Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I'm thinking of starting a long turn-time CBmod game for those who want to try the game, but don't have reliable access or time to play.

Probably a weekly turn limit.
To speed things up, I'll make it a small map and a 5 or 10 planet start.

How many people would be interested?

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I'd be interested.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I would probably sign up for it, too... I'm already playing in CB#2, but I just took over from puke, and am most likely just riding on his momentum right now. It would be nice to have a good slow game so I can figure out the beginning of the mod, rather than slogging through the late-mid game with all the preliminary bits taken care of. Plus I want to get a closer look at the different cultures. I think I'm familiar with Disposable Society (puke's empire), and somewhat with Berserker (everyone else in CB#2). I see the data files for the other cultures, but you can't really get the feel for it until you see it in-game.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

"Carrier Battles Weekly #1"
Is now open to join.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I'll give it a shot, I'm also envious of these large fleet actions that SJ posts.

I signed up as the Azorani Alliance, using Alpha Kodiak's Azorani race style.

Carrier Battles Mod ... For SE5!
 

Extended from SE vs Galciv thread.
----------------------------------
----

Graphics, and AI are my weak points.

What I suppose I need *most* is AI guys, but that is naturally a beta-only thing. Second to that would be a hearty set of LOW POLY shipsets which have nice fighter and troop models.

Also handy, and much more generally accessible would be some weapon animations / effects that look cool in bulk. Samples can be run through starfury to get an idea of how they'll look. I can take screenshots of them in action if you don't have starfury. Real rendered missile animations would be supersweet, although they will need to lack any sort of directional external lighting.
For example; having a flickering engine glint off the metal is great. But you can't have a sunny/shady side, since the missile will be rotating in flight, and missiles flying in different directions would look stupid.
For reference, the CB weapons are DUCs, Plasma Bolts, Laser beams and Torpedoes. Plus about 7-9 varieties of missile, which come in light and heavy versions of the kinetic/explosive/nuclear warhead types. Plus planetary bombardment missiles.

I should be able to scale the animations to match the mount size myself, but if you want to make separate animations for each, that's good too.


Some custom component portraits would help as well. A little grittiness is great, but they should preferably remain unique, colourful and iconic like the stock SE4 stuff.
Carrier Battles dosen't have too many components, so it shouldn't be too hard to get a full collection. In fact, if there are multiple full sets, then I will probably give you the option to choose between the image collections as a racial trait.


Back to shipsets:
I want to have about the same number of ships & units as CBmod for se4, so there will likely end up being many hundreds of ships and many thousands of units in mid-to-late game battles.
That's why LOW POLY is a requirement http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif You should probably keep a high poly version as well, so that you can make beauty shots for giant portraits, and for a big intro battle scene. Glow points should probably be limited too, although creative use of one or two would be nifty... a doughnut topology ship with a ginormous glow point filling in the hole, for example.

For reference, there are in rough order of tech:
- Basic Fighters (Medium Fighter)
- Heavy Fighters (Large Fighter)
- Micro Fighters (Small Fighter)
- ER Fighters (ER Fighter, alt = Medium Fighter)
- Stealth Fighters (Stealth Fighter, alt = Small Fighter)
- Heavy ER Fighters (ER Fighter, alt = Large Fighter)

Ships will probably come in at least five generic hulls, possibly up to 10. Carriers will probably be +1 hull size bigger than the generic ships.
Use the se4 ship names for now, and start from the middle. The mod isn't going to need most of the ship hulls you'd expect of stock; colony ships would be made using the generic hulls, for example.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod ... For SE5!
 

Do you think that Carrier Battles Weekly game will actually get enough players?

Re: Carrier Battles Mod ... For SE5!
 

It's going to be cool to one day be able to experience an epic battle with hundreds of ships, and thousands of fighters, in full 3D glory...

We gotta figure out a way to have the game force a 30fps render to a video file, because that will just be too much fun.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod ... For SE5!
 

