|
Don't fight - ROB. We will see occasions when a ship will be used as
a Sacrificial Lamb (SL) but other than that you should never fight anything
even close to your size. A cloaked, undamaged MBR is much more useful
than the benefit from eliminating an enemy's medium size capital ship.
Play the fuel game. You will always need less fuel than they do. Strip
unowned planets of fuel with "gather" and whenever you can't
steal a ship at least steal its fuel.
Steal ships. (Now we get down to the meat of the problem.) The following
tactics are all based on the problem that in order to steal a ship's
fuel, so that we can tow it to a SB, we MUST be at exactly the same
coordinates as the enemy ship. We can't use intercept to get there because
the turn order is steal - move - combat. If the enemy capital ship has
enemy set to Privateer (if he doesn't have it set to Privateer the first
time he will from then on), you will die at the end of movement and
before you get a chance to steal. You have to be cloaked when you arrive
at the same place as the enemy ship.
Wait at a planet (yours or unowned) from which you have removed the
fuel. If you are sure that you have more fuel capacity than he has fuel
then just set ROB SHIP and wait until the next turn to begin towing
him back to your SB. You can't do this at his planet because he might
transfer fuel up from the planet and that happens AFTER you rob. Lo
and behold, you end up with a very angry capital ship on your hands,
he has fuel, you are not cloaked, and you get blown away.
Use a sacrificial lamb (SL) at one of his planets to capture capital
ships. Get a cloaked ship to one of his planets where you know ships
to be. Pick the ship you want and tow it out to a waypoint where you
have one or more MBRs waiting. Make sure you pick a waypoint position
so that if one of his other ships is set to intercept the one you are
stealing, the other one won't be able to make it that far (also see
tactic #5. This is called the SL gambit because the ship doing the towing
gets pasted at the end of movement (you haven't stolen the enemy's fuel
yet, that's what the other, cloaked MBRs are there to do.) You can try
to set it up so that your ship just runs out of fuel at the end of the
tow but this is a little dangerous. What happens if the ship takes on
cargo and is heavier than you thought?
Projecting a ship's course. (Your opponent has to be very inexperienced
for this to work.) If you see a ship moving toward a planet that is
more than 1 jump away, you can try to project where he will be on his
next jump if he continues to move at the same speed. If you try to do
this a lot, you will start to appreciate the Pythagorean Theorem.
Bait and switch. Send a nice target, a full large freighter or uncloaked
captured capital ship, toward enemy space. Unfortunately, for the enemy,
it is accompanied by a couple of cloaked MBRs. Make sure that the freighter
is out of fuel at the end of each jump. That way you don't loose it
when some capital ship arrives with weapons cocked.
The intercepted freighter gambit. If your enemy is "protecting"
his freighter by having a capital ship continually intercept it, you
can easily get both. Have a cloaked ship waiting at a planet when they
arrive. Tow the freighter with your ship but tow it in a known direction
and tow it further than the jump range of the enemy capital ship. Have
a second MBR waiting at the position where the capital ship will end
up. Example: Both freighter and capital ship have been moving at warp
9. Tow the freighter 90 LY north. Have the 2nd MBR waiting, cloaked,
81 LY north. The capital ship will try to follow the freighter but won't
keep up. You capture the freighter with guns (You DO put only x-rays
or disruptors on your MBRs, don't you? After all, MBRs are NEVER supposed
to fight anything but freighters.) The enemy capital ship is in deep
space, at a known position, where it is easy to ROB and then TOW.
The pirates nest. Privateers have real trouble defending a specific
planet against a large fleet. The best defense is that they shouldn't
know were the SB or rich planet is. Second, you can spread cheap ships
(they don't have to cloak) around your empire that always have ROB set.
These will rob enemy cloakers that are exploring your empire (this can
be disabled by the host in ver. 3.1). But assume the worst. Your enemy
knows where to do you damage and has a fleet on the way. Don't fight
back.
Set up a pirates nest at a planet they are likely to pass through.
This is a collection of cheap BR4s with warp 5 engines and some MBRS.
The BR4s wait at the planet until the fleet arrives. Each one then tows
a ship out to waiting MBRs, to deep space, and maybe one to the SB (if
the SB is capable of handling that one.) This breaks up the fleet and
gives you a chance to handle the ships one at a time.
How to attack with the Privateers
Contributed by Sirius (100441.3504@CompuServe.Com)
How to attack with the Privateers It is well known, that our beloved
Orion Space Traders (or Pirates as some people call them falsely) are
a race who has a difficult time if they have to confront an enemy in
an open large scale battle. Unless they have „organized“ heavy warships,
they just lack the necessary firepower to confront a strong opposition.
This is especially true in games without an engine- shield-bonus, because
the low mass Privateer ships are especially poor combatants (especially
against fighter carriers) without an engine-shield-bonus. Therefore
it is usually the best strategy for our peace-loving green folks from
Orion (who prefer dancing anyhow) to avoid any major fighting and to
stay hidden.
If the Orion Space Traders have to defend an specific important planet
against an determined attack, it takes careful planing to intercept
the incoming enemy at the right places, to break up his battlegroups
by towing some of his ships to hidden waiting defenders and to render
the attacking ships helpless by robbing their fuel. Some clever hints
about this tactic can be found for example in Dr. Dorn Peterson’s contribution
as cited in the Dreadlord battlemanual.
