Tactics

[UesugiKenshin]

In the 1984 classic Red Dawn, the Wolverines cannot directly attack a tank and the few soldiers refueling it. They wait and send innocent looking Toni who carries a rigged explosive device. They steal her food and hassle her, abandoning all discipline and training and focus, and then run on foot right into an ambush.

That is what displacement is all about. Impetuous soldiers underestimate the target and then make a horrible blunder. Reactions are often wrong; responding is prudent, logical, and what you were trained to do.

[UesugiKenshin]

Tristan and Isolde (2006)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hOSP0GTatng

Attacking directly would likely fail and cause high casualties. Two brave fleet of foot soldiers then lured the rest away.

[UesugiKenshin]

People who don't know literature presume the tale of Troy is about Agamemnon leader of the Greeks getting captured Helen back to her husband Menelaus' to assuage some silly sense of honor and help his brother in the process. WRONG.

Menelaus wants the Trojans to fight for him some day. He does not want to engage them directly and lose soldiers when the whole situation is absurd and over frivialities. He's there because if he can add Trojan strength to his chariots, then the Greek army is unstopable.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar4kf5T7ihs

All these minor alien fleets should be enfolded in your military forces rather than a stupid battle when they could become valuable vassals especially through their ship designs. Essentially their homesector will improve by your wise actions. It's not like you are enslaving them.

[UesugiKenshin]

The problem as I see it is that you're not genuinely strong enough to be waging war until at least turn #600...and that is pushing it. You would have to have done everything economically perfect, finished research, avoided sabotage from turn 400-600, picked up minor race ship design, AND had a good map position.

Good luck with that.

So really that might be coming together in turn #700.

But the problem is even finishing level 14 tech does not have fleet formations thus tactics to employ confering tactical advantages, no manueverability variants, no speed variants, and what is more important practical counter-measures.

Levels 15 and higher should address these issues by modding the technology to facilitate every one of these aspects of aerial manuevers. (Yes I understand that they are in outer space and hence not atmosphere and effects like drag and stalling).

New tech should open up new starships to cope. Think I am wrong? The best customized Omega Alliance starships, sent against the Brane, if sent in a group led by a dreadnought, coupled with heavy destroyers, heavy cruisers, a battleship, multiple fighters with their own niches, and totaling say 6-8 starships...only has a 86% chance of winning if attacking and a 74% chance if avoiding. And these are experienced starships that have leveled up for over a hundred turns at a military academy too.

You could use the brute force method and bring a fleet with 12 in it. You could risk luring the Brane outside their homesector by displacement and thus they don't have any homesector defenses.

And my customized starships are vastly superior in many respects to base Omega starships.

The only valid way to even up the issues is several ships having minor race tech as countermeasures. Which means by luck and diplomacy you were able to get them by map location and being tremendously diplomatic,and doing everything right, acting wisely, and only then going against the Brane.

It's rough in the giant 40x40 map as there are not just the Brane but 3 more in that region,very close together restricting navigation. So even if you win, you will be damaged and lose ships, and need repair time. Meaning sending new experienced ships as replacements to then take on those 3 others. There is no rest for the wicked.

There should be a better mechanism to independently acquire technology that would allow better ships instead of customizing ships, as the Omega may never get torpedoes that negate shields or cloaking or even torpedoes that disable engines.

One might have to go to turn# 900 to gain minor race tech such that ships can be customized in the ship designer and of course, those won't have experience but be new ships, so green with that handicap.

Realize that after one maxes out on infrastructure, while your best sectors may have 200 morale so at the fanatical level, unless you actually wage war, it begins to drop every turn to numbers like 185 in some cases. Thus the people of the Omega Alliance want victory at any cost. And so even IF you defeated every minor race empire, then again, these morale numbers will drop. There is no mechanism to maintain high morale except new victories.

Thus if you kept playing, you would have to attack any non-members, even your allies, just to keep morale up. It really doesn't make sense.

It would if there were than 14 levels of tech such that better and better buildings existed that persistently adjusted morale to evoke the sense that all goals except war have been accomplished as the Omega Alliance have entered a "golden age".

See the modding topic for details. Essentially though the Omega Alliance are in a state of perfection ie a utopia, still morale inevitably declines.
viewtopic.php?f=107&t=7080&start=420

[UesugiKenshin]

If you were to look at the minor race fleets, what you would see is that while some minor races are "spacemen" and so have fleet capability, they only have two types, so straight away they are weaker, with some very weak as they may have scouts and fighters against a human player or a major race alien with six types.