Yeah. If there aren't any more players in the next few days, I'll join up myself and get it rolling. CB#1 was four players, and it was awesome.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod ... For SE5!
 

You in luck SJ, I a made a fighter with less than 20 polys yestearday, with SE5 CBM in mind. I think I will try for a full collection that just needs to be exported once SE5 comes out. I'll some images when I get it textured.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Ok, SJ sangged me. I'm gonna be a daddy again in a couple of weeks so I may miss some turns if that doesn't upset too many people.

I've read thru most of the courses (neat idea by the way) on this mod but I'll state right now that I will probably ask at least 1 Brazilian questions about the mechanics of this mod so be patient.

I'll join up in a day or two. I'm really to busy for this but, hey, who needs to sleep?

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

ZA, sweet! Can we see it?

Slick; I reccommend asking this Canadian guy instead http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Ok, stupid question time:

#1) I'm downloading CB mod 1.4a. Do I need any other mods, like Imagemod and version? I have installed a kinda old Imagemod, not sure what version

edit: I'm getting an error on the Imagemod server. Unable to download 1.4a

edit2: nevermind, it's working now.

#2) anything special I need to know about creating an empire?
#3) What anything special I need to do before joining the game?

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

You should update your image mod to the latest version just to be up to date..

SJ has some good help info for the mod.

#3 - nodoze, alcohol, lots of it, vizine, a new mouse, food close at hand, and 1000 songs loaded and ready to play in your MP3 player.

Good luck.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

#2:
- Play test your empire in single player to make sure you know how it works, and that it isn't totally crippled in an unexpected area.

Remember to design a variety of ships. Consider the potential roles they can play in combat and optimize them for it. Pay attention to other players' designs and steal any good ideas.
A mixed fleet does better than a monolithic fleet! You'll need short range assault ships, PD ships, missile bombardment, interceptors, bombers and dogfighters. Even some thick hide cannon fodder fighters to clog up space and slow enemy movement in big battles.

Be careful with your culture selection. It will affect your whole race's outlook far more than any mere stock racial tech does. Try to pick one that matches your personal philosophy. They're all playable if you push hard on the advantages, and cover the weak spots as best you can.

Be *very* careful about your happiness type!
Peaceful hates fighing, but will let you build planetary defenses. !!!Not uber like in stock!!!
Bloodthirsty needs to fight, and will get mad about planetary defenses.
Masochistic is pretty funky; they get happy when bad things happen, and angry when good things happen. However, it does mean instant jubilant status if the enemy lands troops on your planets http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
Provincial is not-quite emotionless. They won't turn on you unless you screw up in their eyes repeatedly for a long time. They prefer a boring lifestyle.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Just want to stress what SJ said about culture for this mod. I'm a Disposable Society in CB#2 (puke's empire) and it took me about 35 turns to realize that I need to ignore most of what is in SJ's CB School of Design. For everyone else in Carrier Battles, and in most other mods, you want to design ships that will fail gracefully, and still be able to fight with half damage. You can repair it later, and the more battles a ship fights in, the more experience bonus it gets. With Disposable Society, you want a ship to fight at full force for as long as possible, then die quickly http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Disposable's strength is in spamming opponents with wave after wave of latest-tech ships. Unless a ship has taken very light damage (a few armour components, maybe a weapon lost), it's better to leave them behind, and find a way to destory them yourself, since it's expensive to maintain the ships. It's not worth it to train ships; in the several turns it takes to train, you've spent enough in maintainence to construct another two waves of throw-away ships. And since you construct at double the rate of anyone else, it's a lot easier to build a fleet quickly.

I'm sure I'll be learning even more about it soon... but I'll be learning a different style for the Weekly game http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

This is actually an SEV question, but I do think it would be appropriate to CBM...

