racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Hey everyone,

i figured this has been asked before but i wasnt able to find the thread. In an ongoing Devnull mod game, actually the first pbw game i ever played the game is hitting a critical stage. Because of my dumbness i wanted to play rpg-ish and gave myself huge reproduction bonuses and stuff, instead of racial offense and defensive modifers. Now i have an enemy, which has both at superior, +20%. He just recently aquired battleships, now using scattering armor, cloaking armor and ecm 3. While i am both more advanced and a lot bigger, in simulations i need at least a 2:1 ratio of ships to beat him, simply because my vessels cant hit him. Im even forced to use Pulsed mount because of its small to-hit-bonus, still, even at range 1 my vessels have a hitchance of about 40%, give or take 5, im not sure. Of course simulator doesnt include training, but since my vessels and fleets are at 20% each, his ships could be as well.
Im using combat sensor III, and without the pulse mount i barely get one hit out of five shots. Instead of using standart anti-proton beams and large mount / battleships i optimized my vessels with 3 tractorbeams, shield depleters and incinerator beams. Still i need to heavily outmass the enemy.
Any suggestions oh what to do ? I could of course EASILY outproduce him, still it is pissing me off.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Get cloaking tech and stellar manipulation ASAP. Also, use Intel to make sure he can't detect your ships. Then, simply park a cloaked starkiller over his homeworld star and watch the fireworks over your victory celebration..... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif no, but really, this is almost ALWAYS a good idea. If you've got at least one - several is better - starkiller(s) parked over his homeworld star, preferably accompanied by a cave troll of a defensive fleet, you've got something to bargain with - his life.

Also, use Fighters. Lots and lots of fighters. Use their to-hit bonuses and your race's ability to outproduce him to face him with swarms of nasty little buggers which have a fairly good chance of hitting his ships and a reasonably good chance of evading his shots.

Note: I myself have no experience with Devnull, so my advice could very well be an empty piece of text.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

You've already hit on the only real course open to you at this point. Massively outproduce him, and be prepared to lose a lot of ship. And make absolutly sure all your ships are trained before commiting them to battle. Otherwise you are going to see some utterly horrendous battle results, like losing entire fleets and only slightly damaging a handful of his ships even when you have him outnumbered 2 or 3 to 1.

Some people more helpful then me may come up with some things to try, but honestly they aren't likely to be very effective.

My only suggestion is to take combat modifiers next time. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Or a mod in which those modifiers are either not as important, or are priced appropriately to their benefit.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Yup, Stellar Manipulation. It is dirty cheap in Devnull, as you actually gain money by retrofitting, instead of having to pay extra. A Star Destroyer or two at the border, more if possible, and blast'em as they come within sight. Warp Openers and a riot run are always fun too, or simply Warp Closers: if they cannot reach you, they are dead. Or all of the above. And let's not forget about the Sentry Star Destroyer, with a handful of vessels protecting the wormholes, to take down enemy scouts. Risky, but *fun* if it works.

Of course, they are likely either protected against Stellar Manipulation, or already using the same things themselves. If not... I would go for it. You may be the worst tactician ever (I am), and Stellar Manipulation can still save the day.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Or, like I said, fighters.

Again, I have no experience with Devnull, but if fighters still have their intrinsic to-hit bonuses (both offence and defence) they're very handy, especially because they're so cheap. Depending on the kind of guns he's slinging, this might also give you the advantage of rendering a certain amount of the weapons on his ships useless.

Or, if there are more players in the game, seek contact with other empires and request that they attack your enemy in return for trade goods (resources, outdated ships/units, defense bases which have become useless, listening post bases which have become useless due to your exploration, planets with low value and no population as a result of, say a plague, etc.).

