Torian Vengeance- Campaign #8

That's probably is the toughest mission in the campaign. It's just a huge military slugfest between two teams. There's no real opportunity for clever diplomacy or a cultural strategy like there is in the main game, so if you rely on those strategies, this mission will be tough.

The Altarians are useful mostly to keep the enemies occupied while you build up. I was able to get by with a minimum of military until battleships. There's obvious chokepoints, you can build military starbases there to hold off attacking enemies. That gave me a chance to build up my planets, and get tri-strontium steel and gravity accelerators.

I went on the offensive with dreadnaughts and paladins. You mention rangers and deathknights, but if you look closely at their stats, neither of those are very strong for how much they cost to build. Dreadnaughts are stronger and cheaper than deathknights, they're only slightly more expensive than battleships. And paladins or wraiths are better than rangers. I used dreadnaughts as the bulk of my forces because they are fairly cheap. I used a few paladins to defend fleets as they advanced on the enemy, and to guard planets where dreadnaughts were repairing. The paladins rarely attacked, so they were in good health when they got attacked. You can also bring antimatter missiles to soften-up targets before you send in your non-expendable ships. Maybe I was lucky, but the Torians built mostly corvettes and pheonixes in my game, they didn't have too many dreadnaughts or vampires.

To win, you only have to beat the Korx. It might be possible to get the Torians to help, but then you should make peace, make peace between the Torians and Altarians, and get then get the Torians to declare war on the Korx all on the same turn. That might take some serious bribes.

This is the way that I beat it:

Research, production and military bonuses are important in this mission.  Don't feel that you have to stay with the same political party and ability bonuses for every mission in the campaign. Try to pick the best bonuses for that mission.

1) It's very important that you don't cripple your Altarian allies by taking too many of the planets.  Take the sectors on the right side and let the Altarians get the ones on the right side. However, their cultural influence can cause trouble for you later so make sure that you don't let them get any of the influence resources.

2) Once you've established a line of colonies up to the battlefront, start building constructors in your lower colonies and attack/defense ships in your upper colonies.  Set a rallypoint on top of the star closest to the Korx. Make this the destination of all your colonies once you have a ship in orbit. This will keep a steady stream of warships going to this planet and keep the korx busy.  Make a planet in the lower right hand corner that's in a system with two colonized planets build freighters until you've built enough to max out your traderoutes.  Send those freighters to the Altarians (no use trying to trade with the Torians; the korx will just blow up your ships and it's not worth the escort).

3) While the korx are busy trying to get rid of all your ships in the front line stars, build transports from further planets and start sending them up to the front line.  As you get a sufficient invasion force, start taking out the nearby Korx planets.  You'll probably have to destroy the conqured colonies to keep them from falling back into Korx hands.  Use the constructors to build mining starbases and give you production bonuses.  If they're along the trade route path, build the trading modules too.

4) Make sure to spend money on destabilization and espionage on the Korx. 

I was going for terror stars, but I think that I ended up beating the mission before I built any.