In SE3 you could launch, and recover fighters on your carrier. I haven't played SE3 in awhile and really don't remember how the AI handled that...In SE4 you can only launch with no recovery in combat. I feel that this should be an option in SE5. Do we think that the AI can handle this properly in combat? Do we know if this is being considered in SE5?

Kana

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

The AI didn't handle it in SE3.
Just launch, and fight to the death.

In CBmod, you get to recover the fighters after 30 turns of fighting, so you can reasonably land & relaunch them in a big battle.

SE5 will be fancier, so who knows.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I'm sure you do, but I understand... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Ok I applied to join the CB weekly game. I installed the latest image mod. Somebody needs to make an installer for that beast. I started a test game at home and got some errors with randomly generated AI empires at game start. It appears like these errors won't be a problem, but some of the AI advanced traits, for example, were not recognized due to not being in CB mod. We'll see how bad this turns out to be...

Edit: I got lots of errors and the game crashed hard on the 2nd turn. How do I get the feel of the mod in a single player game?

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Well, CBMod isn't exactly AI-friendly anyway... even if you did mod the AIs to be technically compatible, I don't think they would do so well in the game.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

SEV is supposed to have some kind of AI scripting. So, maybe we will get lucky and be able to script it so when a fighter runs out of supplies it returns to the nearest carrier.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Edit your settings.txt to make a maximum 10-system game or so (so it dosen't take too long).

Then add two human players, no AIs and play against yourself to get some design, colonization and a taste of combat.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Rats. I was hoping you wouldn't say that. I was hoping to see some AI designs.

Here's what I have gathered so far:

- Read thru the courses again.
- Scanned the data files
---- you musta used your gridder program on the missiles. sheez. Yup, there are enough flavors.
---- many facilities cause pollution, need to worry about planet conditions
---- mounts are very important, even on units
- QNP propulsion... not very experienced with that. gonna be building some less-than-optimized designs
- leaky shields and armor, same as above.
- found "important!readme.txt" quite by accident, and as the name implies...
- I'll need to start a high tech game to check everything out in-game.
- Counter-Intel = offensive project. Hmmm. I hope intel won't overwhelm game.
- Plagues seem to be likely in this mod.
- Looks like ship repair is to be taken seriously. Looks like reduced repair abilities and large numbers of damaged components (due to leaky armor and shields) requires serious repair planning.
- no quantum reactors; supply will always be an issue.


and now some questions:
- SJ, would it be a breach of your security to post an empire (with saved designs) for newbies to look at? You could make one with just some intermediate level designs and keep your killer designs secret.

- What's a good ratio of minerals:organics:radioactives to shoot for in this mod? early game especially.

- Looks to me like a stock shipset works even with modified vehiclesize.txt. Any problems using a stock shipset?

- By reading components.txt, I don't quite get the colony idea. Please explain the differences between Rock Colony, Primitive Rock Colony and Advanced Rock Colony

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Questions:
- Well, possibly... But all the in-progress games are under significantly different versions of the mod.
The school of design gives you a mostly formulaic scheme for the units, and runs through the core of the ship design.
***See below for comments which delve into design issues.

- The resource ratio is hard to say... Early on your ships will cost about 4:1:2. However your facility build costs are all organics, so they are about as important as minerals.
Mid game, your rads cost will start to rocket upwards as your technology pushes into the high energy magic range, and they will become your limiting factor.

- CBmod has fewer hulls than stock, but even if it had more, there would be no problem.

- The normal colony module is available to races with the corresponding "Natives" trait. It is decent.
The Primitive colony module is available to anyone at tech level 2. It sucks bad, but will make a colony if you get it there.
The advanced colony is available at level 2 to the "Native" race. It is cheaper, smaller, better.


Comments:
- "Show only latest" is the key here http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif There are really only a handful of missile types, ranging from anti-missile to anti-fighter to anti-ship and anti-planet. Right-click to see the target types and description in game; it should be obvious from that what the purpose of the missile is.
- Note that conditions won't actually decrease due to facilities... but excessive pollution will make random and attack damage very hard to undo.
- Indeed. Mounts are critical on every weapon (20cm...100cm), even missiles (tube/rack). And armor(20cm-60cm+).

- QNP... not really. Its more like anti-QNP. The school of design lays the propulsion angle out very nicely. Add a drive reactor, and enough engine ports to go speed 1. Then add backup ports. Try to have 5-10 engine ports, so you don't lose everything to one unlucky hit.

- Don't worry too much about shields. They are a finesse thing. Bulking up on armor for hitpoints will keep you going in a slugfest. One shield generator is probably plenty for most ships. Standoff bombardment craft don't need any, and close-attack anti-fighter ships may need two or three. But without armor, shields are useless.

- Check the game settings, to see if intel is enabled.
Also, note that there are beneficial intel projects too. The under-the-table resource gift, the exchange officers, etc.

- Plagues aren't actually that common. They're quite expensive to throw, and once the enemy has a system medical facility, new plagues last less than one turn (they kill a few people, but are cured right away).
The trick is using them if the enemy has no medicine... or to force them to divert resources towards medicine instead of the war effort.

- Oh, certainly. Unless you are a Disposable society or a preservationist, salvage and repairs will be a big part of the war. (Disposables *can't* repair, and preservationists get double-repair)
You will definitely need to build repair yards, and repair priorities are important. You do *NOT* want to waste your precious repair points fixing 20% damage to armor, if you could just hammer the engine ports back into shape and send the ship back into battle. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
Oh, and don't be surprised if you end up with 30% of your navy queued up in spacedock for repairs after a series of skirmishes. You should basically consider those repair yards as being a second spaceyard, which produces experienced ships instead of green ones http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

- Supply is definitely an issue. Take note of the fact that the energy weapons use ZERO supplies, but cost lots of radioactives. The projectile weapons are dirt cheap, but use supply, and the missiles are even more so.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Mounts on missles are screwed, unless they have been fixed in Deluxe?

Kana

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Mounts affect the component, not the seeker that a missile weapon produces.
I have taken that into account.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I was just wondering if it was fixed...

Kana

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

My monitor is just about dead. I have another one on the way. Should be here in 3-4 days worst case. I may go MIA temporarily if it dies altogether.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Why have the carriers become so much smaller in this newer game? I must admit I like the balance of earlier versions... In my other games the feel seems to be just about the right size for fighters per carrier hull and capability of supporting ships. Under this new game the carriers will be significantly smaller, and presumably fighters much less important as a main fleet strategy... Just curious.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Well, in the old versions the carriers had to have a big maintenance penalty in order to keep them fair.
It was also a bit odd with the small-ship reactor mounts and the fact that fighter bays were only usable on carriers.

Now, carriers are regular ships, with a modest size bonus in exchange for the dedicated fighter/cargo stuff. The physics are now consistent, and it is even possible to put small fighter bays on all your warships, B5 style.

Theoretically, its an improvement. It is certainly a change in the atmosphere. Whether it is a practical improvement or not will be determined by the newly started PBW games.

---

As to the fighters, they have not changed in utility... the difference is in how you get them to combat in deep space.
The carriers are certainly smaller... but with the lower maintenance, you should actually be able to afford to bring more fighters into battle...

Plus, there is the ability to build fighter bays into your orbital platforms, and perhaps even a small set of fighters in your heavy satellites.
Fighters will be able to pop up everywhere http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

We have a couple of open slots in various games.

First come first served. There are two empires in great position just waiting for you.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

In an amazing feat, Rollo has written up some AIs for Carrier Battles Mod!

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Sweet, finally get to test it out!

I'll try out a game later tonight and post the results. Hopefully I can offer some suggestions, but from what Rollo has been saying, the AI is already scary good.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Updated, with improved troop usage by Rollo.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Since your mod has its own pictures/game/dialogs folder, you'll need to add a startmenu.bmp file (736x536, but can be narrower).

