The battle had begun in earnest. Warships and mechs from both sides began to shoot at each other. While the melee mechs of the human defenders had yet to go into action, they had already begun to maneuver across the battlefield in the hopes of finding favorable angles of attacks. The native aliens did not underestimate the threat of these melee mechs. If left unchecked, these primitive machines wielding swords, spears or axes could debilitate a lot of alien assets with the help of their space suppression modules. In order to prevent these melee mechs from weakening transphasic energy shields and disrupting the operation of warp drives with impunity, the native aliens had to stop or stall them no matter what it took! The native alien armada had spent much of the last few weeks shipping in large amounts of phasefighters from afar. Many of them were piloted by alien conscripts that possessed little to no experience in actual warfare, but their hardware was largely superior due to the more copious use of phasewater technology. The latest generation of phasefighter models especially stood out compared to the older models! The human defenders quickly noticed that the phasefighters reacted faster and more responsibly to different threats. The strike craft had also become more accurate even as they made faster and more complicated maneuvers. Their cannon hardpoints were able to angle their barrels at greater angles, and the automated tracking systems had become significantly more effective than before! While a mech controlled by a professional mech pilot was usually able to throw off the AI-driven tracking systems for a while, it became exponentially harder to do so when two or more phasefighters were working hard to gun down the human machine! These situations happened more often than not because the alien phasefighters easily outnumbered the total number of human mechs that remained in the star system! The earlier rounds of skirmishing had caused both sides to suffer losses. However, despite the fact that the native aliens lost more small craft than the humans, the invaders were much better able to absorb these losses. The removal of even a single mech had a much greater impact on the human forces due to how fewer of them were available from the start! What was worse for the defending side was that the melee mechs often had to fight at a distance from their ranged counterparts. This meant that melee mechs frequently found themselves in situations where they were outnumbered 2 to 1, 3 to 1 or even more lopsided ratios! Fortunately, few of the pilots succumbed to the immense pressure. They had endured similar situations in the past and trusted in their skills and the strength of their mechs to see them through this chaotic battlefield. Many melee mechs faltered and broke when they got strafed by multiple phasefighters swooping in from multiple directions, but many more managed to intercept the alien craft and quickly strip the alien craft of their defenses with the help of space suppressors. Supporting fire from ranged mechs most certainly eased the pressure, but only under limited circumstances. Their attacks largely bounced off the azure energy shields that protected the fragile frames of every phasefighter without much consequence. Only the mechs armed with transphasic firearms were able to inflict much more significant damage to the alien craft, but they were in the minority because phasewater was still out of reach to more ordinary outfits and military units. This was why it was crucial for the ranged mechs to coordinate their actions with the melee mechs. Only by weakening and dampening the phasewater technology that made phasefighters so difficult to deal with were the ranged mechs able to quickly exhaust the defenses of the alien craft! At first, this tried and true approach worked fine. Its simplicity was its strength. Most of the burden fell onto the melee mechs who needed to catch up to the relatively fast and agile alien phasefighters. While the melee mechs were not able to catch up to their targets by themselves, their pilots had plenty of training and experience in working together to pincer or flank the enemy strike craft! Space was big, the alien phasefighters could only travel in so many directions if they wanted to be useful on the battlefield. Human mech officers carefully read and analyzed the movement of enemy units before instructing subordinates to box in their designated targets. Plenty of alien craft were able to identify the trap in advance and urgently made turns that allowed them to escape the killboxes, but there were other alien phasefighters that failed to get out in time. Though the human mechs were employing the best and most proven tactics to cope against their enemies, the aggressors were not willing to allow their small craft to perish like this without being able to generate enough value. "Gunships!" "Damn, the puelmer gunships have arrived!" "Wait, those craft look different from the advanced puelmer craft!" A mech designer and analysts reported. "These gunships are single solid craft that are likely piloted by multiple alien crew members. Their architecture and material usage is distinctly orven in nature!" The orvens had apparently entered the gunship game as well. While they hadn’t taken the same route as the puelmers and formed their gunships out of combining the frames of numerous phasefighters together, their solution was much more economical and structurally sound! From the perspective of observing mech designers, the gunships were clearly designed with a lot more patience, intent and direction than most phasefighters. The orven gunships were also obviously designed in cooperation with treacherous cosmopolitan mech designers! It was painful to see so many sound human design principles being used to improve and optimize the design of the brand-new orven gunships. Even if the larger strike craft were not able to gain metaphysical enhancements like human mechs, their larger size and far greater capacity to accommodate weapons and other systems were already advantages by themselves! "So this is what the native aliens have been holding back all this time!" "Damn, their azure energy shields are much tougher!" "They’re slower and less maneuverable. They are three times easier to hit from afar." "That doesn’t help us all that much when we don’t have enough guns to wear them all down!" The orven contingent of the alien armada only deployed a couple of thousand of phasefighters, but they were already having a disproportionate impact on the battlefield. The gunships were equipped with basic miniature warp drives that allowed them to travel pretty fast so long as their flight was not being interdicted. Once a melee mech got close, the gunships began to show off their real strengths. Each gunship easily surpassed a heavy mech in size and mass. Their more generous dimensions allowed them to accommodate much stronger azure shield generators and thick layers of transphasic hyper armor plating. The latter was a radical departure from phasefighter design. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺 Whereas phasefighters largely tried to survive on the battlefield by relying on pretty decent energy defenses and mobility, gunships clearly tried to survive by banking on their much stronger energy defenses and armor systems that were no longer a joke anymore! Experience new tales on empire Though expensive, the gunships turned out to be excellent damage sponges at this scale of warfare. A dozen ranged mechs focused their fire onto an orven gunship, but the latter’s defenses proved to be so tough that it took a considerable amount of time just to take the larger craft out of action! The orven gunship did not passively take the beating. It instead opened fire at its attackers and any other human mechs that sought to take advantage of the situation! Powerful transphasic hyper positron beams spat out from multiple turrets and demiturrets. Their calibers were significantly greater than the smaller guns mounted on orven-developed phasefighters. Since the gunships were not only able to supply more energy but also manage the buildup of heat a lot better, their positron beam cannons were able to inflict serious harm onto any mech it hit, particularly if the target lacked azure energy shields or other effective forms of defenses! "Be careful when you are being targeted by these gunships! The new alien craft hit much harder than phasefighters! A few of my friends already got killed because their cockpits got breached before they even had a chance to pull their ejection levers!" What was worse was that the gunships had enough capacity to accommodate even more armaments! When melee mech units easily caught up up to these slower and less maneuverable craft, they suddenly found out that the orven gunships were equipped with weapon systems that were specifically designed to repel threats at close range! Hidden gun ports slid open and revealed short but wide barrels that soon began to launch transphasic hyper shrapnel in multiple directions! The spray of penetrating and incredibly deadly flechettes were so all-encompassing that hardly any of the nearby melee mechs remained unharmed from this devastating salvo! The closer the distance, the more devastating the damage incurred by the unprepared melee mechs! Many of them had lost power or floated erratically as their limbs malfunctioned and their internals got breached. The more powerful melee mechs that were equipped with azure energy shields managed to retain their mobility, but their energy defenses had been overloaded in an instant! "Press the attack! Try to maintain more distance and circle around rather than going in straight away. Watch out for any movement from the flechette guns and be ready to evade in an instant once they are on the cusp of opening fire! Stick to the blind spots of the gunships whenever possible!" Despite being taken by surprise, the melee mech pilots did not lose their cool and tried to adjust to this latest enemy type as best as possible. They quickly figured out that the gunships probably possessed a limited capacity of expensive transphasic hyper flechettes. They also found that it was still possible to threaten the gunships without getting shredded to pieces if they attacked the gunships at angles where their flechette guns were not able to reach. The rear was an especially good angle as there were only a handful of positron beam cannon turrets that could swivel directly to the rear. There were no flechette launchers that could do the same for this particular gunship model! However, the native aliens had at least two ways to deal with melee mechs that tried to hug the rear of their gunships. The orven craft were all equipped with a minimissile launcher. This module was able to launch small but potent transphasic minimissiles that were easily able to circle around and home in on the melee mechs that had been following from behind! Another way the native aliens tried to prevent melee mechs from weakening the phasewater technology that was crucial to keeping the gunships protected against human firepower was to call for help from other alien craft! The gunships by themselves possessed clear strengths and weaknesses. The humans could easily exploit the latter if the larger craft remained by themselves. However, when multiple gunships grouped up and covered each other with their guns, it became multiple times more difficult just to take one of these heavy craft down! When phasefighters were assigned to guard the gunships and drive away any melee mech that attempted to stay in the blindspots of the new orven craft, it became nearly impossible for the humans to quickly eliminate these powerful new assets! "We need a better solution against these orven gunships because they are killing us faster than we are able to take them down!" As the aliens became more adept with employing small craft in warfare, it seemed inevitable that they would resort to gunships to more effectively counter mechs. Even though they were far larger and more expensive to construct than phasefighters, it didn’t matter too much to the aliens as they had much more abundant resources at their disposal. Considering that only a few thousand of them were already enough to sap the momentum of over a hundred thousand human mechs, it was clear that the defenders needed to deal with them sooner rather than later!