Defend Planet / Intercept Fleet

[Litcube]

At a choke point, can enemies casually stroll through your system and continue on into your empire if you "Defend Planet" and they "Hold Position"?

[Bhruic]

Yup. Both of those are considered "defensive" actions, which means no attack will take place. Next turn, that fleet can continue moving, should it choose. If you want to make sure to stop incoming, you must intercept (although the AI is generally too dumb to take advantage of that fact).

Bh

[RobNelson]

If you don't engage them (such as in your example), then they can move freely through the system.

By the way, if you intercept fleet and they assault planet, then the battle takes place at the planet.

[Czaroc]

What I hate is when you select 'intercept fleet' and there is no battle and the next turn the enemy fleet is moving deeper into your empire.

Sometimes I think it happens when you have an enforced peace. At that point you cannot engage any fleets of that paticular government and they can't touch yours. Good time to sit and blockade all of his planets and rush a bunch of colony ships across his borders. I hope they fix this problem next patch, because it sucks when you are the on the receiving end of such a rush during enforced peace.

[RobNelson]

Actually, if you intercept fleet, and they defend planet, then there is no combat (intercept fleet basically means, "If they poke their noses out, snap them off; just stay away from those planetary defenses.")

So if you want to engage no matter what, attack planet. If the planet's too tough for you, but you'd like to engage the fleet, intercept fleet. If even the fleet's too tough, either defend planet (if you have one in system) or blockade planet.

That's a generalization, of course (and a simplistic one at that :D ), but it makes the point. Once you understand how the fleet engagement options work, you can use them to your advantage (most of the time - sometimes you get hosed no matter what).

[cousLee]

Here is the situation, including reloads.

I have a boarder planet, with an attack pending. In that system, I have planetary defenses, and an inferior TF.

Load 1> I choose to defend planet. No combat occurs. However the system still gets blockaded.

Load 2> I choose intercept fleet. The inferior TF engages the enemy, and the planet does not appear on the combat screen. hence the TF gets destroyed (to put it mildly lol). Planet still gets blockaded.

If the planet would have shown in the battle screen, it's defenses could have contributed to (novel thought) the defence of the system. had that happened, and i still lost, I could accept that. But the way it pans out, I have no way of stopping the blockade.

Advice?

[rhyssan]

Originally posted by cousLee
Here is the situation, including reloads.

I have a boarder planet, with an attack pending. In that system, I have planetary defenses, and an inferior TF.

Load 1> I choose to defend planet. No combat occurs. However the system still gets blockaded.

Load 2> I choose intercept fleet. The inferior TF engages the enemy, and the planet does not appear on the combat screen. hence the TF gets destroyed (to put it mildly lol). Planet still gets blockaded.

If the planet would have shown in the battle screen, it's defenses could have contributed to (novel thought) the defence of the system. had that happened, and i still lost, I could accept that. But the way it pans out, I have no way of stopping the blockade.

Advice?
that's just the way it works - you can blockade a system without ever getting close enough to the planet for it to defend itself. the only way to break a blockade is to intercept, and the blockaders aren't crazy enough to come close to your planet for the battle in that case! :)

-rhyssan

[DeckPrism]

Well, if you don't have enough ships, how do you expect to stop a blockade? The planet itself can't contribute to breaking the blockade unless the AI is stupid enough to atk the planet and loses. Short answer: get more ships there.

[cousLee]

So strategically, it's better to concentrate on system ships, than planetary defenses. I have concentrated mainly on planet based defenses first (cost being a consideration), thinking my super fighter base would be able to contribute.

Blockading a system from inter-system resources is fine. Blockading preventing inter-planetary resources is WRONG! if the blockading fleet can get close enough to stop a load of food from Anal II to Anal III, then Anal III's planet based defenses should be able to intervene imo.

(throws another strategy idea in the round file).

[Beamup]

Originally posted by cousLee
Blockading a system from inter-system resources is fine. Blockading preventing inter-planetary resources is WRONG! if the blockading fleet can get close enough to stop a load of food from Anal II to Anal III, then Anal III's planet based defenses should be able to intervene imo.

Hardly. Interplanetary distances are orders of magnitude greater than the size of a battle arena. It would be child's play to intercept interplanetary traffic without coming anywhere near the planets in question.

[cousLee]

Provided one is viewing any given system as if our own, consider this. How can a TF hanging around Pluto, intercept a ship going from Mars to Earth with impunity? granted, there is plenty of space between Mars and Earth for a battle that does not involve the planets, provided the TF can get there. Even if the TF detected the ship leaving Mars, the ship would reach Earth long before the enemy TF could even reach Mars, let alone intercept the cargo ship.

[DeckPrism]

Originally posted by cousLee
So strategically, it's better to concentrate on system ships, than planetary defenses.

