Commerce Raiding

[Pumpernickel]

I'm aware that stealth armor reduces the chances of your raiders being spotted. Does having a raiding fleet composed of cloaked ships reduce chances as well? If so, how much? In comparison to stealth armor?

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

It's supposed to anyways. Deep scan is supposed to increase the odds that you will detect targets as will numbers and raider hull size is supposed to increase the odds of getting detected.

However, in my experience, trade raiding is completely not worthwhile. YMMV though, lemme know if you can make it worthwhile. I've tried a few times with various fleet layouts and just can't reccomend it.

On a similar note, Q-freighters are junk. Using a Q-Freighter instead of a CR will cost you $5,000 per freighter per turn in lost revenue (more for morrigi). For that price tag you could afford the upkeep for either 10 destroyers or about 1.5 cruisers (about 14 DDs and 2.3 CAs for morrigi). I don't know about you, but I would rather have 3 actual combat cruisers escorting my freighters than 2 q-freighters. Personally, I just accept that raiding is very rare and replace losses when they happen. I'm pretty dang sure that I come out way ahead with that strategy.

[Pumpernickel]

Thanks very much for the input. Is a deep scan also helpful for escorts in detecting raiders or is it just helpful to raiders in finding their prey?

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

It's supposed to, but again, commerce raiding is very rare so the few times I really tried protecting my freighters, I just never noticed a difference.

[Pumpernickel]

Haven't come across anything describing a bonus in avoiding escort detection by using cloaked raiders. Does anyone have info on this?

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

I don't know of any hard numbers due to the difficulty of testing that sort of thing out. Not to mention all the possible variables that might effect it. I have seen anecdotes over the years that cloaking helps you remain undetected. I can also add my own anecdote as well.

The last time I tried raiding, I was playing tarka and was allied with the liir. I was busy fighting a war with a couple of other empires on the other side of the galaxy, but I wanted to soften the liir up in preparation for my sudden but inevitable betrayal. I tried various mixes of cloaking DEs and CRs and really put quite a few raiders in literally every trade sector the liir where involved in. After I declared war, I figured that I would just leave the raiders in place. As I recall, only a handful of raiders ever got detected over the course of something like 50-75 turns or so. It was also nearly totally ineffective so meh.

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

Oh, here's something else that might be of interest along the lines of raiding.

A few games ago, I was playing morrigi and the big showdown at the end of the campaign was against a very entrenched hiver. Anyone with much sots experience knows just how much of a pain it can be to clean out a hiver infestation. Due to my faster FTL, I could see hiver expeditions coming into my space from several turns away and just shoot them down in deep space. On the other hand, their farcasting made actually clearing their space out problematic at this stage. Sure, I could build a ton of ships and brute force it, but I wanted something with a little more finesse.

My first instinct was to use commerce raiding to tilt the attrition rate in my favor, but then I remembered the experience directly above. After thinking on it for a little bit, I remembered that blockading an enemy planet reduces IO to half and stops population growth. So I designed and built a fleet of "submarines". These where Cloaking ER cruisers. I then sent them out in pairs to blockade every hive planet in a fairly significant region of space. Once they made it to the planet, they where allowed to attack only if the planet was virtually defenseless. Otherwise, they would just run away until the end of the battle, never engaging.

On the plus side, it was very effective. In fact, it was so effective that it just sort of broke the AI. It kept trying to defend every planet at the same time and stretched its gate capacity way too thin to put up a useful defense against my actual fleets.

On the minus side, it was really extremely super tedious and breaking the AI like that felt pretty exploitative. Personally, I try to avoid AI exploits so I won't be doing that again.

Food for thought anyways. Also? That's one of a very few times I have ever found a use for ER CAs.

[Scorpio_asz]

An alternative is to conquer a planet in the sector to effectively "block" it from the enemy... You entrench in that planet and neither you not the enemy can trade; and since it is supposed to be THEIR sector is their loss, not yours... Easy to accomplish with Morrigi; those 27 light years per turn can really decimate you... Maybe Tarka if it's within 12 light years striking distance... Forget it with the fish, two turns to get from your backyard to your nearest star system is not going to be a surprise anytime soon.

Another nice surprise even with human opponents is to get a deep scan vessel coupled with a jammer to a hostile trade sector... they will send a fleet to intercept... you have pulled them from planetary defense... then suddenly change direction to the planet they came from... and surprise them with a full invasion fleet that was masked as a simple raider... works wonders versus AI's and human opponents. Morrigi are best for this tactic, may work with tarka, forget it with humans, zuul, hiver or liir; those can't surprise anyone in a trade sector...