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Thank you for your kindness, but 'amazing feat' and 'scary good'? Let's just hold our horses for now =).
This is just a 4-day hack to get the ball rolling. I am sure there are many ways to improvement. I have only just recently (last week) found out about CB mod, so I am a total noob to the mechanics and since there was no AI for target practice, I decided to whip up something real quick. So credit goes to all, who advised me what to build =).

This is still step 1 of making the CB mod AI and is a work in progress. So if you have any suggestions for improvement, kindly post them here. We are looking for odd behavior concerning strategies, flaws in designs, and general good old bugginess.

Here are a few hints to playing with/testing the AI:
I'd recommend a low tech, one planet start, with no or low AI bonus, and low or medium random AIs + (optional) Neutrals. The AI script does not include the full tech tree and all design sizes, yet, but should be good for about 150 turns or so. .emp files don't exsist, so you have your races added randomly. The Phong.emps that are in the /empires folder are leftover from development and should _not_ be used, since they contain a faulty strategy.

That's all I can think off for now. I am going to be away for 10 days, leaving tomorrow, and looking forward to your suggestions, bug reports, and after action reports. So can implement them when I get back and continue to improve the AI. Top of the list is getting research and designs done for the full tech tree, of course. Have fun! =)

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Well, here's the first report:
- Medium tech start. No bonus.
- about 25 turns in.

Ukra Tal Heavy Fighter
Design:

• Cockpit with extension
• Speed 3 engine
• Level 2 Shield
• Level 3 Supply Pod x5
• Level 3 Maser (20mm) x3
• Level 6 Light Kinetic Missile (external mount)

This fighter appears to be on point defense duty, as its missile would imply it should be.
However, the three 20mm lasers are bad design. One laser is all that is needed to kill light missiles, since the fighters stack up their shots. The lasers also drive the radioactives cost way way up, which is bad for build rate.
Supply amount is good; ~16 missile shots.

Fighter never gets close enough to use its lasers, and instead, retreats to maximum range of its missiles (since they have a reload rate of 1).

Reccommended;
1) Replace two lasers with one 20mm torpedo (or a 40mm DUC).
2) Set movement optimal or short.


Combat notes:
Ukra tal planet was recently colonized, and I sent a whole carrier against it. They didn't stand a chance, but their 4 laser attack fighters killed 1 of my 30 fighters, and I landed a couple troops.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Possible high-level strategy issue:
Ukra tal have countered my invasion of their colony with a huge attack from the other side of the empire.

Three carriers and two destroyers.
However, the weapons being carried are 100% explosive missiles. An ungodly wave of missiles wiped out all my defenders, but the Ukra were unable to attack my colony itself.
I suppose I should expect a troop invasion soon.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Quick note regarding Intel with AIs. In a low-tech start, one homeworld game, the Phong and Terrans researched Intel around turn 70. Only problem is, with such a low number of points, they began using the cheapest operations: Resource Gift. Not a very good op to use against your enemy, since it depletes your resources and gives it to the hated ones http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

I was getting used to the changes between 1.0 and 1.4 for that test game, so I don't have much to offer on AI strategies or designs; except I have noticed a general lack of repair and supply capacity in AI fleets. It's hard to do repair in CB, but the AIs could have saved a few fleets by having repair priorities set to Drive Reactors and Engine Ports (only) and having a small amount of repair capacity and a supply tanker or two. It's a lot easier to get a speed 5 fleet to safety than it is to get a speed 1 or speed 0 fleet to safety.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

There should be a tech area with the beneficial gifts and other positive items that the AI doesn't research, since it doesn't understand them.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Yeah. That is definitely gonna be done.
Perhaps as a racial tech "Good Samaritans: Allows access to helpful intel projects"

The main problem with getting the AI repair ships as I understand it, is that it would use up one of the warship design types. And the AI can't really afford to lose one.

Putting one of the small, high tech repair bays onto larger carriers could be a good solution.


