How does one get invulnerable ships?

This is the "tie rule" that was introduced in DA.

Since ships always fire back even if they're destroyed now (DA/TA), with the exception of the first round of combat when a civ with the Super Warrior i.e. First Strike ability initiates the attack, it is possible for two fleets to destroy each other.

Since GC2 doesn't support MAD (mutually assured destruction), the tie rule was introduced.

The ship (not sure how it works exactly for fleets) with the highest attack survives the combat with 1 hp.

It's gaining hp due to leveling up by killing your ships, but it should only gain a couple at a time-10 is outrageous, especially for a 22 hp ship.

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Since you aren't playing the Arceans or a race with the Super Warrior SA, you have a couple of options.
-You can build ships with sufficient defense to survive the DL ship (75% of his fleet's attack in defense on a single ship-more is better, up to 100%).
-You can build a ship with higher attack than his ship.
-You can have a fleet that he can't destroy in one round.  For this, you need logistics, and tiny hulls.  At this point, it doesn't matter what weapons they have on them, so long as they each have a weapon.  Your goal is to have at least one more tiny ship than he has weapons on his ship-so if he's fielding say 8 black hole generators, you'd need a fleet of 9 tiny ships, or 18 logistics.

For fleets, the last ship to be destroyed in each fleet is compared for the tie rule.

Thanks for the pointers.  Was unaware of the 1 point rule.  Seems quite favorable for the DL.

I am 17 months into the Achilless Heel mission, suicidal level.  DL has 3 escort ships and a defender ship with 22 hit points and circa 114 beam weapons.  So to take out these ships it looks like I would need at least 4*8+1 = 33 tiny ships + starbases to slow them down + troop transports + ships to counteract their new builds.  WOW

I guess a restart with a change of strat is in order - there is plently of $$$ in the game to be had from the allies.  No more organic building.  Just labs, then buy ships.  Will colonize the nearest 3 planets to produce these ships.

As far as fleet combat goes, per Willy's comment, the tie rule should only really matter when it gets down to the last ship.  So just throw the most attack you can at them in that scenario.

And for what it's worth, logistics maxes at something like 56/57/58ish, so the maximum amount of tinies in a fleet would be ~28.

Yes using a fleet of tiny ships is the key to destroying dreadlord ships - you don't even need starbase support, just go and wipe them out, it is almost toooo easy once you know how!

Just keep an eye on what defences the dreadlord ships are using and change your weapon type accordingly, otherwise you could easily end up facing invunerable dreadlord ships again!

In the DL campaign, i think in some missions you are stuck with 1 weapon type.... these are my favourite missions ever, because it is then not so easy to beat the dreadlord ships because of their defences!!!

Oh i forgot to mention.... to get an invunerable ship, you will usually need to hammer the defence technology (which opposes your main opponents weapons) pretty hard before you can consider it remotely possibe. Becoming a 'good' race will open up some handy early defences, however i would not recommend this course if your opponent is using missiles - since the 'telapathic' defence is just way too early on the tech tree and therefore cannot justify bothering to reseach the necissary good and evil tech tree. In other words you could pretty much get better defences by researching missile defences directly instead of heading off to the good and evil tech tree.

You probably need to get at least three quarters along the defence tech tree also, in order to break away from all the mirriod 1 and 2 point wonder useless defence techs! Messing around with these is pretty much an excersise in futility because the enemy's weapons technology is just going to laugh at you (unless your playing fool level).

Now your on your way to getting an invunerable ship!

I usually take up about the same space for weapons as i do for defences - half and half and pretty much never fails me, and i never load on more than 1 type of defence. If i need more than one defence type then i will design alternate ships and have seperate alternate fleet - ships all with the same defence type in the fleet

Well, it depends on the situation really, fighting on 2 fronts it's much better to design seperate ships... but if you are in a corner and fighting several enemies using different weapons, whom will all come from 1 direction, your better off making each ship have appropriate defenses for all those weapons, since you would not be gaurenteed to have all appropriate ships in the best spot at the best time. And you would likely lose more ships that fight the wrong enemy.

