Kazuhiro808

Join Date 09/2007

What the crap do I do now?

In my first game playing on a Gigantic map, on Normal difficulty, with 9 other races, I've run into what you might call some considerable difficulty. Please bear with me; I know this is boring but I feel that the best way to get help is to give enough information. Thank you in advance for your advice.

A quick overview of this piece of the galaxy: Everyone has already been conquered except for me, the High Amoria, the Terrans, the Torians, the Drath, the Altarians, the Iconians, and the Arceans.

I had all but conquered the Drengin when they handed over their worlds to the Iconians. This was irritating because now my borders were pressing right against the Iconians', and there were some temptingly high-quality planets to be had, but the Iconians liked me, so things were looking OK.

The nasty part comes after over a year of me building up my new planets and researching the ultimate war machine (since all nearby planets are inhabited and I'm not about to declare war for no reason.)

My research is chugging along just fine-- and that's when the Drath declare war on me. Eager to flex my military/industrial muscles, I divert my research towards Majesty and get cracking at cranking out the Shortsword, which is shielded and armed with missiles. The Shortsword is doing just fine-- and that's when, one following the other, the Altarians, Torians, and Iconians all declare war on me. You see, for some odd reason, everyone was Friendly with everyone else, including, for the most part, me.

Now faced with the prospect of fighting four races when the other two are totally unwilling to send fleets, I finally develop my war machine, the Cesta. It's the first Huge ship in the galaxy and it can wipe out a fleet without taking a single point of damage since for some odd reason the AI insists upon using lasers.

Fast forward a few years. The Altarians, Iconians, and Torians have all repeatedly signed peace treaties with me, then promptly broken them for the exact same reasons they declared war on me in the first place. In one case I actually gave the Torians some technology to raise their relationship with me to Warm, which, of course, had no effect at all. The Cestas remained powerful death machines for several more years, but I've diverted literally all of my national budget towards producing them and they seem to have met their match. Huge-sized Drath craft are showing up in pairs and trios or even more, which is more than enough to take out a Cesta, or if they're lucky, even two. What's worse is that although they're still not a real threat, Torian beam weapons have advanced to a point where they can take a pretty decent chunk out of a Cesta, further harming my ability to effectively hold off the Drath-- every time I leave a world unattended, it's almost immediately invaded.

There seems to be no way out for me-- unless I can completely crush one or more of these civilizations, which is looking more unlikely every turn, I'll just be flying forth with Cesta after Cesta, until my economic engine is ruined and I'm helpless in the face of those damned Drath Dreadnoughts. I may actually go for a science victory at this point, as I already have Discovery Spheres and an Omega Research Facility.,

So, my questions:

How do I avoid a situation like this one where I'm locked into an uphill battle? Or, What did I do wrong?

Why was I unable to request that the Arceans or Terrans declare war on the other civilizations? (Their relationship, again, was Friendly.)

What would you do in my position?

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Mystikmind

Join Date 06/2004

+20

You could try building very cheap tiny hulled ships with reduced firepower.

Make sure to use weapons contrary to the enemies defences and use mid range or less weapons which are nice and cheap for their firepower.

Experiment with maximum firepower they can use without being targeted in preference of the powerful ship in your fleet.

They won't do much to be honest but it will make use of unused logistics and add to your civilisations power rating.

Oh if you have military starbases in range then this will not work, they get targeted first by the enemy!

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The relationships at friendly is why you can't get them to declare war on other races...It's simply too high.

Are you playing DA? You might be seeing the affect of the Drath superability. They can pretty much get anyone to declare war on you and if you are at war with them, they will use it. If you are under DA, you might need peace with the Drath to keep the others from re-declaring war.

I would definitely try to get those races that aren't currently part of the war into it...If anyone actually has some ally relationships, you might be able to just set the whole galaxy on fire. And that would be a step up!