Or, building on the above paragraph, build up a powerful static defense line of bases, sats and especially mines, then find another (preferably weaker) empire and simply outproduce them, then bully them into attacking your enemy. If he doesn't listen take/glass a few unimportant planets and post traffic regulators on the warp points to avoid his ships colliding with each other on their way to your enemy http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

I think i will take the stellar manipulation then. I already have about a douzen of planet creators in use, right now im researching dreadnoughts, because they have a to-hit-mount as well and will immediatly go for star creation and destruction. Any more advises are welcome as well.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Even more fun is gained by sending cloaked sunkillers into his very systems, with the main target being his home system. Then, if he isn't begging for his life after one turn, push the Big Red Button and all that'll be left of him are several rapidly expanding clouds of monatomic gas and several stray ships which can be hunted down and destroyed with ease.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Standard fighters are very poor actually: they may have a good bonus to offence, but they will not get Ship training (-20% to offence), their Combat Sensors are much harder to research and weaker (-35% to offence), and they will have a hard time breaking through all the defences on an enemy ship. In defence, fighters lack Stealth and Scattering Armour (-30% to defence), ship training (-20% to defence), and their ECM is weaker (-30% to defence), so even regular weapons are going to eat them for breakfast at point blank range. In this particular case, add -20% to both offence and defence.

Fighters can still do a good job, but you will need to lure the enemy into attacking a particular wormhole, and put all the fighters there. If you do not care much about losing the bulk of your fighters, a force of ten thousands or twenty thousands should do some real damage, combined with a nice fleet. I would not bother with low numbers of fighters: if you want to him them with fighters, hit them hard.

Devnull improves fighters somewhat if memory serves, mostly by giving bigger fighters, but those will lose part of their offence bonuses, if memory serves. There might be other things of interest in Devnull too; the weakened PDC will not be much of a deal though. If you can get big weapons and big shields for your fighters, plus fleet training and the best fighter CS/ECM, it could work. It is probably too late for all of that, however.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

I say Stellar Manipulation. If that's not possible (say, he has large defensive fleets in his systems which will destroy your sunkillers on sight) go for the bullying option.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

And he ain't joking about that neither!

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Haven't played that mod in a long time but I've found a ramming strategy can equalize the playing field significantly against an opponent with much higher offence/defence bonuses.

As stated, outproduce 'em and swarm 'em. Try building 10-20 destroyers / LC's with nothing but engines, armor, and warheads. If you outnumber them significantly and have good speed, it can be effective.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

I can certainly testify about that, having lost only one of 18 ships against a total of 90 in one turn once on PBW. It was actually three separate battles, but I was outnumbered 5 to 1 in each of them and that one light cruiser was my only ship that even took damage while all of my enemy's ships (cruisers and battlecruisers mostly) were completely destroyed.

Besides stellar manipulation, you could try overwhelming his PD with missile swarms, but that probably won't get you much better required force ratios than you currently have. If Devnull didn't change it from stock, Wave Motion Guns have a +30% to hit bonus which could help quite a bit. You could search for other high-accuracy weapons by searching for "Weapon Modifier" in components.txt and glancing at the number before hitting find next (F3 in most programs I know).

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Wave Motions Guns are pretty expensive to achieve since we are playing a high techcost game. I get like 600k rp per turn, still...

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

They gain offence bonuses and loss defense bonuses as you go up in hull size. This is the problem.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

What does small emissive armor have anything to do with anything? The emissive ability doesn't work on units...

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Oops. I was hoping this in the history log meant they had shield and armor now. "2. Fixed - Shield Depeleters will now work properly against units."

I knew I should have tested something. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

also... perhaps you should change your target areas... Use the space to your advantage. If there are nebulas that cancel shields use an all armor fleet to fight the player there... If you have ways into the players systems... Then attack their planets instead. Going on a running riot can be fun and it will hurt the enemy's production and may even cause planets to riot and rebel. Which would hurt more in the long run. Remember you out build so the player must concentrate their forces to match your 2 to 1 , 3 to 1 fleets. You have already won that battle. The concentration of fleets. Now use it to your advantage. Have a 1.5 to 1 fleet as well as the 2 to 1 fleet and have it doing something new that the enemy must counter. Hopefully pulling his fleets apart. Make them react and you should prevail unless the seiv combat engine decides it no longer likes you and lets you take part in one of those you lose 300 ships they have 3 ships damaged....