Carrier strike groups are made up of several types each having a specific role to play. You would not send battleships as that is a very dated paradigm, but regardless, you would never send five battleships ie all one kind.

So minor race fleets begin unbalanced and should consistently lose.

It appears that each minor race ship is supposed to create a niche starship for the player to customize in the ship designer. I doubt the AI ever customizes. The way most AI opperate in 4Xgames, they use what is designed and seldom repair ships, but use up whatever exists.

The AI is sometimes foolish and will make an outmoded unit to save money or even think that multiple cheaper older units will be able to beat a newer unit type as it considers the cost benefit analysis. That is the likely reason that BotE won't let you make older iterations of ships...so the AI and new players don't try that...as it doesn't generally work.

So for AI led major and minor races, you want to create diverse starships and facilitate their success with proper mixed fleet assignments. AI generally are not smart enough to grasp these kinds of issues, but choose the brute force method of "more is better".

[UesugiKenshin]

It seems strange, but due to the limitations of any AI, it actually is better to have one on one battles where you have general purpose ships that have many abilities...likely cumulatively.

Whereas fleet formations are stylized battles about unit composition, multiple simultaneous attacks and defenses, feignts, using multiple ships to converge,flank, pin a ship or ships, etc. It's a big deal that BotE even attempts fleet battles. To do any kind of accurate fleet battles would require either some RTS elements or incorporate this by tech levels confering formations.

See the topic on combat without animations for a rock-paper-scissors discussion on employing fleet formations.
viewtopic.php?f=107&t=7076

That was done in the Homeworld series from inception with: claw, sphere, wall, parade, X, etc.
https://homeworld.fandom.com/wiki/Formations

Fleet battles are won by number crunching: unit attributes, command abilities, unit composition, formations, etc. Animations are just eye candy. Many games have such eye candy and it makes not a bit of difference as there is no human way to direct attacks with multiple targets without a lot of starting and stopping an engagement. Which defeats the whole purpose.

Realize space battles lack the standard issues of: terrain effects like reduced movement due to friction, elevation, time of day obscuring vision, heat, wet, fog, cold, swamp versus sand, etc. Those then become crucial to unit composition and RTS elements regarding the timing of simultaneous attacks and reduced morale due to the conditions of the battlefield.

[UesugiKenshin]

You would have to test this concept hundreds of times, but as small fighters are very fast and manueverable, less expensive in raw materials and time for development, can be configured to have monumental weaponry that are unrealistic based on their diminutive nature, then technically speaking a swarm might be able to evade the firing of weapons from capitol ships, and get in close past say a beam weapon cannon or the effective range of torpedoes, and so inflict a lot more damage.

It's amusing as that is the premise of sending X wing fighters against rather large heavy cruisers and trying to lob a chain reaction torpedo crammed down the mouth of the Deathstar.

[UesugiKenshin]

Big bulky fleets are not generally manueverable. To protect each other limits their speed.

Little fighters cannot effectively use kamikaze attacks as their mass is too small to inflict enough hull damage. But in BotE, pull up the ship designer, and you will see that you can configure highly unrealistic payloads of torpedoes and so it might work.

[UesugiKenshin]

In the days of the kamikaze, they lacked effective targeting of air to surface missiles. But with a huge abberation of torpedoes, coupled with much faster speed engagement and dancing around the capitol ships sluggish nature,the little hornet on its own can't win against a single human, but a swarm of them can cause many humans to leave the engagement.

[UesugiKenshin]

The Omega Alliance from turn #709 forward can earn 7 million a turn by manipulating resource values up, sell them off at the end of the turn, and literally buying whole Omega battleships every single turn from multiple sectors. There would be no finesse to it; no genuine tactics, but just send huge armadas of battleships against every minor race sectors...and win.

See the issue for the AI is probably making "the unit that is the most powerful" and if the AI were in that situation, then that is what it likely would do. If you can make a fighter or a battleship in a single turn, what do you do?

That is not a very interesting way to win.

In Civ 2 and 3 that concept messed up the AI which is why you get monsterous levels of nuclear tipped ICBM wars that end up as ten year stalemates. There are youtube videos on that phenomena as the AI versus the AI cannot think of a way to win, and so makes as many ICBMs as possible, and the Earth has become a nuclear wasteland.

[UesugiKenshin]

Fighting against the Brane with their heavy destroyers which paralyze and the cruisers which negate shields, think how dumb it would be to not dictate the terms of battle, but just attack then.

Instead, you send a strong powerful fleet set to avoid, which I did that had a 99% chance of winning. I don't actually wish to defeat them, but absorb them into my empire.

