Anyone tried The Barbarian Horde strategy?

[Possum]

Lessee, normal maintenance cost os 25%

You can get a 5% reduction by choosing Engineers, and then make the other 20% by spending race points.

[capnq]

I've been forced to use this on a small scale in a solo game vs. an AI race. I was roleplaying my peaceful scientists, who hadn't researched beyond Ship Construction 2 or any weapon technologies when the Xi-Chung blew up an unarmed scout and declared war. I spent a couple decades losing two frigates for each of their destroyers that I killed or crippled, then 2-3 destroyers per light cruiser. By the time I got LCs I had a slight tech edge overall, so things got more balanced, but it took a couple more decades before I could take the war to their territory.

------------------
Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[Steven-n-Donna]

You can get absolute zero mantanence cost by modifying the settings.txt. These setting alow you to adjust the amount in which racial points cost. Example: anything over a 100% of say Defensive only costs 1 racial point each. You can also change it so you can have higher amounts of racial advantages. Like a 200% Attack rating.
Personally, I don't use these, since it makes the game seriously easy unless you go through and modify every other AI and human players' sources.
It takes a bit in the text file to realize what your modifying, just look at the strings, and they are pretty self explainitory.
Steve

[Nitram Draw]

You can also use those characteristic costs in the setting file to make the game harder. In my hotseat games we have put a limit of 15 on the plus side of maintenance. This means that no one can get 0 maintenance, 5% is the least. We have also modified some of the costs also, maintenance cost 200 per 1% increase.

[Lemmy]

i think i'm going to use that strategy in my current game, maybe i'll mix in some dreadnoughts for a diVersion.

My race has acces to all of the racial techs, so i can use the temporal shipyard, and probably will try to fit as many of the most damaging weapon on a light cruiser, or maybe several high damage/low distance weapons.