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Build up massive battlefleets to counter his attacks. Make sure you have at least a 5 to 1 advantage, and focus on defense only.

Then, begin building swarms of stellar manipulation ships - and I mean swarms. Go to the star systems bordering both your empires and nuke their stars if he's got ships in the system, otherwise make nebulae out of them. You could also do both http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Then, send your defensive fleets forward into these (hopefully) shield-negating nebulae and watch his ships die by the masses.

Rinse and repeat until all that's left is his home system, then build masses of construction bases in the systems surrounding it and churn out a massive fleet consisting of both warships and landing ships. Use the warships to take down his defenses, but do not glass his homeworld! Instead, land lots and lots of troops on it. Then, if there are still other colonies in the system, simply use his own homeworld's massive production capabilities to build a fleet of approx. 100-200 orbital bombers, then glass his planets. If you're feeling really cruel (or you don't need the system at all), pull out all of your ships and nuke the star.

*****

Another approach:
Build massive fleets of ships armed only with shield depleters, then build swarms of boarding ships. Use the depleter ships to sap his shields, then capture his ships and use his own weapons against him.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

But if he's got any sense he'll start chucking SSDs on all his ships the first time you pull that trick. Now that could be a good thing, if you've got production superiority you can afford to trade several small destroyers for one of his battleships.

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

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Do NOT do that! There's a great chance that even with emergency build on, it'll take more than one year to finish the thing, at after a year it'll be another year in which you have 25% efficiency in your spaceyards, perhaps even causing the ships to be completed after an even longer time than when you would have them built at normal speed.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

heh i know that http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Usually it takes me 11 turns to get planet creators, so i usually go emergency after the first normal turn.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Emergency Build lasts for 11 turns, not 10, so you can switch it on the first turn. Basically, if the ETA is 1.6 year, EB will drop that figure to 1.1 year, and it will be completed before EB goes off.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Are you guys talking about playing the AI here? I suspect you may not be dedicating 30 planetary SY's on emeregency build to produce these star destroyers when you're playing humans. If you are, you must be in a very strong position and able to outproduce with regular ships anyways.

Hey, let's face it, if you're thinking about a campaign of 15 or more star destryers, you're talking about a significant allocation of resources (not just minerals, etc. but SY production). You're sacrificing significant production of defensive support as well as offensive fleets here. You would leave yourself quite vulnerable to a decent human player IMO.

So IMO, that is probably only a wise tactic against the AI. A few "terrorist" strikes against a human opponent, maybe; but a large number against a human opponent is not going to be all that effective. Any respectable opponent would probably have Hyper Optics so your cloaking endeavors would meet only with minimal sucess.

Just IMO.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Nobody said the Star Destroyers should move unescorted: you could move them after the bulk of your fleet, as a "no counterstrike measure", or you could simply move them if you have accurate intelligence on what lies on the other side. More importantly, you can use them on your borders (on in your own systems), where you have a strategic advantage: even if your foe does head for the star(s) in your systems, a Sentried Star Destroyer can still do some damage.

The main problem is putting the Destroyer in the same system as an enemy fleet; that one usually requires you to have either a Stellar Manipulation dominancy (unlikely), or to have a central "hub" of wormholes allowing entry into your systems (or System Gravitational Shields, but those prevent the Sentry Destroyer from working). Alternatively, simply put one such Destroyer in every single system, especially if the enemy likes to use big fleets together.