Since I was set to avoid, and they could not plausibly win, they avoided to a position outside their sector. This negates any home sector advantage. The only way fighting them might be worse would be if some sort of stellar phenomena existed which was more harmful to my starships than theirs. There is not. They could run into a black.hole and pop up somewhere that I have no fleet nearby. They could fly into a nebula and maybe that tips the odds in their favor to achieve a better short term outcome.

An oddity of BotE is you can take a sector from a minor race, and that does not disband their minor race fleet. So you have to deal with them.

In some situations where you might be trying to take their sector before another major race, then maybe you rush and attack. Most likely it would be smarter to let the other major race "do the heavy lifting" and thus they likely get damaged by the ordeal, then if they win, attack them while so weakened.

I can't think of a good reason to openly attack a race in their home sector, can you? Displace them so you have the advantage.

There is no "chess clock" ticking and so no need to exterminate. That one sector is not more important than the other 1599 in a 40x40 galaxy...
...unless you badly require their minor race technology for some reason as an equalizer say against a major race that has seized the initiative and is going to eliminate your major race.

[UesugiKenshin]

You may have to defeat races that you do not wish to if you feel you just require making their ships classes and that when customized it confers enough of an advantage.

In the Brane's case, while their heavy destroyers and cruisers are superb, they have no military academy, thus their experience is only 1000. Were it modded where they had not only a large military tech bonus and their special torpedoes, and also a military academy, they would be much tougher and might have chosen to fight.

I'm making 6.18 million a turn. I don't need money, even to colonize, but choose to. My empire doesn't need anything technically, but the Omega Alliance morale system is configured to wage war to keep the people content and fanatical. So depending on the style of the player, it might more sense to create an alternative Omega empire that was not of that ethos, but whatever would be more appealing to a more enlightened empire.

BotE is not necessarily about crushing every major and minor race. Think about it: that is one dimensional and ultimately not satisfying.

[UesugiKenshin]

Combat is not how you think it will be.

For example, a mixed fleet of Khaoran risked supporting a colony ship as an escort and approached Aspidske with two medium cruisers. My lone cruiser was sitting in a system with shields, an orbital battery, and a minefield. That makes no difference as the fleet wasn't going to attack the system (that would be suicidal), but attack my cruiser.

Luckily sabotage resulted in them losing their colony ship to my control. I retreated to near Xeres and moved the colony ship south towards Omega Alpha. I then merged a couple fleets to that retreat location and formed a a strong fleet with 3 cruisers and a heavy cruiser. Now they are returning to Aspidske.

Had I fought, my statistical chances were 39% and avoiding and retreating would fail. It was better to do a tactical withdrawal to reinforce.

Much of war is manuevering for a defensible position and attacking with superior numbers. This is space based combat so there are no "terrains", though anomalies or gravity could play roles and add modifiers based on star gravinometrics.

Terrain and morale and weather and ambush are what win wars, not superior numbers. These and the ability of the commander to employ specific tactics after rallying the veteran soldiers to feel they are invulnerable is how to win battles. There is nothing specifying terrain in BotE. I wish there was as combat would be complex and using certain troops and unit composition and speed and force (mass times acceleration) and artillary and air support to best effect.

You want to employ whatever defensive infrastructure on the ground and space and train up experience and veteran status. I hope for a BotE 2.0 that would have flagships with accrued tactical ability in fleets. Then winning battles improves their odds and with specific attributes as is the case in Medieval 2 Total War Kingdoms (possibly the finest wargame ever made for modding).

[UesugiKenshin]

What could happen is instead of 40x40 maps, you have 400 x 400 maps and you zoom in for battles on the ground for troops or placement of ships near the star or away from it, and based on battle calculations, you try to lure the enemy into attacking there, or attack the enemy on a weak position from your strong one. The grid would have general "terrain" defensive and offensive modifiers. That would be standard tabletop wargaming as this is a static strategic wargame, not an RTS. There is no good way to do precise tactics on a tablet. You need a mouse or a precise touchpad for that and a good one.

[UesugiKenshin]

Otherwise in BotE 2.0, you have a battle menu and unless ambushed by cloaked ships or if you are cloaked, then you get a surprise attack. The battle menu would be zoomed in and you select a grid point based on movement points to defend or if offensive then can spend so many points to relocate to anticipate dogfighting in a space battle.

Or similarly do ground attacks by specifying which planet and based on terrain modifiers.

That is essentially how M2TWK works except it's an RTS and there's quite a lot of employed tactics involving exhausting soldiers using artillary, cavalry, horse archers, and infantry including archers and shock troops.