Terra Invicta – Advanced Space Combat Tactics

Guide to Advanced Space Combat Tactics

Feigned Retreat

If horseback archers could do Parthian shots thousands of years ago, so can we!

Col. Hanse Castillo

What You Need: Critical mass of coilguns that can overwhelm PD, eg 5 or more Battleships with advanced heavy coilgun batteries and advanced coil cannons. Decent frontal and rear (!) armor. A drive that is capable of good combat acceleration.

When I Use It: Outnumbered badly against a doomstack, consisting of ships with varied acceleration. When a heads up engagement would present too many PD at the same time as well as too much damage to deal with.

What to Do: Set initial velocity to the lowest that still lets you click on all control nodes. Turn back and accelerate with full force ASAP, at this point your rear armor may get hit a few times, so be wary of that. The enemy fleet will try to catch up. Since enemy ships differ in how fast they can catch up their fleet will separate to manageable groups of enemy ships. Once the fastest ships close their distance below coilgun range turn back to show your frontal armor and decelerate as fast as you can. The increased speed of incoming enemies limits their mobility, and increases coilgun damage. Enjoy as you grind down small pockets of enemies one by one as they arrive.

Encirclement

I was always amused watching dogs herding sheep whenever I visited the English countryside. It’s time to see whether ship and sheep have more in common than the way they sound.

Commander Fiona Ayoade

What You Need: Critical mass of coilguns that can overwhelm PD, eg 5-10 or more Battleships with advanced heavy coilgun batteries and advanced coil cannons. Decent frontal and rear (!) armor. A drive that is capable of very good combat acceleration (better or about the same as what the Ayy has) and high dV (!).

When I Use It: Outnumbered grossly against the largest doomstacks, when even a feigned retreat would fail, eg there are so many enemies that after stopping my ships to shoot back they would still overwhelm my fleet. Another situation is when there are many enemies with the same drive capabilities, so those would roughly catch up at the same time.

What to Do: Start as if you would do a Feigned retreat, but instead of turning back and decelerating keep bursting forward until you shake down all enemies. Start maneuvering your ships (together, keeping your formation) slowly to turn around, keeping your high speed. Pass by the enemy fleet and start doing circles around it. The Ayy will try to catch you but since your ships are doing continuous pass by-s around them they will accelerate toward your ships current position and once they reach their next control node you will have already moved on to another side of them. You can maintain this maneuver keeping a very high speed, helping your coilguns doing more damage and leaving less time for PD to work with. If things become problematic eg a ship gets damaged and have little use anymore simply stop circling with that ship and use your high speed to disengage.

Missile Boat Station Fly-By

Get fleet of 9 tiny missile boats with 4g acceleration and at least 100 dV, burn straight backwards then circle around until all alien ships are far from catching you, then stop, set primary targets to all alien defense modules then full burn

Takes down any alien station guaranteed and bypasses any defending fleet. half of your own fleet will survive

Dancing Defenders

Combine big dreadnaughts with low armor (around 5-1-1) with small ships with high armor (for example 30-15-20). Small ships also need decent dV and thrust, advanced pulsar is good enough.

Large ships can use any doomstack weapon you have access to (coil, plasma, mk3 rail, doesn’t really matter), and at least 1x particle PD (needed for more range). The small ships use 2 particle PD.

In pre combat, choose high wall, 0 velocity, and large ships spawn in the center.

Manually burn some of your small ships slightly in front of your fleet then click stop. But leave a few around the sides of your large ships, close to where they spawned.

Then during battle, let your large ships float, but keep burning your small ships in random directions every minute. You can also stop the burn at the half minute mark, so effectively your ships are changing acceleration twice a minute rather than once a minute.

Because the small ships are the closest target, aliens will target them first. Most of their coil rounds will miss because of your dancing, and the rest will be zapped by PD. Lasers and plasma will hit small ships, which will survive a long time due to their armor.

If pulled off correctly you can get really high survivability similar to a pure large ships fleet where every ship has 3x PD and 10+ points of side armor. But by going with small ships which have an order of magnitude cheaper armor, you dramatically save resources on armoring your large ships, and also can get away with less PD and more weapons on your large ships. The downside is more micro.