newby's guide to ship and fleet strategy

[dumbluck]

What warp weapon? Do you mean the repulsor beam? Am I missing something here?

[Suicide Junkie]

The wormhole/warppoint beam. It moves the target to a random (unoccupied) square, anywhere on the combat map. Usually more effective than a repulsor beam, although it sometimes makes the situation worse .

[tesco samoa]

Hey GUTB where did you go...???

[oleg]

quote:

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Originally posted by tesco samoa:
Hey GUTB where did you go...???

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He is still driving his mighty armada at 3 miles per month along the interstellar highway bypass and will be arriving shortly

[Gryphin]

oleg,
Now that you mentioned it, I saw on in the Intergalactic Daily Tribune Harald in the "Incedents Report" that his slow speed caused a pile up in a warp point and has been sent to ship design school.

(I'm only joking)

[LGM]

quote:

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Originally posted by Phoenix-D:


"OVERWHELMING FORCE. Brutal, direct, unsurmountable FORCE."

[ 26 February 2002: Message edited by: Phoenix-D ]

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My response to both GUTB and Phoenix-D is that the strategy of creating a massive, cheap swarm early on and building tones of Weapon Platforms to defend against it is bad while the rest of the universe is developing and expanding normally. If a player spends his first 20 turns building a war fleet in a multiplayer game, he may trash the first player he meets, but he is not colonizing anything, so his power base is not growing. The goal these games is to expand and grow. A player who spends all his resources defending against an early swarm is also seriously set back. In a two player game this strategy might work in a very small universe. I hope someone tries this against me in the Universe Cup. But in that map, the two players start 7 systems apart, but two of the lings would be two turns apart as they are on the same side of the map. I think the home worlds would be 9 turns part. By turn 29, I expect to have Minefields which are the best way to stop an early game hoard. Once minefields enter play, offensive efforts usually shut down for a while while everyone builds massive Mineclearing fleets. A typical planet can build 10 cheap minefields a turn. A mine sweeper with 5 sweaping components will need level 2 to clear one turns worth. The player who build the awful swarm will no research colonies to research Mine tech 2, 3, etc, to keep up with minefield building.

I used to advocate playing with no minefields, but I guess without them early swarms would be hard to handle. Of cource in a multi-player game, I would just find a new game if I ended up being ambushed by a early swarm, knowing that they would not survive long. I would join a new game and hope to start in a better neighborhood.

[Phoenix-D]

Question- did you actually read my post? I wasn't defending his strategy, I was ripping it in half! Please don't quote me quoting someone else unless you include my response.

"I used to advocate playing with no minefields, but I guess without them early swarms would be hard to handle."

It's handleable. WPs are the cheapest alternative. You might loose a colony or two, maybe a some minor damage to your homeworld, but if he hasn't been expanding and the attack fleet gets fried, he just wasted a LOT of time and effort.

The WPs are also cheaper to build, so you can have more of them per the same time period. And it doesn't take more to kill the offensive he described. Hell, even speed 6 CSMI ships will do- one of them can kill 3-4 of his "assult ships" if you remeber to select max range.

Phoenix-D