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Post by pokington on Sept 24, 2016 12:50:12 GMT
I'm having a lot of trouble with the stinger drones on the Retaking Ceres mission.
At the start of the mission the enemy fleet launches their drones in a beeline for my fleet. I can't seem to evade or destroy them. I have yet to find maneuvers that can cause them to miss due to the very low orbital speeds, and attempts to shoot them down en-route with beam drones and missiles have all failed. Once they make it to my fleet, the drones just annihilate my carrier while my schooner just runs for safety.
Can you please share your tips for dealing with these stupid drones?
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Post by nerd1000 on Sept 24, 2016 13:19:08 GMT
IIRC you have a support carrier on that level, which has a small number of beam drones. Send them out to intercept the incoming enemy stingers: 2 beam drones can defeat an entire squadron of stinger drones if you get the approach angle right.
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Post by domfluff on Sept 24, 2016 19:51:45 GMT
Am currently on this level, and was thinking about it last night. Obviously this means that I'm as new as you are, so grain of salt.
You can fight drones with drones, that will work. Lasers are the anti-drone weapon, so beam drones should be good against them. There are difficulties with this, not least is that your drones need to both slow down relative to the enemy (turning 180 degress, if you're trying to engage fully), and slowing down whilst ensuring that your drones are engaging the enemy before your ships is another.
The other one though (and I suspect the real answer) is that your ships have a lot more dV than the enemy drones do - force them to manoeuvre and this should be simple, I think.
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Post by pokington on Sept 24, 2016 19:52:30 GMT
Alright, with some work I managed to get a good intercept with my beam drones. You were right -- they made very quick work of the stinger drones. The key is getting a slow enough engagement that your drones can actually get good time on target.
20 flak missiles and some of my own stinger drones later, and I made it through unscathed. Thanks!
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Post by domfluff on Sept 24, 2016 20:27:30 GMT
Just had a really frustrating "loss" here - killed everything with no damage in return, but one of the "kills" was an engineless enemy craft, sent spinning off on an escape trajectory, so I couldn't catch it  |
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Post by Crazy Tom on Sept 24, 2016 20:45:21 GMT
IIRC I used custom unarmored ships and made the enemy drones run out of dV before my missiles smashed the opposition.
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Post by etranger on Sept 24, 2016 21:00:42 GMT
Just had a really frustrating "loss" here - killed everything with no damage in return, but one of the "kills" was an engineless enemy craft, sent spinning off on an escape trajectory, so I couldn't catch it That has happened twice to me. Third time I just had enough dV for an intercept with my capitals.... |
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Post by josephw71 on Sept 25, 2016 15:06:56 GMT
Could not get my laser drones to intercept the stingers, managed to run them dry with the stock fleet, took a lot of tries. Going to go back at some point and figure out the drone to drone intercept, seems like an important skill.
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Post by kpatwin on Sept 26, 2016 2:29:07 GMT
I'm having difficulty outmanuevering both drones and missiles. The missiles I can get some of the time, but most of the time I can't shake them and waste a ton of delta-v with nothing to show for. Any tips on what type of burns I need to do to run them out of dV?
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Post by RA2lover on Sept 26, 2016 3:22:49 GMT
Ignoring gravitational influence (Ceres has a gravity low enough to allow this), once you have an intercept, you only need to spend as much delta-v mantaining the intercept as the target does. The default ships for the mission have 5-6km/s of delta-v. Flak missiles have about 2 and Stinger drones 3.5 or so, meaning evading them requires a sizeable portion of your ships' delta-v. It's much easier to use the laser drone. to intercept them. With some trajectory planning, it's possible to destroy their entire missile/drone magazines with just 2 of them while spending less than 500m/s of delta-v on them.
My strategy involved waiting for the missiles and drones to accelerate(which takes 2m), then launch the laser drones in such a way as to intercept both initial salvos in one go.
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Post by lelden on Sept 26, 2016 18:05:23 GMT
When the AI launched their missiles/drones I launched a few missiles and some drones to counter. I slowed them down just a tiny bit to get them in a tighter orbit and then tried to intercept the missiles and drones. One trick to note is that you can click on your path before the 'intercept' or 'flyby' icons and still sometimes get the option. Where you click on your path is where it tries to start its burns, so starting earlier uses less delta-v. The missiles were easy since they homed on my missiles and so 5 of mine took out 25 of theirs. The drones were not that hard since even if we came together at a large relative velocity they would try to change course to stay in range and expend their delta-v.
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Post by Durandal on Sept 26, 2016 18:27:46 GMT
Hello everyone, first post here.
My tactic was to deploy Beam Drones from the support carrier without deploying them as a new fleet. I kept them with my capships as CAP unit and spammed missiles at the enemy (5 nukes, 20 flake per wave).
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Post by kpatwin on Sept 26, 2016 22:31:50 GMT
Thanks for the tips. I think I'm gonna go back through the tutorials and relearn the basics, because I'm struggling with understanding how to manage my burns and plot successful intercepts
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 3, 2016 19:23:14 GMT
What I did was actually build a custom ship that had 4 39mw 8mm rail guns per side so 16 total and 4 100mw lasers per side for a total of 16 of those. That plus 8 60mw power plants is enough to utterly destroy the drones and with 4 devastator nuke launchers launched in one big salvo so 40 27mt nukes hit the cap ships first and very much ruined them so I could finish off the wrecks with the railguns.
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Post by nivik on Oct 3, 2016 20:29:29 GMT
Huh. I went with a very different tactic.
I engaged the Stinger drones with small salvos (between 5 and 10) of Striker nuclear missiles with homing turned off (the missiles set to "no order"). The Stingers aren't set up to fire at missiles, so you can wait for your formation of nukes to pass through the formation of Stingers and manually detonate them to get anywhere from a 70 to 100 percent kill rate.
I've found that sacrificing missiles to neutralize drones and sacrificing drones to neutralize missiles are both pretty effective tactics.
That said, my quartermasters probably hate me. I chew through consumables like they're candy.
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