Since building the partystarters, did we have any significant technological advances or do we expect any presently?
We managed to reverse engineer their engine tech.
That means practical applications of that are on their way. New missiles, fighters, faster ships of all stripes ...
And I think we have some fire control or ECM/ECCm upgrades in the works as well.
However, building new ships or upgrading existing ones takes years.
Fighters and Partystarters can be build quickly (and new, faster assault shuttles!) though.
I'm a bit lost on the strategic gameplay, but while their fleet is playing hide and seek, it seems like a great opportunity to strike vital infrastructure.
That's what this is, but we intend to do more than merely run in and strike their orbitals. The conquest of the planet is the real goal. Most of the ground army for that is building and assembling as we speak.
And the reason why is simple: conquering it gets you hundreds of research labs, financial centers, construction factories of all stripes, and free tech.
Not sure how much damage their defenses can do exactly, but that's a risk I'm willing to take if we can take out their shipyard and orbitals.
It's probably similar to their ships. But they can't move and at least half of the eight orbital fortresses are primarily missile defenses. We'll figure it out when we get to it, right now their massive fleet is the primary concern.
Assume we want to keep the mines intact so we can take those over in a later stage.
Yeah, it's good to know where they are but we won't attack those until we've secured the system.
Without the shipyard, we can nibble away at their fleet which won't be repaired or reinforced, right?
If they don't fight us directly, sure. Then we can lock the door on the jump point by parking our fortress on it on our end and repeat the Partystarter operation.
But they may very well decide to fight and then we're looking at something very similar to our earlier engagements with them. 6 or 7 massive waves of anti-ship missiles at 7 minute intervals, which requires us to bunch everything that can shoot together so we can fight them off.
Once they run out of missiles they're pretty much dead though, our laser gunships are faster and can kill them by keeping the range open.
But it's dangerous. Our fleet is much larger than the previous times, but so is theirs. Seven waves of 315 anti ship missiles is nothing to sneeze at, and they also have the shorter ranged Deux Sèvres there which in sufficient numbers can also be dangerous.
Destroy their naval infrastructure (and STO?) -> destroy their fleet -> take a moon / establish forward operating base -> soften up and take the planet -> mop up the system -> home before Christmas
StO stands for Surface to Orbit batteries. They will have a bunch of that, and that's also going to be dangerous. Since it's ground based and can reach the moon that part of softening them up is a step in the process, probably after we secure the system.