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Try focusing on one or two civs for alliances. Max out your trade with these civs, give them stuff, and have a higher military than them (individually). Hopefully, you can secure an alliance or two; not only will this keep them off your back, you can proceed to build influence bases in their space with little fear of retribution. Once you have converted them totally, you can start allying with another....repeat until the galaxy is yours.

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Hi!

How do I avoid a situation like this one where I'm locked into an uphill battle?

Don't put Drath into the game. From my experience: if Drath were in the game, there was always lots of senseless fighting. Now I make sure Drath are either absent, or constantly at war with someone else, or friendly to me.

Or, What did I do wrong?

You missed to follow the 4X strategy - expansion by extermination. For several years of a distinct tech advantage you fought SHIPS of the AIs that attacked you, instead their economy. In those "fast forward a few years" you should've CONQUERED PLANETS of most of close AIs, so they'd lost the economic ability to successfully fight you. Then Drath would be just a small nuisance, because you'd be several times bigger than they.

BR, Iztok

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Mystikmind

Join Date 06/2004

+20

You missed to follow the 4X strategy - expansion by extermination.

On Normal level you have good potential to grow more powerful over time than the AI's without taking any planets. Infact i would recomend it otherwise the game would loose it's challenge!

It dousn't get any more fun than when your fighting of several strong AI's that have somewhat threatening fleets.

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I'm actually not playing DA, so I don't know that removing the Drath would have that much of a difference on game flow. As for the notion that I should've quickly stolen planets before the Drath got big, the problem was that my forces were spread thin: If I wanted to form a fleet of two or three Cestas, I would have to leave a world or two unattended. More often than not these were garbage worlds, but I was still unwilling to let them use even those few panels.

Thanks for all your help-- I'll remember all of your advice if I do manage to steal enough Iconian planets.

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It sounds as though you're a giant swatting at flies. Sooner or later, you will be nickel and dimed to death. While pursuing better diplomatic relations with some of the races is a good idea, some aggression would help too. In my experience, trying to build up trade won't work too well because your enemies will just flit all over destroying your freighters, but everyone likes a bribe. It's hard to make recommendations without knowing what your economic and manufacturing power is, but here are some thoughts:

Turtling up and going for a scientific win is certainly doable in these wars of attrition, but let's face it, that's a pretty unexciting option.

An earlier poster suggested you conquer some neighboring worlds. You should definitely do this. I sympathize with your reluctance to lose any of your own worlds, but this is war, and it calls for strategy, not sentiment. In the long run, it's worth losing a few trash worlds to capture some high value targets. Build up and escort some troop transports and capture some of their more important economic and manufacturing worlds, and hold onto them. These resources then become yours. You can easily recapture your trash worlds long before the AI is able to make any real use of them; you can do this through conquest or re-capture by influence if your influence is high enough.

Related to this is your approach to your fleets. Huge hulls are cool, but IMO the best results come from medium and large hulls. Having a super powerful dreadnought doesn't help you if it takes a long time to make just one. You can't advance that way. Scale down the power to something that gets the job done yet can be built in a reasonable amount of time and in sufficient numbers to give you some response options. If you're playing without Dark Avatar, small hulls with good weapons can serve this purpose pretty well. If it takes you more than 8 weeks (which is itself a long time) to build anything decent, look into upgrading your manufacturing capacity. If you don't already, specialize a couple of worlds with good bonuses to churn out ships. The idea here is not to flat out crush one of your opponents. The idea is to pick one and weaken it by taking some high value targets, and keep at this until you've built up sufficient strength to force a peace diplomatically, then repeat the process. Unless one of them is very small, you likely can't build the kind of overwhelming force necessary to completely conquer one. It can be quite time consuming taking over every last planet. Trying to wipe them out may even make things worse by causing them to hand over all their planets to another race. Having a bunch of smallish, declining factions is better than having fewer, stronger ones. You want to push them to the edge, not over it. That will buy you the time you need to consolidate and make a final push for dominance, be it military, technological, or diplomatic.

