SDTroll wrote:I enter the system, winning the WP battle. The enemy fleet retreats to the planet and waits for me under the cover of the PDCs. For the example, lets say the planet has 30 PDCs on each side, so 180 total. Each PDC has a Ptb, a Mg, and a Da.
That's it? No armor? What EL?
I bring my drone ships through the warp point and park out of range of the planet and the fleet on the planet. Once I have determined that the PDCs exist, either with a sacrificial fleet or a flight of sensor laden drones, I want to take out the planet in one shot, so I launch a huge number of attack drones, (each has 6 XObs with two Ptbs on them).
Ok, so you have to be using Drone2 (since Drone1 can't use weapons). So you have to be at least SL 6, right? I'm guessing you're a plasma race too... no other weapons researched yet?
I want to hit all six hex sides at the same time. Can all the drones fly in one stack and fire from the same hex, with targeting rules for which hex side they hit, or does each group need to fly around the planet to aim at the correct hex side.
You can only hit something you can see. At the very least, a PDC has a 180 arc of fire. So if you are facing one hexsides, you should be able to shoot into that hexside or the hexsides immediately to the clockwise and counter-clockwise positions.
I'm not sure how sophisticated the drone programming can be. Could my programming directions be: Move at top speed to hex XXXX (something 12 hexes from the planet), then fire all XO racks at hex YYYY (hex with planet in it) targeting PDCs on hex side 1 only?
I don't have the ULTRA rules in front of me, but I think you can simply give it a targeting parameter for PDCs. If I remember correctly, D9 has the rules for that.
I hope that is clearer. Even with drones it is hideously expensive to take the planet out. If my calculations are correct, assuming no ships to come out and engage the drones, it will take around 80 drones per hex side to take out all the PDCs. That is something like 20,000 Mcr, not counting the ships to launch them and the maintenance. Heaven help you if you need to take out more than one planet. Unless I'm missing something, which is likely.
Unless you're just not telling me about dozens or hundreds of points of armor on those PDCs, those things should be toast in a heartbeat. Sure you'll have 90 of them able to fire into a hexside at any time, but Da can't assist datalink members and PDCs, once detected, are nearly impossible to miss...
I'd have to see you're exact setup and numbers, but my gut tells me that either I'm missing some information or you've made an assumption that is making this harder than it should be.
SDTroll wrote:Unfortunately, the tech level was pretty low when we were fighting. No W boxes, although the sheer volume of fire might work, if you could survive the counter attack. Of course, with Plasma torps, I need We just to use them. In the original scenario, we didn't even have point defense yet or AP yet. Now I'm just playing with the system to try to find a solution other than banning PDCs, which is top of the list right now.
There are other options as well, such as increasing the hull cost, requiring minimum and maximum sizes, increasing the maintenance percent (or just having a maintenance surcharge), etc. And as Xveers mentioned, GFFP always works and you can't miss.
The other option I've been looking at is shuttles with bombs, not sure how that would work yet, but at least they are really cheap.
Don't know... the point defense will be very hard on the shuttles, I believe the "bomb" was originally envisioned by Marvin to be a cheap way to destroy ground troops.
The diplomatic penalties of genocide make it pretty unattractive, but at least the people are easier to hit.

Well, true. But if you do it to everyone, does it matter? After a while, there won't be anyone left to care (one of the the founding principles behind GFFP)