Ragnarok can outproduce the enemy here, so there is no worry with SYs. Still, a large Empire in the later stages of the game should have a few hundred of planets, many of them with asteroid stats, other breathers under direct control, 70% resource conversion, and a rising Monolith economy. This stage should be reached around turn 80, more or less, depending on your trading/treaties and the specific circumstances. In a 2vs2 high-tech game, I ended up having about 300,000 minerals to spare turn after turn around turn 70, despite having about 150 SYs and a few Star Destroyers under production, plus a small fleet of 350 to maintain; since it was a warring game, my Empire was definitively not optimised: no Monoliths, only one breathing type, no asteroid planets.

In another game, Joachim had about 20 million points by turn 120 (NeGoC5), roughly 1,200 colonies, take or add one hundred, and a very sturdy (and studly) economy. Their fleet was *big* and had the Talisman, and he could still go on with pumping more warships. When you have this kind of Empires, putting a mere 30 SYs to Emergency Build is no worry: you should have quite a lot of SYs already, including Base SYs if needed, and your fleet should be sizeable to say the least. If you have the resources to spare, you could also build the basic hulls of your warships in the SYs, and do the rest of the work by retrofitting. It is more expensive and time consuming in micromanaging, but *much* faster, and the only limiting factor is how many resources you have. If your SYs can crank one Dreadnought every two turns (then retrofitted in orbit for two turns, perhaps three), you should be able to build as many warships as you need, and then some more, so long as your economy can keep up. And if you really need more SYs, you can add some in your colonies: scrap a Research Centre on all your colonies without a SY, and build a SY there.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

You've never heard of Douglas's trick?

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

I beg to differ. I wiped out three entire empires and severely damaged a fourth, all of them quite sizable, in the space of three turns with 30 star destroyers and 7 warp openers. Yes, this was on PBW and all four of my targets were being actively played by human opponents. It would have been just two turns, but one of my star destroyers took the wrong route and didn't manage to get to its target on the first turn.

Edit: Of course, such large scale destruction can have some unwelcome side effects. Due to a bug in the game, star destruction occasionally picks a few extra stellar objects to remove apparently at random. The 30 star explosions I set off resulted in at least two one-way warp points, 5 of my planets just disappeared, and I've noticed one system that obviously used to be trinary now has only two stars in it. I'm sure more such things happened outside of my space where I just wouldn't notice.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

pretty interesting that side-effect of stellar manipulation douglas just stated. Its a pity the galactic invasion 1 was game stopped, i would have loved to see both our empires at war.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

As obvious bugs go, I kind of like the sound of this one. simultanously blowing up half a quadrants worth of stars should have some unexpected consequences. It's like you broke the universe or something. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

I guess I gotta' sign up for a few PBW's and experience this myself. I suspect some of you might be surprised (either that or I'll be dining on a substantial portion of crow http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif). Any suggestions as to a good game to join?

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

How about The Galactic Invasion 2? 10 players vs 2 human-played space monsters using Adamant Mod. The game's already started, but it's only turn 9 atm and we have room for two replacements. It should be a fun cooperative game using a very good mod until and unless the space monsters are definitively beaten, at which point how the game goes from there will be up to you - the first game was heading towards a colossal war between the top two powers once it turned out the space monster AI wasn't good enough to seriously threaten us, but it ended due to poor administration before it could reach that point (don't worry, that admin isn't even playing in this game).

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

If one of the monster races is open in that one, I'll be VERY interested in it.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

The monsters are both taken, in fact played by douglas and me, the superpowers of Invasion game 1 http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif If i may say so. If just the propulsion system in Adamant werent so slow ;(

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

It is only slow at low tech levels. You could always choose a medium tech start and start off with Ion Engines.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

In my opinion its very slow even midgame, not the actual movement rate but rather the amount of supplies that is needed. I like adamant mod anyways though :p

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

We should probably move this to a new thread.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Oh, like the one you just made?

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

-blanked- in case enemies read the boards.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

Perhaps your enemy is also reading this thread, and is using the BS-5 design to throw you off guard, thinking you have an advantage, then to strike with the BS-3s. Perhaps the BS-5s are just decoys.

Re: racial trait +20% and evasive armors
 

perhaps http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif