, 12 April 2003 06:12

But to make a point about the whole computers thing.... Missiles and torpedo's CANNOT be jammed below their base value - at all. This is one reason why I prefer Omegas to Arms. The omega hits 80% of the time everytime. The Arm doesn't. In other words all those slots you use to: get the first shot/get the accuracy up/get the accuracy up WAY to high because your enemy is jamming; can be used for other things like armour, jamming, deflectors etc...

Wrong. You can jam any missile/torp way below its base value, in particular if you do not put computers on the miss/torp boat. Try attacking a 95% jammed ship with a Omega-only Nubian (no computer) and you will see what I mean.

The fact that computers and jammers tend to nullify their effect does not mean that jammers are useless. In fact if I face your no-comp omega ships in a game I would be more than happy to counter-design you with a 88% or 95% jammed ship and take all those nice minerals

With Nubians, it's true that you don't run for initiative, but remember that computers have another function, that is to reduce inaccuracy.

YucaF

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