An interesting political setup has appeared in my game:
- The drushocka are offering treaties, while everybody else is getting quite grouchy.
Since the druk are Neutral culture that might make some sense. Although Traders and Pacifists are the ones that really benefit from treaties.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

An interesting thing here on the comparisons chart:
After 40 turns on medium tech start. 7 races, 3 neutrals...

The Eee appear to have lost their homeworld on turn 35.
The Drushocka had their homeworld blockaded on turn 38, but liberated it on the next turn.
The Ukra Tal had their homeworld blockaded on turn 20, liberated it on the next turn. It was down to 50% production, so it took some damage. Then on turn 26, it was hit again. This time it only lost a little bit more, to maybe 40%. They are slowly rebuilding.
The Terrans had their homeworld blockaded on turn 35, and it only came back to 50% as well.


Half the AI races have had major attacks on their homeworlds by other AIs.
Some defense bases may be in order.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

You can use one of the other design type designations (like attack base etc) for a repair ship design.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Well, having played a couple of decent battles, I think I need to do some work on the missiles. They're really dominating in combat, especially the light explosives, which pack enough firepower to hurt ships, but are also really fast.

Missile speeds will definitely be adjusted downwards. That may be enough.

I believe Rollo is already using all the available designs.
The nature of CB is that you need a wide variety in ships to field, and we picked the X most important types I could think of, where X was the number of available AI design slots, including attack base.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Hmm, wasn't aware of a hard-code limit to the number of designs an AI can have. Pity, since CB basically encourages using as many designs as possible.

Also, a suggestion for a sort of tweak to the mod overall; is there a setting for Combat To Hit Defense for planets? I know it's normally an obscenely big penalty, but how about changing it to a really big bonus? Explain it away as atmospheric interference, or difficulty targeting a specific spot on a constantly rotating sphere, whatever; but the result is, a lot of the damage to planets caused by direct-fire weapons is nullified, and you really would have to use Planetary Bombardment Missiles to glass a planet, or capture it with troops. Or just spend a really long time bombarding it with "conventional" weapons.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Yes, there is a setting in Settings.txt; I think it's called "Planet Defense Modifier" or somesuch...

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

That is an interesting idea.

It should be noted that tiny planets can easily have hundreds of thousands of hitpoints already, due to troops acting as planetary armor.

1% hit rates would require tens of millions of damage points to be thrown at the planet in order to clear it. Not a bad proposition, actually. Rollo's AIs seem to be fairly good at dropping troops, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem for them.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

It would also have the effect of drawing out battles more. I see a huge parallel between the inspiration between Carrier Battles and WWII Pacific theatre. Battles over tiny islands would go on for months at a time, and it wasn't really an option to just bring a few warships alongside the island and shell it until all the enemy resistence suddenly stopped. It was necessary to send troops ashore, and systematically root out all enemy strongholds, which still took a long time, but was generally faster than trying to pick them off at a distance http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Then, Planetary Bombardment Missiles become the equivalent of nukes, ICBMs. No precision necessary, just fling it in the general direction of those English pig dogs, and let the massive taunt defeat them http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

A refresh of the download link for those who want to try this out:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...?Number=408927


Hmm... Nukes & ICBMs?
PBMs are very very slow, easy to pick off if you have air defenses still. And they'll only kill a couple turns worth of infantry or tent to twenty tanks each.


Game Update
-----------
Turn 55.
The Terrans and Ukra-Tal have lost their homeworlds permanently.
The CueCappa and the Vikings have stagnated, and there aare now six races that are about 50% higher score than them.
The CueCappa have lost a lot of ships recently... A small attack on my borders, followed by a huge attack that wiped out most of my assault fleet that was gathering. Unfortunately attrition is not going their way, since they are not building new ships very fast at all.

I think the EEE homeworld may have been infected with a plague... their population is dropping steadily for the last 20 turns. I suppose it wasn't glassed, but is merely rioting.