BM Drones - Warp Busters! Help Captain Kwok!!!

Your opponent has used a simultaneous transit. This is not limited to drones. From the looks of it he just told them all to move through the transit at once instead of one by one. The minor drawback is that some of them might materialise in the same place and thus blow up. I wouldn't use it with manned ships as it amounts to suicide for the crew, but who cares if drones die? I would have done the same myself.

Here's a description from a Starfire point of view (Starfire being a table top game with some nice things in common with SEV)

Simultaneous Transits -- While these can be hard to fathom, many times it was best to sacrifice 30% (nb: As far as I can determine in SEV it's between 10 and 20%) of your force in order to win the battle with lower casualties. Due to either a single die roll preventing the race from ever using simultaneous transits or due to the races nature (generally from a role playing stand point), many races were not able to do simultaneous transits causing that race to be forever limited in attack ability.

My current Starfire race, Arachnids, wouldn't give a second thought to swamping the warp point in this way.

You can deploy fighter wings vs drones. Especially if they are missile drones.

Remember; Drones are pricy to build too. This is probably a big fleet investment.

~Myrath

Pricey maybe but character wise it at least allows you to use the tactic in good conscience. Later computer driven ships would also allow it. One of my finest memories was when I dropped a couple of dozen simultaneous cruisers on my enemies defences

how do you set it to do that? id always attack like that if i could. hehe my ships are armored everywhere, they would prolly take damage but survive.

the amount of armour is irrelevant. Two objects cannot share the same space. Not that I know for certain but at least in Starfire materialising in the same space guarantess the joint destruction of both masses.

As the explanation goes, it is impossible for two objects to share the same space. Bad things happen to objects that do the impossible.

If you want to try it though just place the ships in a fleet, then go to the controls for the fleets wp transit order and tell everything to go through at the same time, as opposed to ship 1 (1), then ships 2 (2) etc. You can even mix it, have some groups go in order but the ships in each group go at the same time.

Here is what the SE5 manual says

Warp Transit Order This section allows you to set options for the control of how your ships move through warp points.
Simultaneous Transit If this is set TRUE, then your ships will attempt to transit the warp point at the same time. Doing this raises
the risk of the ships hitting each other and being destroyed. If this is set to FALSE, then ships will transit in
order one at a time.

so maybe they do just ram each other. Armour might help, i don't know.

Has anyone read "In Death Ground" and "The Shiva Option" by David Webber? The books play out the combat and warp point assaults very much like the game, the mention of Randallw's Starfire race "Arachnids" is the exact main enemy/threat of the book series. If no one's read them, they're great game related fiction even though they don't correspond to SE5. Some of my warp assault strategies have come from those books as the massed drones simultaneous warp transit was the primary warp defense buster of the Alliance against the arachnids.

Just thought I'd share:)

I have indeed read them both. They are my favourite books, such that my copy of The Shiva Option is quite worn out. I've thought of getting another copy. Crusade was also quite good. I've never read Insurrection as I am philosophically opposed to the idea of any part of Humanity committing the sin of rebelling against Earth. I got Exodus awhile ago. Big dissapointment. Weber wasn't involved, It didn't seem to have any sense of background, the new aliens were unrealistically dealt with seeing as how they seem to copy technology from the Federation the second they see it, at least the Arachnids took 18 months to develop Gunboats, and 2 years to make Monitors. What was worse was it ends inconclusively with a promise of being finished later but near as I can tell not only is there no plan to write another book but it looks like there never was.

In my multiplayer game using Arachnids I got a bit of pleasure in that the first race I consumed was the Star Kingdom of Manticore. It's True .

I've been writing a story for it if you're interested Ray. I mean, I'm not Weber, but it's fun not to bother with all that annoying diplomatic stuff.

http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/5617#comment-42812

I haven't had the oppurtunity to really go on the offensive but at least I've gotten good use of kamikaze gunboats.

"Crusade" is available at the Baen free library as ebook. You could DL the rest from some of the Baen CDs put on the net.

I was thinking about a mod that would better conform with White's Starfire series.

For the record in my Arachnid game I finally managed to use a simultaneous transit. Two light cruisers and a destroyer, in which the destroyer hit one of the light cruisers and blew up. The light cruisers, and the rest of the fleet survived so i suppose plenty of armour might well be useful. The situation was that my enemy had enough fighters that I thought they'd do more damage attacking each ship as it appeared than I could expect risking a collision and bringing maximum firepower.