Balance mod satlites and breaking through warp points?

[Lain]

So maybe i am missing something but since fighters cant jump, drones and ships use ship weapons and that satlites are considered to small to hit with ship weapons the only thing that can target them are fighters and defence weapons. So when you drop 30 or so satlites in a warp point with a shield gen a combat sensor and a wave motion gun they will get first shot on anything entering in through the center. Some people would say wave motion gun is unaccurate and looses damage to fast for them but with combat sensors and being point blank it really doesnt miss much and they are tossing out alot of damage while being shot at with point defence lasers. You cant launch enough fighters fast enough to stop this threat because the satilites rip the carries apart to fast and if each satilite has its own anti air it can and will block most seekers and fighters that do launch. Pair this with the energy dispenser in crystal tech so that they can be remotely powered i feel this leaves a system un attackable even more so when the system is jump point protected.

[Shrike]

So you'll be spending an enormous amount of resources for stationary defenses with dubious targeting accuracy, requiring a huge investment in research to even become possible? I would tackle that with a cheap drone fleet with nothing but bomblet missiles or other PD and defensive sensors on it. Haven't played in years so my memory may be foggy, but the supplies consumption and reload time would put the satellites at a disadvantage and they're stationary while the drones could use max range and fire much longer. You can always start a test game with full tech available to see what would happen, but my money's on the drones :-)

[Lain]

Drones use big ship weapons and are weaker then ships plus satalites use big ship weapons and shields but are only targeted by small things. So your drones in the distance they are would be shredded to bits and while the wave motion gun is the best bet other weapons can work.
The supplies needed vs the cost of satalites is nothing. Late game they are stationary to an extent cause lets say i capture your next system i can have a ship with a bay pick them up and carry them off somewhere plus they are even deployable in combat to make tricky tactics and ambushes. By defult the satilites make a ring around warp points so close they dont miss.

[Shrike]

Okay, I was too tempted to test this. Turns out the drones probably aren't the way to go, but using ships will still secure the win in the end. There's a sector limit which applies to the number of satellites or any other small units a player can launch, but there's no such limit for ships in a fleet. Just for fun I designed a base ship which was able to overcome a bunch of satellites worth the same resource amounts (1 ship versus 15 satellites). The satellites had a wave motion gun plus best defensive/offensive sensors and armor bonuses available plus a phased shield. They also had the advantage of occupying a single spot on the map instead of being spread out. I managed to grab the win consistently by putting massive amounts of heavy armor on the base ship combined with anti-proton beams and flak cannons. The strategy was set to short weapons range and the armor held (barely). So even 100 satellites could be overcome by 7 base ships to clear out a warp point while the resource cost would be the same.

[Lain]

Interesting but what if we used a different weapon set up on the satalites. I dont know but i really feel they have great potential.

[Shrike]

I don't disagree in early game, but once the opponents become able to crank out too many ships and join them up in fleets, the stationary defenses tend to lose their efficiency rapidly. I have fond memories of giant fleet battles with a few hundred battleships and dreadnoughts accompanied by assorted support ships invading systems and clashing with a similar defense fleet after mopping up the stationary defenses. It doesn't matter you can actually go to sector view to manually position your defending units when the enemy can just send in a single "tank" to draw those units out of position for the real attack later that same turn. There also used to be a carrier bug whereby destroyed carriers would miraculously leave their cargo intact, so that was often abused to do an economical sweep of warp points. And in later game stages one tends to warp in by means of created warp points anyway, provided they could be researched fast enough.

[Lain]

The system gravity building stops opened warp points and that can litterally from closing any others make one system the only system that can be attacked by the enemy the defult settings are 200 ships and something like 2000 units. Since satilites are units you can just keep slapping them down. And like i said earlier they can only be attacked with point defence or small weapons. Starbases and space stations are god awfuly useless late game its all weapon platforms at that point but satilites have no maintence ether in my games i have kept a system un attackable for ages with this even doing all tech learned on start settings.

[Telfram]

Light or heavy cruisers configured as pure point defense ships, can tend to clear the way.

[Shrike]

Originally posted by Eve_Wake:

And like i said earlier they can only be attacked with point defense or small weapons.

That's not accurate. There are plenty of weapons which can target them; just check the components.txt file to see which ones. Anyway, it doesn't matter you can defend an isolated system pretty well when your opponent remains free to gobble up the rest of the galaxy. Eventually they only have that single system to focus their attacks on and with an economy orders of magnitude bigger than yours it's a no-brainer to predict the outcome. If you play versus humans this will happen a lot sooner than the end game.