Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

What are SSDs?

Yes, he's got the production capacity (he said so himself) so it's a viable tactic.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

SDD, Self-Destruct Device.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

I doubt destroyers are going to get it done. A smart enemy is more likely to use security stations to prevent you from pulling this off as a method of getting him to blow up his own ships. Destroyers don't get the high damage mounts, so you are going to have to use a lot of space for shield depleters, which won't leave much for shields or more boarding parties to overcome his Secusrity stations. You might manage to get lucky and snag a couple battleships, but you are going to need more than 4 or 5 to one odds to do it I think. And if you do manage to capture a battleship it will be toast. It won't have any shields, and it will be at an instant 20+20% disadvantage against it's identical ex-fleetmates. (Actually, might be as high as 40+40% since your captured ships won't be part of a fleet, and his will and presumably will have fleet training)

I think to pull off capturing you are going to need to use bigger ships, but then the economics stop making sense. It might be useful as a suprise, or in desperation if you don't have time to train you ships. But I don't think you are going to have much success with it.

I think you'd do better just loading them up with shields and armor and setting them to ram. Your ships will be just as dead, but your chances are better of taking some of his out with you.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

What I was thinking was larger ships doing the shield depleteting and the smaller destroyers just carrying boarding partys for the capturing.

Your not going to efficently capture his ships this way, but if you out produce and out tech him (if I'm reading your posts right) then do you even want to capture his ships?

Whatever it's just a variation on the same theme - Grind him down with shear numbers. As for which one would work best, that depends on the other guys reaction, ship design, etc.

Or just a few stellar manip ships to try and even the odds. Your heavily armoured ships in shield negating nebulas might stand a slightly better chance. That add him losing an entire system which he probably wont appreciate.

Stellar manipulation: 'How not to win friends and influence people.' http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Just as a side note:

I've never found the "Star Destroyer" tactic too sucessful except on small-scale operations. Thos suckers are quite expensive and take a while to build.

By the time you build any significant amount of them, you're enemy has caught up or surpassed you in the ship-count category.

And once you've done 1 or 2, the enemy starts mining stars. Yes, I know, you send mine sweepers with 'em. But before you do, you may have lost a few to mines beforehand and wasted all that production you could have spent on warships.

Star destryers IMO only work like terrrorist activity; once or twice, they work. After that, their effectiveness diminishes significantly. Unless of course, you're fighting the AI. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

IMO you're better off raiding systems and causing them to riot instead of blowing them up. Spend the production you'd use on a Star Destroyer to build a few small, fast raiding fleets. If you haven't tried that tactic, as said before, riots can bring huge empires to thier knees.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

I, on the other hand, have successfully used star destroyers on a VERY large scale. Of course, I did use them all at once and gave no warning of what I was planning, but all 30 of them exploded successully, wiping out well over a third of the galaxy in the Shattered Hopes game on PBW.

If you build up a large stockpile of them and some warp openers to go with them, your enemy won't have time to implement countermeasures before he's dead. Of course, this assumes that he hasn't already taken steps to defend against such tactics. A few System Gravitational Shield Facilities can really ruin your day if you were depending on star destroyers to beat him.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Note that a Star Destroyer is very cheap by the end game: it only costs twice as more as your regular baseship, and three times (or so) more than a Dreadnought, if memory serves. The actual cost will vary depending on what you put on your warships, of course, but my point remains the same: Star Destroyers are not really expensive in the later stages of the game.

For my purposes, the Nebula Creator component is used on Stellar Destroyers. If you are willing to pay extra and want to make sure the targetted systems are quite definitively dead, the Black Hole Creator is the way to go instead. Either way, nothing should prevent you from blowing up your own systems, should an enemy fleet arrive: that will save you the happiness hit, while destroying the enemy fleet, and slowing down further attacks. Just evacuate the system beforehand if you care about those suckers... your most esteemed citizens.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Ty guys. Will let you know how it turned out.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Shattered Hopes. Hmm. Approprite title for the game.....



Star Destroyers are expensive, but nebulae creators are even cheaper, still destroy a system, and you get an entire system in which his advantage of shielding is negated or at least critically diminished.

He said he could easily outproduce the guy, so the production capacity argument won't matter. If I'm reading this right he can produce 3 or so nebulae creators at a time and still have enough production space left over for an acceptable battlefleet.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

pfff 3 nebular creators are noth.ing. Actually i own about 15 planet creators. In the last turn my income, after upkeep etc is 420k-120k-130k, the income without upkeep is about 200% of that. And a lot of planets are still building ressource facilites since im in the mid/end phase of planet creation and colonizing. I could just order 10 nebular creators and make them emergency build http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif