In need of some strategic help

[Mephisto]

First of all you have to decide on what range you want to fight your enemy. If you want to engage him on maximum range, go with the seekers. At least you will hit something and not only your enemy. As you already said, go with the Battleship to keep up the distance. I would recommend not to use fighters on this range as they will only be cannon fodder for the shard cannons without support.
A friend of mine uses another approach against the RT at the moment and it seems to work ok. Use the heavy carrier, put in the minimum of fighter bays, take all the combat sensors you can get, max speed with the solar sail and everything else put into weapons (you can use the massive mount on a heavy carrier!). Set this design to point blank, you want to hit something! Keeping your distance will only get you killed against the RT. As a fighter design, use large fighters with afterburner, 3 shields and one to two weapons. Make sure the fighters are slightly faster then your carriers as the AI will first launch the fighters and then move so you fighters will have to catch up again with the carriers. You can add a combat sensor but speed is more important. These fighters will not do much damage, but they can take quite a beating and are nice target dummies.
Look at these numbers: 6 Phased Shields V (240 kt) will give you 2250 shield points plus 240 hit points, 2490 hit points in total. 8 Fighter Bays 3 (240 kt) will give you 240 hit points and 720 kt cargo. 720 cargo equals 28 large fighters. Each large fighter has 180 shields with 3 shield generators and 25 hit points, 205 hit points total. So the fighters sum up to 5740 hit points. Together with the hit points of the fighter bays you get 5980 hit points compared to 2490 hit points with shields.
You can add some kamikaze ships with organic armor to the mix and your opponent has quite a bit of hit points to wear down. Shield depleters won’t work against units and the shard cannon does not very much damage. Good luck!

[Grandpa Kim]

After what the others have said you'll think I'm completely nuts!

Strip your ship down to essentials. Forget shields; that makes her depleters dead weight. Forget armor, makes her rethink the shard cannons too.

Your ships need vehicle control, engines to the max, supply storage and gathering, combat sensors and for weapons, ripper beams and nothing else! (Specialty weapons and anti cloak sensors can be considered too.) Set your strategy to point blank. And for goodness sake train you ships and fleets to the max!

You will be charging in to a range where you will hit her more often than she hits you. No, you won't hit 100% of the time, but you have more guns-- lots more guns-- that do more damage. Yes, you will take a h*ll of a beating but you will be pushing forward to point blank range and the RT ships will be retreating to max range. Your partially damaged ships will be left behind on the combat map and can be repaired later, so have lots of repair ships in the fleet. You will be overtaking the damaged RT ships and destroying them as you move forward.

Once she catches on to this strategy, she will change hers. Anticipate this and have new and different models building while the "stripped" fleet is engaging her.

No guarantees here. I still say player skill is the no. 1 factor but this gives you a chance to find out how good you are.

Kim

[PvK]

The previous two suggestions seem rather good. If you're organic and have no ripper beams yet, or even if you do, you might also consider Acid Globule weapons. They have a very high ratio of damage done in the first shot, compared to resources used to build them, which adds up to a good cannon-fodder weapon.

PvK

[Cheeze]

I would add that you should definitely keep ECM on your ships. Yes, the talisman makes it useless. However, if/when you start hitting your opponent's ships, the talisman is a large component that can go down quickly. Without sensors, and your ships' training and ECM, may turn the battle to your favor. In one game, I watched an ally (heavy organic) tear apart a religious opponent, in no small part due to a sudden inability to hit once a ship's talisman was destroyed.

Also, you might try going around your enemy's war fleets with Groups of small "commando" fleets, designed to hit their colonies, capture them or wipe them out. Ruin that player's resource base, make the populations riot, and it will be necessary for them to spend time on defense. Suddenly, their huge fleets may become a liability in maintenance expenses. Clearly though, with crystal tech they have maintenance reduction facilities, so such attacks become even more important.

Perhaps, along with point-blank strategies, you might try heavy shield depleters along with a Boarding Ship strategy. If your ships can survive to ripper beam range, it is not too far a stretch to think they could bring down a ship's shielding and then board. Then YOU have ships with shield depleters and shard cannons, and they may have the problem!

[Samurai99]

Hello,

Thanks everyone for your thoughts. I'm sure other readers found them as interesting as I did, and will benefit from your combined wisdon.

I, however, was not able to implement any of your ideas. There just wasn't enough time to regroup. The reasons are many.

I had overextended my forces in taking out two AIs, the XiChung and the Uruk-Tal. At the same time, I had skipped a generation of new ships, instead stupidly building a bunch of value-improvement facilities. So I was using older cruisers and battlecruisers -- not to mention a bunch of clearly obsolete light cruisers and destroyers -- when my human opponent had been building top-of-the-line dreadnoughts.
Even though I quickly realized my mistake when I came up to her border (which is when I posted my original plea for advice), she moved too quickly, taking two systems every two or three or four turns with multiple, large fleets of her lethal dreadnoughts.
My infrastructure wasn't all that great, and production grew worse as she moved forward.
Two other AIs chose this time to send in big fleets across my eastern marches and into my core systems, where I had gutted my defenses, transferring the ships there to the southwest to try to slow her down. The AIs didn't attack my planets, but their mere presence decreased production.

It was interesting, as well as frustrating, to experience a rolling collapse of the mood on my planets as she came on. At the end, I had around 50 or 60 planets rioting at the same time.

If we play again, I'm either not going to let her have the religious trait or I'm going to have it, too.

Well, OK, that's just sour grapes. If we do play again, I'm going to be less interested in expansion for the sake of it, and try to keep up a steady stream of ever-more-modern ships.

In the end, I should have known I was in trouble the minute she chose the Borg shipset.

Again, thanks everyone.

[oleg]

Just a thought - would't it be nice to have a special damage type "religious talisman only". Something like inducing loss of faith or something Might be another psycic weapon...

[TerranC]

Originally posted by oleg:
Just a thought - would't it be nice to have a special damage type "religious talisman only". Something like inducing loss of faith or something Might be another psycic weapon...

No, it should be from Astrophysics

[Fyron]

Originally posted by mxlm:
I've only played organic once, but I thought shard cannons could target fighters. If they can, then the opponent won't need PDC, as they'll have a 100% hit rate with shard cannons on the fighters.

How do you figure that?

Oleg:
How about "only family X" type of damage? That would allow any number of specialty weapons.

[ April 07, 2003, 05:49: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Suicide Junkie]

With a religious talisman, the shard cannons do devastate fighters.
The shard cannons are relatively weak, though, and some other main gun would be even more destructive.