Again, it's easy to get into trouble by over-reliance on fabulously overpowered ships that take forever to make and are monstrously expensive: just ask Emperor Palpatine. You need numbers as well as power, and if you had the kind of wealth and manufacturing capacity to create numerous fleets of Massive Hulls, we wouldn't be having this discussion. In the time it takes to build up a force of super-powered terrors, your enemies will catch up to you technologically. Get yourself a few groups of medium/large hulls and some groups of smalls; the former are good for invasions and the latter are good for home defense.

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... As for the notion that I should've quickly stolen planets before the Drath got big, the problem was that my forces were spread thin: If I wanted to form a fleet of two or three Cestas, I would have to leave a world or two unattended...

For future games, consider it's not always necessary to have every planet defended with massive ships early in the game. Having a few cheap ships to hold off enemy invasions for a few turns until your better ships arrive is enough.
Also, focus on high quality planets in a system as you may take over the quality 4-6 ones later just by influence from your own better quality planets nearby.
It seems that when you had the advantage of your Cestas you didn't exploit it: it would have been interesting to use them to safeguard your transports & render AI worlds defenseless so you could invade them. For defense you could stick to smaller, less expensive ships that you could produce much faster.

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Why was I unable to request that the Arceans or Terrans declare war on the other civilizations?

It could be that they have lower military ratings than the races you are fighting. Try doing it the other way around - make peace with one of your enemies and try to convince them to attack the Terrans or Arceans.

Also, you may need to back off from the huge hulls. Design a large hull with nothing but a few engines and a crapload of torpedos (not the Black Hole generator, though - think cheap), get every planet making them, and crank your military production as high as you can. Send them out singly or in small fleets and dogpile on every enemy ship you can find. Once you have that going, start building transports and go after one faction's planets. Once you have them beaten down enough, make peace and repeat with their buddies, one at a time.

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Reading this thread I'm slapping myself for not maximizing the advantage of the Cesta. The sad fact is that I actually had upwards of five Cestas prowling the skies, they had three HyperWarp drives apiece, and I even had a level 14 Cesta that I was using to clear out Iconian and Torian fleets when they came to pester me. The more I read, the more I feel like a total idiot for not using them to their fullest when they were the scariest things in the galaxy.

As I said, it was my first game with those settings...

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The above advice is great, and one more thing I would add more as a suggestion, and not really a gamebreaker, is that you not focus on "the ultimate warship" strategy.

This is where the player focuses on getting all the tech needed to make thier superclass I-can-kill-anything warship. I agree, very fun to do, and from a roleplaying perspective is neat to declare as your flagship etc blah blah blah. Even worse, you were playing on a gigantic map, and only had 5 of those ships per your #10 reply. Not only does it delay your conquest and ultimate victory but usually is ineffective. 4 or 5 uber warships is nice, but you could have been making 30 or 40 or 50 medium/small warships that would be much better. 1. They can guard all those worlds you were talking about that kept getting invaded. 2. With a little experience those ships are probably better than your Cesta. 3. It allows you to make transports to take over the other worlds. 4. If would raise your military rating and other races wouldnt be so ready to declare war on you.

In my experience, #3 is a lot of people's downfalls. They are great at designing and building fleets, but bad about timing transports and building them. You have to be building and moving transports before you declare war, and on a gigantic map I would probably suggest never stop building transports.

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Yea, those Drath are real instigators. I don't let them play in DA. I like a good fight, but those constant war declarations early in the game are a bit rough.

If I wanted to form a fleet of two or three Cestas, I would have to leave a world or two unattended. More often than not these were garbage worlds, but I was still unwilling to let them use even those few panels.

Here's something interesting to consider, I use ZERO planetary defenses. My game is all about offense, has been for a long time. Though, I may stack a fighter fleet on top of outlying military and economic resource starbases before getting into a war. I rely on the speed and firepower of my fighter fleets to keep the lines moving into enemy space and intercept enemy transports before they can take any of my planets. My transports are nothing but engines and a troop transport module. I stash them out of danger far behind enemy lines with their long reach to enemy planets. I do lose a planet every now and then when an enemy transport sneaks through, but it doesn't happen often. One trick is to build the Eyes of the Universe special project (available through Sensors tech) and place a bunch of scouts behind enemy lines to clear the fog (cargo hull with nothing but engines and a support or two on it).

