Tactics for fighting alien stations?

[Biggus Dickus]

I don't know if I've been lucky in my game so far because the Aliens have used ships mostly built around missiles so I just put a couple PD and lasers on my ships are more than enough to handle even slightly larger Alien fleets even if it takes a while since they run out of ways to attack once they spend their missiles.

So around 2048 I decided to try using a 15K fleet with armed mostly either with PDs and Plasma Mk3s against a moderate Alien station with only 4 LD. The station absolutely wrecked me, just the sheer amount of plasma it throws my way destroys my dreads instantly, and the amount of PD meant that when I tried again by just spamming monitors with nuke torps nothing got through.

The only thing that seemed to have any effect on the LD was heavy Plasma as it was the only thing that couldn't be shot down and had the range to touch the LDs, but still how do I deal with since even with heavy plasma I'd have to spam cheap ships that can mount it in order to output enough damage before the LDs in turn reduce my damage output.

So how do you deal with Alien stations usually? Is there any tactics that work against them?

[soulfreezer]

I use Titans or Dreadnoughts with plasma weapons against stations, just put enough front armor (50 or more) and some side armor on them and most of them will survive the battle.

[ulzgoroth]

I wonder how much armor station modules actually have. If it's little enough it'd be possible that spinal phasers would burn faster than heavy plasma. But the plasma is a safer bet.

[Biggus Dickus]

Originally posted by soulfreezer:

I use Titans or Dreadnoughts with plasma weapons against stations, just put enough front armor (50 or more) and some side armor on them and most of them will survive the battle.

Oh wow that's a lot, I usually stick 20 on the front of mine, how much would you consider "some" for side armour then?

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

I wonder how much armor station modules actually have. If it's little enough it'd be possible that spinal phasers would burn faster than heavy plasma. But the plasma is a safer bet.

From what I can tell station modules don't have normal armour but a lot of health and the component armour style of armour(the kind that goes in a utility slot on a ship) so it doesn't have armour and armour degredation but straight bonuses against stuff like lasers iirc, could be wrong though since when you fight a station in combat when you hit it it takes only hull damage no armour.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by Biggus Dickus:

Originally posted by soulfreezer:

I use Titans or Dreadnoughts with plasma weapons against stations, just put enough front armor (50 or more) and some side armor on them and most of them will survive the battle.

Oh wow that's a lot, I usually stick 20 on the front of mine, how much would you consider "some" for side armour then?

You really shouldn't need any side armor. If you do something's gone wrong in ways you probably won't be able to rescue. Unless you bring the ~15 you need to survive plasma hits?

20 armor is enough to deal with a little plasma, the problem is with a lot of plasma you take chipping. More armor should mitigate that to some extent.

Component armor and if possible damage control upgrades are desirable for the same reason.


It should be possible to put your bombardment ships on tangential flyby paths so that they can easily escape the engagement quickly if they want to. Thus hopefully making it possible to take out some defenses and then disengage for repair (if you've got a base close enough). Have not tested this.

Originally posted by Biggus Dickus:

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

I wonder how much armor station modules actually have. If it's little enough it'd be possible that spinal phasers would burn faster than heavy plasma. But the plasma is a safer bet.

From what I can tell station modules don't have normal armour but a lot of health and the component armour style of armour(the kind that goes in a utility slot on a ship) so it doesn't have armour and armour degredation but straight bonuses against stuff like lasers iirc, could be wrong though since when you fight a station in combat when you hit it it takes only hull damage no armour.

I'm fairly sure they should have armor because there was a change log line about reducing how much armor they had.

But not completely sure because the UI gives you little to no visibility into what's going on with them.

[Biggus Dickus]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Originally posted by Biggus Dickus:

Oh wow that's a lot, I usually stick 20 on the front of mine, how much would you consider "some" for side armour then?

You really shouldn't need any side armor. If you do something's gone wrong in ways you probably won't be able to rescue. Unless you bring the ~15 you need to survive plasma hits?

20 armor is enough to deal with a little plasma, the problem is with a lot of plasma you take chipping. More armor should mitigate that to some extent.

Component armor and if possible damage control upgrades are desirable for the same reason.


It should be possible to put your bombardment ships on tangential flyby paths so that they can easily escape the engagement quickly if they want to. Thus hopefully making it possible to take out some defenses and then disengage for repair (if you've got a base close enough). Have not tested this.

Originally posted by Biggus Dickus:

From what I can tell station modules don't have normal armour but a lot of health and the component armour style of armour(the kind that goes in a utility slot on a ship) so it doesn't have armour and armour degredation but straight bonuses against stuff like lasers iirc, could be wrong though since when you fight a station in combat when you hit it it takes only hull damage no armour.

I'm fairly sure they should have armor because there was a change log line about reducing how much armor they had.

But not completely sure because the UI gives you little to no visibility into what's going on with them.

Well that makes sense about the armour for my ships but if that's the case I should probably stick to ~20 armour since going up to 50 would help with maybe 2 or 3 hits and the LDs are focusing fire and hitting each ship with 10-15 shots every second so it's usually an all or nothing situation, wondering if I should strip them and the component armour to make them faster and try to get under the guns.

Also yeah the UI makes it hard to tell with the stations, but from what I can tell they don't have any, armour usually has its own health like for example on ships you can see a white/yellow/red line outlining a ship section that gets hit to show armour and health as well as the damage numbers above it, but I don't see that with stations only the hull going white->yellow->red and the damage numbers are all direct damage, no deflection, chipping or armour damage. Probably still there just coded or displayed weirdly then.