Too be honest, i have never had that problem! The fact is, it is pretty easy to manipulate and predict where and when battles occur.... so indeed i am pretty much guarranteed to have the right ships in the right place at the right time! And for those games where i was backed into a corner because i was weak for whatever reason,,,, i wouldn't be using defences at all. That is because my usual emergency strategy is to use tiny hulled ships backed up by military starbases. Any larger ships i own won't be touched, so their defence type is irrelevant,,,, they won't be touched because the AI is fanatically addicted to targeting the heavily armed tiny hulled ships in the fleet first.

Although in reality, either way I usually stack on a bit of defense of each regardless of the situation... I am assuming everyone gets Eyes of the Universe on any difficulty (it's hard not to get it). Playing suicidal difficulty, I rarely have any problem, since as you implied above, the AI is so dumb from a tactical standpoint, you really don't even need to go to those lengths of designing that many different ships to be able to take on every other specific ship in the first place. Usually ships with a defensive variety in fleets has no problem dealing with anything on the map. If you play to try to take as few possible losses as possible in a game, you method would be the best (although a bit more time consuming and a tad more expensive upgrading to various designs when the need would arise).

The thing is, the AI is extremely slow in countering the weaponry you are using, so slow in fact, it's hard to ever actually see the AI do so to any means that would actually matter. I always pick 1 weapon path to go down, but since defenses are so cheap to research, and since they don't take up much space, it's easy enough to pile enough defense on so that way your ship won't have to be upgraded if you decide to take on an enemy with different weaponry down the line.

But I guess it comes down to how much time you want to spend on each turn, I tend to to prefer to just pump out ships that can handle any situation and end a game that I know I'm going to win 1/8th way through (I don't scoremonger).

For me personally, the main thing about the game are the ships, so i will spend most of my time playing about with them and designing ships specifically to counter the AI. I like to allow the AI's to get super strong so i can realy put those ships that i designed to the test

For me it is all about the ships - scoring or actually finishing games are of no interest to me!! lol

Now that you mentioned that, I should try playing on a similar basis... I did lose quite a bit of ships in my current game, and I am sometimes stunned at the number of losses in the end stats screen. (Espcially troops killed, when it is at like 100 billion or w/e, I almost feel guilty lol).

Perhaps I should give that a try, to see 'how few ships I can lose' during a game! As well as 'how few troops I can lose'. I'm sure it matters and probably makes a huge difference.

Too bad Metaverse doesn't have a 'high score' for that. Winning Militarily with fewest losses. You could possibly be in that spot!

The one thing that always gets in the way of my ship fun is money!

So i will spend all that effort keeping ships alive and gaining heaps of experience only to pass them off to an ally in the end because i cannot afford the maintenance or upgrade!!! I really hate this problem in the game, kinda does make your way of playing much more viable.

You would almost have to make sure you go neutral... for the reduction in upgrade costs that it gives you (i think it is neutral), or perhaps one of the galactic improvements you can make by going neutral allows that (of course can't remember all this off the top of my head). Do you usually play a specific moral choice?

It's neutral.

Thalans get an additional bonus tech that gives them another 25% if they go neutral; Korx get one regardless of ethical alignment.  Neither one can be traded or stolen, so you're limited to 50% apart from the random bonus you can get from colonization events (which albeit relatively rare can be fairly high).  I've gotten as high as 30something percent from it, for a possible 80% discount on rush buy cost, and if memory serves someone posted a very long while back about an abnormally low rush buy cost such that they had ninety-seven percent discount.

As an aside, the rush buy discount boost from Neutral does not work, I repeat, does not work in DL or DA, only TA.

Typically i will go Neutral yes - mainly because of the neutrality learning centres and neutral shipping.

And because i do like a hard fight, i almost never get round to upgrading any ships save for the rare tactical emergency. The second i have some new ships in place, i am selling the old ones like crazy!!