"Its better" depends. For the cost, and at a certain stage of the game, and vs AI's, planetary defenses are good. They can also reduce piracy faster, being cheaper. Yes, if your goal is to stop passerbys then you need ships. Fortress worlds at boarders and critical junctures will need orbitals. Cost vs time. Strategy = applying resources to meet goals.

PS I can get "past" Pluto simply by coming from the other side.

[rhyssan]

Originally posted by cousLee
...
Blockading a system from inter-system resources is fine. Blockading preventing inter-planetary resources is WRONG! if the blockading fleet can get close enough to stop a load of food from Anal II to Anal III, then Anal III's planet based defenses should be able to intervene imo.
if this has changed post-patch, i apologize in advance. it would've had to be a code change, and i didn't see it mentioned, but who knows....

a blockade doesn't stop planets within the system from trading. in some pre-1.2.5-patch games, having a planet that was exporting food in a blockaded system saved me!! in one case, the sole farming planet couldn't quite feed everyone in the system, but it did enough! of the 4 planets i owned there, 1 (it) was exporting (green), 2 were importing (yellow) and 1 was starving (red). the imports couldn't have come from out-system because i couldn't break the blockade for at least 5-10 turns (wasn't set up for war to start yet :( ). so the only way i got green instead of white and 2/1 yellow/red instead of 3 reds were from that one "feed the world" planet.....

not to argue on either side of whether it's reasonable - just throwing the observation out there...

-rhyssan

[Norfleet]

Space is big. Really big. Perhaps the bigness and emptyness of space hasn't quite entirely occurred to you, but there's a lot of empty space which falls outside of the battle arena. That means there's plenty of space to go and shoot down little ships flying through that space. Besides, freighter captains are chickens and don't even want to try in numbers large enough to actually alleviate a planetary shortage.

[cousLee]

Space is big. Really big. Perhaps the bigness and emptyness of space.....
Oh, it has. hence the reason for my POV. It's so big and vast, that to say a TF a trillion miles away from a transport that only has to travel a comparetivly short, can catch up with that transport becore it can reach the arena of battle that would/could include planetary based fighters. (not to mention, if someone had a CV orbital, which I didn't have in this instance)


a blockade doesn't stop planets within the system from trading.
I will have double check and see. Upon seeing the planet was blockaded and starving, I was under the impression nothing was getting through. I really hope your right and I was in error. Now how I go about checking that is a guess. having inter-planetary, and inter-system import/export details would have been nice. If it's there already, it would be nice if it was easy to find. (IE, a third tab on the demographics pop-up)

[RobNelson]

Well, the distance the Planetary Defenses cover is WAY less than the distance between Earth and Mars when they're at their closest approarch. An enemy fleet could very easily sit between the two and intercept everything, without the intervention of planetary defenses. Even missiles would be SOL, since they'd have long since run out of fuel (and hence would be easy to dodge. And that's only when they're at their closest.

[cousLee]

if the enemy TF is sitting between mars and earth, it would then be too far to away to intercept things sent from pluto to uranus. The enemy TF can't be at all places at the same time, and can not cover every planet in a given system...... using the distance between planets as a basis.

But as ryssan pointed out, I may be incorrect in my assumption. I looked back at the save, and indeed i didn't have any bio in that system. So knowing for sure will have to wait for another chance to investigate it.

I am scrapping that game anyway. Way too many mistakes made early on, and if I have to re-work the entire empire, I would just rather start a fresh one. besides, starting fresh will give me a good oppertunity to start my DP fiddling.

I still don't agree wih the set-up. But it would seem i am in good company. Most players here have something or another that rubs them the wrong way, even though they still enjoy the game (as do I)

[Ron_Lugge]

Your system can be blockaded, but your planets still do in-system trading.

:mad:60:mad:Second:mad:limit:mad:

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by cousLee
if the enemy TF is sitting between mars and earth, it would then be too far to away to intercept things sent from pluto to uranus. The enemy TF can't be at all places at the same time, and can not cover every planet in a given system...... using the distance between planets as a basis.

They don't have to. The amount of shipping required to supply planets is massive, and freighter captains aren't armed or trained in combat. They're simply not paid enough for this, and since it's impossible to detect an enemy ship at a distance of less than a few dozen planetary radii, the freighter captains begin to think that the damn things are everywhere, and are too scared to even try. They're not the ones starving, after all. Furthermore, their hard-earned tax money was sent to you so that YOU could build a military and shoot these things down. That's YOUR job. You can't very well blame the freighters for not doing their jobs if you refuse to do yours properly.

Sure, there will be a few brave ones who try anyway, but like I said, the amount of shipping required is massive, and a few people won't make a difference. It also doesn't help that since you're not going and blasting these ugly whatevers out of the sky, there's a strong selective pressure against attempting a run when it won't really help.

Never underestimate the effectiveness of applying strong selective pressure against an undesirable behavior.