[Baron Munchausen]

It's dangerous to assume that a 'special' advantage you have chosen will be the key to winning the game. History is littered with ruined military forces who thought they had a "special angle" that would carry them to victory in all situations. The only real 'trick' that the Crystalline tech tree gives against Organic tech is armor-ignoring weapons. Since your regenerating armor is effectively neutralized, just approach the problem as if you were a "normal" tech player -- as you should approach ALL problems, btw.

You, and everyone, would face the extra problem of destroying a ship equipped with crystalline armor, of course. But the solution to the armor-ignoring is roughly the same as the solution to the crystalline armor problem. You need to either attack from extreme range so they cannot shoot at you in the first place (missile strategy as suggested by others here) or you need to move very fast to avoid being hit -- 'dance' in and out of range. Also, you want to hit with few attacks and as high a damage as possible for each attack because this reduces the amount of shield regeneration they will gain from the hits. This is easy with missiles. They do lots of damage per hit. If your enemy has lots of PDC then if you didn't have the Acid Globule or Env. Acid Globule I'd say research torpedoes quick, or a special weapon that also skips armor like the Null Space Weapon... it has less range though and makes the "hit and run" strategy harder to use. Ships equipped with as many of the largest mount Acid Globule they can carry and max engines plus at least some shields will give the crystalline ships a lot of trouble if they are given a "max weapons range" strategy.

As in all games, ECM and Combat Sensors are very important. If your enemy has the same or better level in these than you do, you are in trouble no matter what. Make sure to use Ship and Fleet training facilities, also. It effectively adds a number of turns to 'construction' of your military forces but the advantage can be very important.

Something I have never been able to do with strategic combat is get missile ships to use their "missile dance" independently of beam ships maneuvers. If you could send in two seperate fleets, one full of beam ships and the other full of torpedo ships, the coordinated attack of these two forces could be very difficult to deal with. Unfortunately, the two fleets tend to get in each other's way. This can be very powerful in tactical combat though.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 30 May 2001).]