Dread Lord soup anyone?

How I stomped the big man himself.

I was playing the 'seige' campiagn last night. I was playing alot, over and over even. Yes, really. I got my butt handed to me many many times. I prefered 'normal' difficutly.

At first I thought that since any shot fired from a dread lord at my ship ment certain death, cargo hulls were the same as normal. They just hold more weapons and engines so they can get first shot and win before dying. Nope. Logistics limit that far too much.

So then I think (new game), why not build lots and lots and lots of tiny ships? They are far cheaper and more can fit in a fleet. Of course that worked better since the rest get to fire again after one dies. I built them like crazy. I had 7 fleets of 14 built before the Dread Lords even showed up.

I destroyed their first battle ship with 2 losses in my first fleet. Then I sent all of them to their homeworld and devistated their entire fleet in orbit one ship at a time using only one of my fleets, without loosing any ships.

At this point, I had researched the entire line of planetary invasion through shock troops, so it was no sweat to stomp on 10 million DLs.

At this point, I have a massive fleet compared to the Drengin and Yor, so piece of cake.

The wierd point about all this is that the Dregin and Yor only had shields on any of their ships. No weapons at all. They just kept building more with sheilds alone each time I blew one up. I also had no one left after a ground invasion (0 remaining on both sides) in this game. So I am wondering....

Did anyone else find this easy once they got the right stratagy, or was my game a bit too easy?
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Reply #1 Top
I found that ignoring the Dread Lord ships altogether and then intercepting only their transports and constructors with swift fighters was a handy way of thwarting them until I was able to research enough tech to beat them face-to-face in direct combat.

For the most part the Dread Lords ignored my ships unless they were within one move of a transport/constructor, or too near any of their cruisers/battleships; then they'd start attempting to catch my ships. I always made it a point to build ships that had a movement capability of the Dread Lord Escort ships (seemed to be the fastest of them) plus 1 or 2 for safety. Using Impulse mk3 was sufficient in most cases. Slapping something as crude as a laser V was enough for transport/constructor/starbase interdiction (assuming the starbase wasn't equipped with battlestations).

I also found that not building any starbases helped keep them away from my area of the map; somehow they can 'sniff' out a starbase from over 15 sectors away - they must have something like Eyes of the Universe to allow them to see everything on the map - especially starbases. As a flipside of this, using starbases as bait to lure the Dread Lord ships out of your quadrant (and perhaps into the laps of the Drengin/Yor/Etc) was pretty effective. Just fly a constructor to where you want to lure the Dread Lord armada, construct any type of base, and then wait a couple turns for the AI to 'get it on its radar'. Once done, just sit back and watch all the ships just home in on the hapless starbase. You should make a note to decommision it just before it gets whacked so you can at least recover the BCs for scrapping it.

Lastly, I found that letting the dread lords take a few worlds and then taking them back later in the scenario helped in the chance of stealing their tech for your own use - I got Hyperwarp II and some high-level mass driver I forget the name of right now (had a damage rating of like 7 or 8) from doing this. Helps save time on researching these techs yourself.

Anyways, the thought of using swarms of little ships seems like a good one. I'll have to try it out.

--- Danek Jovax
Reply #2 Top
I was just suprised to have conqured them entirely with only one fleet of ships. They were not much of a problem once I got that idea.
Reply #3 Top
What wepons and stuff did you put on the ships? What other stuff did you research?
I'll probably get round to playing the campaign properly at some point and apparently that levels quite hard.
Reply #4 Top
I researched a bunch of techs, but all after I had built those ships. They used only the techs you have available at start.