But there are times when you as an Orion commander cannot wait for
the enemy to come to you and when you do not have the possibility to
choose the location of the engagement, because you really want to attack
a heavily fortified planet. Due to your movement advantages you should
have a sound economy with plenty of starbases and enough minerals and
money at each of them. In other words: you should have a clear superiority
in numbers. But you still lack the real muscles, since your race just
cannot turn resources into great combat vessels. And if you cannot get
such ships from somebody else, you have to overwhelm the enemy by sheer
numbers (and maybe by the surprise due to the lighting speed of your
gravitonic accelerated battle groups).
The following battle report is from an still ongoing game (TH1 hosted
by Tim Hofstee in CompuServe’s PBM Forum) and shows how the Privateers
can attack a strong enemy homeworld even without any foreign technology.
It also shows that unexpected events can bring doom even to the most
sophisticated battleplans. I hope that some of the readers will learn
as much from reading my report as I did from planing and fighting the
attack.
The Crystals had started a war against the people from Orion by attacking
a planet and killing all innocent colonists there. In addition to that
the Crystalline web mines posed a great threat for the Orion trading
lanes, and therefore the council of Orion had to decide to extinguish
this Crystalline danger completely from the Echo cluster.
During the beginning of the war, the Orion activities concentrated
on disrupting the Crystalline economy, harassing the border planets,
destroying freight traffic and isolating the productive starbases from
their supply of minerals and money. Over time, the Crystalline war fleet
degenerated and the Crystals run out of resources to keep a full coverage
of web mine fields around their core planets. So the time had come for
the ultimate decisive battle: the attack onto the Crystalline homeworld.
The Orion council had developed a fine battleplan and prepared everything
for a long time. Starbases were specifically set up, ships custom build
for the attack, planets taken and supplied as intermediate staging areas
and then a fleet of a total of 14 ships (which was a big fleet then
given the fact that it was still relatively early in a resource poor
game) launched to fly the attack against the Crystalline homeworld.
The Crystals (or anybody else) did not see anything moving into position
and could have been warned in advance only by the fact that their defending
ships had been towed away by Orion ships for several turns. The Orion
fleet appeared in attack orbit around the Crystalline home world without
prior detection by the defenders. All ships came in either cloaked or
towed by meteors directly from the staging area at a planet some 150
light-years away.
The plan was that the Orion fleet should split into four battlegroups
and attack in four distinctive waves:
Group 1 (the Scout Lance) had the primary role to sweep the area free
of Crystalline webmines, which were deployed as a large barrier around
their homeworld. They had also captured some defending ships earlier
and flew a supporting attack against a secondary starbase nearby. All
scout ships had already moved to their positions cloaked and were equipped
with high tech beams and plenty of supplies (to repair possible web
mine hits).
Group 2 (the Combat Lance) was to take out (or capture) any newly arriving
defending ships, if they were to be build at the starbase just during
this turn or coming in from other planets. It was their purpose to protect
the third group from enemy ships. Therefore they fought first with their
high tech torpedoes and went in cloaked, so that they could not be reached
by the planetary defenses.
Group 3 (the Anti-aircraft Lance) had the sole purpose to shoot down
the fighter compliment of the starbase. This group consisted of cheap
expandable ships with enough beam weapons to handle the base's maximum
load of 60 fighters.
Group 4 (the Command Lance) was then to fly the final attack against
the planet and to destroy it with a lot of high tech weapons. They carried
a substantial amount of Mark VIII torpedoes.
Unfortunately the plan did not work out fully and the battle turned
out to be very costly for the attacking Privateers, although this was
not caused directly by the Crystalline defenses.
So what went wrong? Just in the moment when the brave people from
Orion launched their forces into the orbit around the Crystalline homeworld,
another race - the Fascists - appeared and attacked the Orion fleet.
Here is what happened „in slow motion“: The Scout Group swept the webmine
barrier away, which allowed not only the friendly ships, but also the
Fascists to move in (had the Fascists tried to move there any earlier,
they would have gotten stuck in the webmines badly, which had happened
to them at another location earlier in the game). Then some of the scout
ships flew their supporting attack against the second starbase. The
Combat Group blew the only newly arriving Crystalline ship in orbit
to pieces, but these ships did not fight the Fascist, since the group
was cloaked (to avoid the planetary defenses) and not set to Fascist
as primary enemy, since they were supposed to attack Crystalline ships.
The Anti-Aircraft Group was now attacked by the Fascists and entirely
destroyed, because these ships had never been designed to fight other
ships and were totally lacking any long range weapons. Only after the
Anti-Aircarft Lance was gone, the Command Group started to fight the
Fascist and were able to destroy the Fascist opposition (which was out
of ammunition at this point of time) immediately. Now the Command Group
proceeded to fight the planetary defenders. But the starbase was still
filled with fighters and those fighters were able to destroy most ships
of the Command Lance. Being ships of Privateer design, none of them
had the mass (there is no Engine Shield Bonus in this game) or the high
number of beam weapons to withstand a serious fighter attack long. Thanks
to their high tech weapons, the remaining Orion ships were eventually
able to bring down the starbase and planet, but only under high losses.
After the loss of the homeworld, the Crystalline opposition collapsed
rapidly.
The high losses during the attack could have easily been avoided, if
the Orions had just added one ship to the Combat group, with primary
enemy set to Fascist. That would have killed the Fascists (who did not
come with strong forces, since they stumbled onto the battle field by
pure chance) in the very beginning and protected the Anti-Aircraft Lance
until it’s ships would have been able to shoot down the defending fighters.
But the Orions just did not expect a Fascist attack against them over
the Crystalline homeworld. So the lesson is, always be prepared, that
somebody will surface (come out of cloak) totally unexpected to screw
up your plans. Be prepared for this possibility!
|
