Defending a Wormhole.

[Randallw]

Can anyone explain to me exactly how defending a wormhole works. I knew that if you share the space with an ally it cancels out the automatic first turn, but after some experience failing to fire at the enemy I need clarification. I had a ship defending a wormhole and it may have been in a fleet but I also had another ship not joined to it. When the enemy came through one ship started in the middle of the enemy fleet and never attacked, while the other ship was way off on the side.

[Atrocities]

Yes, close it. Put a system shield generator facility and turtle yourself in for the long hall.

[Randallw]

This particular game doesn't allow warpoint manipulation, which I must say adds a new element to gamepley, in that my Empire is vast but the different military districts have to fend for themselves as it takes ages for ship to cross from one side to the other. It also makes warppoint dfence highly important.

[douglas]

Assuming only two combatants, the defender's fleet placement works just like at any other location - ships that started the turn there start near the middle (which just happens to be near the warp point), while ships that just arrived that turn are near the edge of the map in the direction they came from. The attacker, assuming he's attacking through the warp point, starts near the warp point. The defender moving first and the coincidence of the start locations for stationary ships and warping ships being close to each other usually means the defending fleet starts in range and can use its first move to shoot. If your ship started in the middle of the enemy fleet and never attacked, it must have had some other reason why it didn't shoot. Maybe it was out of supplies, or all its weapons were destroyed. If it had no valid reason to not shoot, then you may have encountered a bug.

[Randallw]

I actually avoided the term "Shoot" because it had no weapons. It's fitted out with ramming warheads. Perhaps I mixed up the orders. The placements fits your description though. The idea was it would ram a ship before the vastly outnumbering enemy fired.

[douglas]

Oh, right, ramming ships. I've had some experience with fighting those in a few games, and it seems in my experience that orders to ram are treated as "Do not get hurt" for the very first round of combat. I haven't specifically tested this, but at least once I had a space monster go through a warp point in The Galactic Invasion 2 to find a mixed fleet of rammers and shooters defending it. The shooters took their shots immediately as I'd expect, but the rammers all ran away for one round, then turned around and came back, chasing my ship through the rest of the battle. I think it finally ended when one of them caught up with me.

[Randallw]

hmm, good to know. I might have to change some of my tactics.

[Atrocities]

Mines, Satellites, Ships, and bases. SEIV spreads everything out so horribly that it is nearlly impossible to actualy DEFEND a warp point.

Vary your Satellite designs, make some long range powerful and some short range very powerful (ripper Beams) Add armor or shielding.

The ships assigned to protect the Warp Point should always get first shot, so also vary them from long range to short range. (Torps often give you a LR advantage.)

Base should be heavily armored and have significant LR and SR weapons.

Mines are just there to help out in case your enemy doesn't have any sweepers but by turn 20 most empires have em and mines become useless.

ALSO - be sure that you have at least one satellite within the system that has a Hyper-Optic III component. This way you can see ALL of the ships in your system. No sneeking in cloaked mine layers.

[dogscoff]

Atrocities said:
Mines are just there to help out in case your enemy doesn't have any sweepers but by turn 20 most empires have em and mines become useless.

They prevent cloaked ships from sneaking through your warp points- you can't sweep while cloaked.

FOr static warp point defences, uses the largest mounts available and look for the biggest short-term damage. Doesn't matter if the reload rate of a weapon makes it less effective in the long-term than some other weapon, your goal is to do as much damage as possible in your guaranteed first strike. Weigh in favour of weapons and sensors rather than shields/ armour and ECM. If you hit them hard enough, they won't have anything left to hit back with.

Engine-killers are good (especially combined with repulser beams- yuk yuk yuk), anything that skips shields and/or armour is good, ship capture components are good, massive ruins tech weapons can be good too.

Mash 'em up...

[Alneyan]

dogscoff said:
They prevent cloaked ships from sneaking through your warp points- you can't sweep while cloaked.

Armour, even the standard Stealth/Scattering components, should be enough to soak up all the damage from regular mines. It probably wouldn't be so good against seriously beefed up mines (not the most important field of research normally), so that brings me to the second point.

Just send in a suicide sweeper right before your fleet, and you will go through the mine field unscathed (well, except for that one ship). Of course, it gives the game away, but you should be past their defences by now, and can start wreaking some havoc.

Third point is, of course, that cloaking is unlikely to do you much good beyond the early game. A lone satellite can detect everything cloaked in a system, can be deployed everywhere, and is dirt cheap (a ship/base component would work just as well, but I'm a miser). The best sensors come from the Advanced Military Science area, so they tend to be researched rather quickly. They wouldn't work in a red nebula, but you wouldn't be protecting anything in that sort of system.

On an unrelated note, mines do work fine in those red nebulas, if you would like to be notified when someone is sneaking by there... and it's always fun to blow up damaged enemy ships pulling out to the 'safety' of the nebula for repairs.