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yeah piznit,it definetly helps having transports built and ready to go before a fight. I usually have staging areas behind my lines on all frontiers just in case with troops ready to go. I like to keep at least 10 to 15 ready at all times on gigantic maps.I also like to hit the enemy if possible from more than one side simultaneaoulsy so the ai can't put all its force to bear in one area without sacrificing somewhere else.In a war with the Altarians I hit from all sides and had ships in place above quality target worlds before I declared war they couldnt keep up. In a handful of turns I captured their capital and 14 of there best planets. Then they were more than willing to make peace heh , I wonder why

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Sounds to me like the Drath are being a bunch of little *ouch*ags. They are using the Super Manipulator on you, you need to attack them first before they have a chance to react.

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After unsuccessfully going for a research victory and then trying a new game, I had the exact same situation with the Iconians, Altarians, Torians, and Thalians. I was able to make peace but it didn't last long and again I was fighting an uphill battle, but this time against huge 20+ point Torian fleets, using fleets of three Medium fighters geared for high speed. Yet again their shields fell short of protecting them, yet again I found myself locked into a hopeless conflict with no way out. The worst part came when I realized that because I threw in Alliances to seal the deal for peace last time, the Torians, Altarians, and Iconians were officially allies.

I just can't seem to get the hang of this game D:

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One method to use to prevent this from happening is incite early wars. As soon as you've got money/techs to spend, start getting other races into wars with each other. They'll be much less likely to ally afterwards, and many of the races will be more wary towards each other.

While other races are at war with each other, do the conquerors a favor and take the loser's now undefended planets so that the invading race doesn't have to spend more on transport ships. Wasn't that so thoughtful of you?

Basically, by the end of the first year on, if everyone isn't at war with each other (except for you, of course), then you're doing it wrong

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Mystikmind

Join Date 06/2004

+20

Basically, by the end of the first year on, if everyone isn't at war with each other (except for you, of course), then you're doing it wrong

You have been reading the 'shadows' galaxy conquoring texbook from Babylon5! (if they got their way that is)

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

I say attack one of them hurt them by taking out much of the civs ability to make war as well as thier planets. Get them agree to a peace treaty at least straight up, therefore they acknowlege you have the upper hand. offer as many ships and money and technology for all thier planets. Slowly take away your money from the deal then ships then technology. Accept the peace treaty affectivly wiping them out. Warning if you take too much away that you have already given them you'll have to start all over with them giving you no planets.

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A quick note-- A major factor in getting the Altarians and Torians to declare war on me was the fact that I steamrolled the Drengin, who turned their worlds over to the Altarians. I then turned my aggression on the now-Altarian worlds, which were obviously all too easy to capture. After I was done with that, I hurriedly made peace.

The trouble was that this created quite a few - signs in my relationship with nearly everyone. To give you an idea, my report on the Torians looked a little something like this:

--Our Military strength
-Our close borders
-Our historic animosity
-Our Ethical alignment [Neutral]
-Our tendency to conquer others

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Hi!

I then turned my aggression on the now-Altarian worlds,

If there are good civs in the game, NEVER attack Altarians, or you'll face the situation you're in each time. The Super Organizer trait makes all civs of the same alignment to declare war on the attacker of the Super Organizer.

BR, Iztok

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I'm not running DA unfortunately, though everyone on these boards is, so I'm planning on getting it soon enough... as soon as this site stops denying my card.

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Mystikmind

Join Date 06/2004

+20

I'm not running DA unfortunately, though everyone on these boards is, so I'm planning on getting it soon enough... as soon as this site stops denying my card.

I'm not running DA!

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