this Strategy must be broke

[Will]

Works great against AIs. But once a human opponent decides to take a pot-shot at that "impressive" fleet, and sees that a lot of them are only semi-built, they'll start bringing Long Range Scanners to see when there's a nice big juicy target for them to hit. You could compensate for this by placing a scanner jammer on each shell and warship, but then your opponents could also look for a large number of your repair-class ships to find a potentially easy target.

The main problem with the strategy though is cost. Once the shells are built, they start costing maintainence, and in vanilla SEIV, that equates to the cost of a new shell about every six turns IIRC. There's also the extra time and cost from retrofitting, and the 150% cost limitation, potentially causing the need for retro-series. Once you refit a ship, it starts costing the FULL maintainence for that design, while you might have to wait at least one turn for it to become active. It depends on your playstyle on whether this extra cost offsets the ability to have "bleeding-edge" tech on your fleets.

Generally, the better strategy is waypointing ships to a training planet (in vanilla, usually set up at a planet with two moons, to take advantage of three training facilities) to join a fleet, and go to the front from there, or to have a few construction centers with insane numbers of shipyards (depends on empire size, I've gone up to 100 BSYs against AIs before) in one spot, and either send the ships straight to the front lines, or train and send out.

The fortified WP over the Huge planet is one technique to bring large numbers of ships from one of the uber-yards to a front line. It usually cuts down a lot of the travel time for the mid-to-end game where warp openers/closers become common.

[Fyron]

Will said:
Once the shells are built, they start costing maintainence, and in vanilla SEIV, that equates to the cost of a new shell about every six turns IIRC.

Without any maintenance bonuses, you pay 25% of the cost of every ship (which is not mothballed), every turn. A measely 500 racial points gets you a score of 110 in Maintenance Aptitude, which drops the rate to 15% of ship cost paid every turn... Pretty silly, but Aaron never wanted to fix this in SE4...

[Raging Deadstar]

It is however a good way of keeping ahead in the Technology upgrade game. As Races build ships and retrofit them or wait for the old obsolete class get destroyed you add the latest tech to your upgrades for the shell and retrofit pretty quick, It may cost more but you can be assured around 20% of your fleets are top of the line..

Against a Human this strategy would be defeated, the Ai however would probably get it's backside handed to it.

[Possum]

There are some things I regard as "must have's" (speaking here of plain-vanilla SEIV Classic)

Bonuses to Research and Maintenance are at the top of that list

[Gandalf Parker]

Well it didnt feel like a "winning" strategy anyway. But it seems like its good for my "deck of tricks". It might be a one-shot in a game but in certain circumstances its (like having a dozen "dreadnoughts" while he is still trying to finish his first) it could gain you a small advantage you can capitalize on.

I just realized (from a post on the SEIV discussion list) that it duplicates the old SEIII build-queue arrangement.

[Arkcon]

Will said:
, but then your opponents could also look for a large number of your repair-class ships to find a potentially easy target.

So here's what you do, construct the dreadnought with a repair bay, begin the retrofit at the spaceyard, then send it on its way. Then it will repair in transit, and have something ready whenever it encounters an enemy ship.

I'm starting to use the retrofit building more and more. For a while, I would rarely build battleships and never build dreadnoughts. They take too long to build. I only built them when I had max spaceyards, and plenty of time to wait -- which means I've practically beaten the A.I. into submission anyway.

I would use boarding ships to steal opponent battleships and dreads, but their designs were weak, that inspired me to design dreadnoughts and retrofit. But I never did that with my own.

'Course once I got to build a battlemoon, I absolutely had to use the retrofit series. It takes 22 turns to build an almost empty hull, and moving only one sector a turn, that time was better spent filling the hull with components instead of having it be fully built.

That's when it hit me, why not do it whenever building will take a long time; dreadnoughts, starbases in nebulas, etc.

On some level this is an exploit, subverting the balance that long build times provide. But I dunno, you see half built starships in sci-fi all the time, seems kinda appropriate.

It kinda returns us the the multiple spaceyard queues of SE3, where you could see your partially built hull filling with components, and move it around according to your new priorities.

[EDIT]
Gandalf Parker beat me to that Last point, that'll teach me to get a snack mid-typing. Oh well, it's his thread anyway.

[geoschmo]

This strategy works agaisnt humans too. As long as you don't build all your shell ships as the same class. Keep varying the class names and the other guy will never know until he attacks the strength of the fleet. Scanners will tell him, but you can counter that by putting scatterign armor on your shell ships.

The two biggest problems with this are the cost and the micromanagment headaches. Cost though is always easy to remedy in SE4. More planets.

Geoschmo

[Atrocities]

I recall that one of the best peaces of advise I was ever given about ship design and strategy was to not diversify your ship design, stick to solid one weapon platforms and build differant ships for differant weapons. It worked and I have yet to loose to an AI.

[Grand Deceiver]

Gandalf,

Very Interesting strategy..as well as Arkcon's.

I have no real advise..but it is very interesting to me..and should be to lots of others that:

(1) based on the nuber of Posts you show;
(2) the length of time I have seen you on the Boards;

one would assume that you are one of the VERY Experienced Vets and would know everything about how to beat the game/ai's/others.

What I'm trying to say is that its refreshing to see a vet still working on strategies to play the game..and that us with less experience can take heart in that we arent as bad or hopeless as we might think we are when getting our but handed to us.

Hope that made sense and that it wasnt taken as an offense.

[Fyron]

Grand Deceiver said:
Gandalf,

Very Interesting strategy..as well as Arkcon's.

I have no real advise..but it is very interesting to me..and should be to lots of others that:

(1) based on the nuber of Posts you show;
(2) the length of time I have seen you on the Boards;

one would assume that you are one of the VERY Experienced Vets and would know everything about how to beat the game/ai's/others.

If these forums were only for Space Empires IV, that would still be a semi-truthful assumption at best... In this case, it is not. Most of GP's Posts have been racked up over in the Dominions 2 section.