Surefire early game combat tactics

[Lerchey]

Yes, you are correct. Combinations of greater speed and greater weapons range will always allow you to do better in tactical combat. The only real equalizer is to turn off tactical combat and let the computer AI hash out the details. This is something that I strongly recommend for multi-human-player games. Given the types of tactics described, I regulary kick the snot out of computer controlled DNs using DDs and LCs. Sadly, the computer AI, by default, does poor (IMHO) weapon selection and research.

I haven't played with it yet, but I believe that a good portion of the AI is configurable via text files. One thing I'd like to do is to set up computer races that use very specialized weapons tech. For example, it would be neat to build a race that uses only missiles and point defense. Given the range issues, they could become quite deadly despite being computer-controlled.

John