Strategy Articles!

Joachim · #1 August 8th, 2003, 05:43 AM

Here are some other cute ideas I have gleaned from the forums, some are similar to what you have already mentioned. None are original:

Use transport hulls for your early colony ships.
Load mies into colonisers for a quick defence.
When raiding randomly drop mines around the enemy system - that way they will just never know!
Change fleet target priorities to kill minesweeping/stellar/supply ships first.

J.

Stone Mill · #2 August 8th, 2003, 02:36 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
Here's another:

Star-Exploding on demand:
This can backfire on you, so be careful using it. Park a star destroyer over the local star. Order it to sentry, then to destroy the star. When an enemy ship enters the system, the sentry order clears and..boom.

Thanks Phoenix... added.

I have not verified that this works... but it sounds feasible... and deadly...

Stone Mill · #3 August 8th, 2003, 02:47 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Joachim:
Here are some other cute ideas I have gleaned from the forums, some are similar to what you have already mentioned. None are original:

Use transport hulls for your early colony ships.
Load mies into colonisers for a quick defence.
When raiding randomly drop mines around the enemy system - that way they will just never know!
Change fleet target priorities to kill minesweeping/stellar/supply ships first.

J.

Thanks Joachim! Added.

Only, I'm not sure about the strategy behind
"Change fleet target priorities to kill minesweeping/stellar/supply ships first."
Does this actually work, and what is the value?

Slick · #4 August 8th, 2003, 05:27 PM

Stoney, great article! I have a few neat ideas, none of which I came up with myself. These all apply to simultaneous games.

Since a lot of people attack your fleet by attacking the first ship on the top of the list, if you want to avoid a battle that you think is imminent, break away your top ship on the list and run in a different direction to draw off the enemy fleet. Make sure you (M)ove the rest of your fleet in the other direction a couple of sectors before sending it on its original path. You can avoid this trick by randomly attacking a ship in the middle of the fleet listing.

There are many variations of the Ship Naming Game. Increase the number so the enemy thinks you have lots of that model. Name your attack ship as a "Minesweeper". The possibilities are endless.

Any time a fleet needs to stop for a turn or more, have any spaceyard ships in the fleet emergency build more units. The "slow" build time can be spent during fleet movement.

I think Stoney may have been the original poster of this one in another thread. I think this is a particularly devious one. Make your carriers into Troop Ships. Carry fighters and troops and you can use it to capture planets. Make sure the design type is "Troop Ship" and the strategy is "Capture Planet".

If you know your enemy is heavily guarding a warp point, you can open another WP and go thru on same turn. You can do this by having your WP opener a sector or two ahead of your fleet, give the WP opener the order to open the WP to the enemy system, and (here's the trick), send your fleet to attack or move to a place in the target system (you cannot use the "warp" order because the new WP doesn't exist at the time you give the order). When the new WP opens, the pathing routine will choose the shortest path for your fleet and go through the new WP. For this to work, you have to make sure that your fleet starts off far enough away from the heavily guarded WP so that it will choose the new one. Hope that's not too confusing.

Slick.

[ August 08, 2003, 16:28: Message edited by: Slick ]

Phoenix-D · #5 August 8th, 2003, 08:23 PM

Just confirmed the star thing: it works. It also works with warp openers and closers, and I presume most other commands. NOT the self-destruct command though.

Stone Mill · #6 August 12th, 2003, 08:41 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Slick:
Stoney, great article! I have a few neat ideas, none of which I came up with myself. These all apply to simultaneous games.

Since a lot of people attack your fleet by attacking the first ship on the top of the list, if you want to avoid a battle that you think is imminent, break away your top ship on the list and run in a different direction to draw off the enemy fleet. Make sure you (M)ove the rest of your fleet in the other direction a couple of sectors before sending it on its original path. You can avoid this trick by randomly attacking a ship in the middle of the fleet listing.

There are many variations of the Ship Naming Game. Increase the number so the enemy thinks you have lots of that model. Name your attack ship as a "Minesweeper". The possibilities are endless.

Any time a fleet needs to stop for a turn or more, have any spaceyard ships in the fleet emergency build more units. The "slow" build time can be spent during fleet movement.

I think Stoney may have been the original poster of this one in another thread. I think this is a particularly devious one. Make your carriers into Troop Ships. Carry fighters and troops and you can use it to capture planets. Make sure the design type is "Troop Ship" and the strategy is "Capture Planet".

If you know your enemy is heavily guarding a warp point, you can open another WP and go thru on same turn. You can do this by having your WP opener a sector or two ahead of your fleet, give the WP opener the order to open the WP to the enemy system, and (here's the trick), send your fleet to attack or move to a place in the target system (you cannot use the "warp" order because the new WP doesn't exist at the time you give the order). When the new WP opens, the pathing routine will choose the shortest path for your fleet and go through the new WP. For this to work, you have to make sure that your fleet starts off far enough away from the heavily guarded WP so that it will choose the new one. Hope that's not too confusing.

Slick.

Thanks Slick- those are excellent additions!

Added...

Pablo · #7 August 14th, 2003, 02:47 PM

About the point of heavily defended warp point - are you sure guys that it is possible to have 2 warp points between 2 systems? IIRC the message says 'there already is a warp point to that system' and you are not allowed to open another one. What you can do is close the defended warp point and open the new one. This is also clumsy as when I tried this the warp point opened in the exactly same position as the closed one so it became heavily guarded again. My resolution was to open a warp point from another system and get inside

I hope I made my point that you can understand what I mean