I looked into the offense vs. defense issue using Kryo's ship battle simulator. Generally, I was hard pressed to find any case of two fleets of equal cost where one with defense was better off than a pure offense fleet (see caveats below). Here's a typical example: Each side has medium-sized hulls, and has Laser V / Shields tech (equal distance down each path). Player 1 is pure offense and his ships carry 9 lasers (9
See the wiki entry on difficulty levels. In addition to modifying the AI's intelligence, the lowest and highest difficulty levels lower/raise the AI's economy and production. Link
Starbases don't protect planets. If you see a starbase engage an enemy fleet, it's because that fleet attacked it. They have no ability to attack anything by themselves. What they do is provide military assistance to ships within their range of influence. For this you need to add the modules which say "defense assist" or "attack assist" to military starbases.
Influence is generated by population, modified by things like racial abilities, technologies, and improvements like embassies. Maybe that world had a large population or some influence modifiers like the Restaurant of Eternity? There's also a bug where after an invasion a world will temporarily have a ridiculously high population and this can cause the whole map to change color. But this goes away after a turn or two.
I just played a game on crippling with the non-beta game and noticed that the AI made at least one very strange starbase placement. The Arceans put and upgraded a military starbase on the edge of the map that didn't protect anything. I checked its radius of effect and there was nothing inside it-- no planets, ships or other starbases. Nor would any ships pass through its effect radius on their way anywhere. Is this a known bug?
In all levels, the enemies declare war and then begin a slow campaign of attrition. I declare war on them by capturing several worlds at once and wiping out multiple starbases with a surprise attack. It's very gentlemanly of it to declare its intentions and give me a chance to prepare, but gives it a big disadvantage. How about at tough difficulty and above, the AI will never declare war until it's ready to actually attack? That is, when
I agree that it does seem a little odd when late in the game the computer will make a ridiculous offer, even if you have a huge diplomacy advantage. "No, I will not give you majesty for missile defense theory."
You probably mis-read it-- there are two techs called "Photonic Torpedo I & II" before switching to "Photon torpedo."
Fleet A will beat Fleet C: Much of Fleet C's firepower is wasted in overkill, while little of Fleet A's firepower is wasted, and it isn't blunted by defences. Actually, given fleets of comparable cost, fleet C will win because bigger ships provide economies of scale. For the cost of a huge ship with
Regarding the fleet combat, I think you could explain it by saying that the smaler ships are defending the bigger ones. I know it really doesn't look like it in the combat viewer, but it would make sense for the little fighters to be running interference for the star destroyers or troop transports. Or to use the naval example, you can't just attack the aircraft carrier-- they're in the middle of a carrier battle group for defense: <a href="http://en.
The initial colony grab appears to be critical to victory on the harder levels. Here are some strategies I use on the small/medium sized maps at "tough" level as human: As rygar said, build faster colony ships. They're more expensive but worth it. Buy your colony ships, don't wait for them to build. Get Stellar Cartography fast. You can micromanage your research slider so that you get it within a few weeks. If I can see two
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Okay, I put together the following match-up for Kryo's simulation: Each side has medium-sized hulls, and has Laser V / Shields tech (equal distance down each path). Player 1 is pure offense and his ships carry 9 lasers (9 attack, 0 defense). Each ship costs 305. Player 2 is mixed and carries 5 lasers and 2 shields (5 attack 4 defense). Each ship also costs 305. For the simulation I used fleets of 4 ships (shown
I agree that defense is of negligible use. I tried using the Jedi combat simulator with various fleets of comparable cost to see what was best. I would setup a fleet on attack, run a few simulations, adding up the number of surviving ships on each side. Then I would reverse the attacker and defender and repeat. I haven't found any fleets yet where the one with defense ended up with more survivors overall than the one without. And this was in cases
You can find the Tech Tree at the wiki site: Link Ship size is researched in the engineering tree. But I'm thinking what you're really asking is what techs are needed for specific core ship designs, like "Star Fury" and "Battlecruiser." As far as I know, that information isn't available anywhere. Don't worry about trying to get the core ships. Custom design your own ships to su
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