[Morti]

I used both super heavy lasers and plasma in my last game, both worked fine, ( i don't like dreads for plasmas because heavy plasma canon damage is too heavy and dread can't have it )
I think you have the good weapon technology to deal with these stations, so the problem is probably the lack of armour (50+ on the bow) so you can survive few shots
So as long as you got 50 (i end with 60 with the daedalus drive ) wall tactic ( choose the wall to make a square with your ships : 4-6 short wall 6-18 high wall 15+ great wall 25+ )
I guess against a 4 LD lategame alien station you need at least 9 ships ( i prefer lancers with heavy plasma canon 1(or 2) PD and 2(or 1) light phaser battery because it deal better with missiles volleys. But 2 heavy plasma batteries on a dreads deal near the lancer's canon damage and should do the job, then you can use light phasers canon ( or maybe light coilguns canon on nose to work as PD )

Edit : i was so long to write it that 3 of you answer so yes, the problem is the armor, you want adamantium armour with 20 armour heavy plasma 2 shot your ships, but plasma weapons aren't really good at chipping armour so more armour is really efficient ( it will be usefull too if you face a mothership ) with 60 front armour, your ships can handle around 10 heavy plasma shots, so if you're rich enought, you can send paper ship and rebuild them but i think it's more efficient to use heavy armoured ones.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by Biggus Dickus:

Well that makes sense about the armour for my ships but if that's the case I should probably stick to ~20 armour since going up to 50 would help with maybe 2 or 3 hits and the LDs are focusing fire and hitting each ship with 10-15 shots every second so it's usually an all or nothing situation, wondering if I should strip them and the component armour to make them faster and try to get under the guns.

It sounds like you are very much misunderstanding what chipping means.

Hits that don't penetrate the armor blow away a limited amount of the armor. (Done by volume, I've heard, rather than the energy capacity of the armor, which is super dumb, but moving on.) They do not reduce the armor by an amount equal to their damage! Chipped armor has a chance for subsequent attacks to just skip past the armor (???!), but that chance doesn't rise super fast.

[Biggus Dickus]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Originally posted by Biggus Dickus:

Well that makes sense about the armour for my ships but if that's the case I should probably stick to ~20 armour since going up to 50 would help with maybe 2 or 3 hits and the LDs are focusing fire and hitting each ship with 10-15 shots every second so it's usually an all or nothing situation, wondering if I should strip them and the component armour to make them faster and try to get under the guns.

It sounds like you are very much misunderstanding what chipping means.

Hits that don't penetrate the armor blow away a limited amount of the armor. (Done by volume, I've heard, rather than the energy capacity of the armor, which is super dumb, but moving on.) They do not reduce the armor by an amount equal to their damage! Chipped armor has a chance for subsequent attacks to just skip past the armor (???!), but that chance doesn't rise super fast.

Ah that makes sense then, yeah I was thinking armour just acted as a buffer, that's cool they actually took ablative qualities into account, gotta rethink my armour schemes now.

[OrangSemut]

I tend to go overboard for my base assault ships. My assault BBs will have 70 front armor but only 5 on the sides. I use 2 of the single slot UV nose phasers and 2 medium plasma batteries (the 2 hull slot weapons). PD will be two 60cm UV phaser batteries.

The dreadnoughts will have 150 front armor, 8 side and 5 rear. Weapons will be 1 single slot nose UV phaser, 1 two slot nose UV phaser. Hull weapons will be 3 medium plasma batteries and PD will be two 60cm phaser batteries.

The heavy front armour ensures my ships get into range where the combo of lasers and plasma will quickly destroy the alien layered arrays.

I normally use assault groups of 16 - 8 dreads and 8 BBs. More if there's a strong defensive fleet.

[wei270]

you do need side armor if you got closer to the station. after experimenting alot with nuke trops on station and having enough lancer + bb to over saturate station pds. i find that nukeing station with suicider is actually not that bad economically.

all you need is a 10 ish heavly armored bb carrying 6 nuke trops with armor component, and rail or coil nose weapons. with an engine that can go 4g combat of course.

then launch nukes when the first few ships charge in to point blank range at the closes station defence.

nukes expecially the later once have very large aoe that does not damage friendly units. 1 nuke trop hit any where on the station will damage all parts of that station.

also most station defence comes in a groups of 4 like a triangle at the side. if you nuke the middle station with a strong nuke trop, over 90% of the time you will also destroy the adjacent stations.

[Ariochaotik]

I just took out my first alien orbital base which had 12 LDs.
I used 14 BBs with 30 front armor, 5 on the side and rear. They all had large mk3 plasma batteries (4 slot), 2 nose slot mk3 coil gun. (coil gun is for the subsequent barrage on the planet-side base. I had 3 ships with yellow nose structure after that battle.

I lost 1 ship to the planet side defenses. 3/4 the alien planet side base is destroyed, but I have to go repair my ships. Either ran out of ammo for the coil guns or they are all damaged. cant bombard anymore.

[Majickthyse]

This might be considered cheesy but...

I started a fight with an enemy fleet docked at a station. After destroying the fleet the aliens had opted to flee the battle. So I also ended the battle. That left me docked at the station and my marines then destroyed it.