racial trait +20% and evasive armors

[Atrocities]

geoschmo said:
And make absolutly sure all your ships are trained before commiting them to battle. Otherwise you are going to see some utterly horrendous battle results

And he ain't joking about that neither!

[rdouglass]

Haven't played that mod in a long time but I've found a ramming strategy can equalize the playing field significantly against an opponent with much higher offence/defence bonuses.

As stated, outproduce 'em and swarm 'em. Try building 10-20 destroyers / LC's with nothing but engines, armor, and warheads. If you outnumber them significantly and have good speed, it can be effective.

[douglas]

Atrocities said:

And he ain't joking about that neither!

I can certainly testify about that, having lost only one of 18 ships against a total of 90 in one turn once on PBW. It was actually three separate battles, but I was outnumbered 5 to 1 in each of them and that one light cruiser was my only ship that even took damage while all of my enemy's ships (cruisers and battlecruisers mostly) were completely destroyed.

Besides stellar manipulation, you could try overwhelming his PD with missile swarms, but that probably won't get you much better required force ratios than you currently have. If Devnull didn't change it from stock, Wave Motion Guns have a +30% to hit bonus which could help quite a bit. You could search for other high-accuracy weapons by searching for "Weapon Modifier" in components.txt and glancing at the number before hitting find next (F3 in most programs I know).

[Ragnarok-X]

Wave Motions Guns are pretty expensive to achieve since we are playing a high techcost game. I get like 600k rp per turn, still...

[parabolize]

Alneyan said:
Standard fighters are very poor actually: they may have a good bonus to offence, but they will not get Ship training (-20% to offence), their Combat Sensors are much harder to research and weaker (-35% to offence), and they will have a hard time breaking through all the defences on an enemy ship. In defence, fighters lack Stealth and Scattering Armour (-30% to defence), ship training (-20% to defence), and their ECM is weaker (-30% to defence), so even regular weapons are going to eat them for breakfast at point blank range. In this particular case, add -20% to both offence and defence.

Fighters can still do a good job, but you will need to lure the enemy into attacking a particular wormhole, and put all the fighters there. If you do not care much about losing the bulk of your fighters, a force of ten thousands or twenty thousands should do some real damage, combined with a nice fleet. I would not bother with low numbers of fighters: if you want to him them with fighters, hit them hard.

Devnull improves fighters somewhat if memory serves, mostly by giving bigger fighters, but those will lose part of their offence bonuses, if memory serves. There might be other things of interest in Devnull too; the weakened PDC will not be much of a deal though. If you can get big weapons and big shields for your fighters, plus fleet training and the best fighter CS/ECM, it could work. It is probably too late for all of that, however.

They gain offence bonuses and loss defense bonuses as you go up in hull size. This is the problem.

[Ed Kolis]

What does small emissive armor have anything to do with anything? The emissive ability doesn't work on units...

[parabolize]

Oops. I was hoping this in the history log meant they had shield and armor now. "2. Fixed - Shield Depeleters will now work properly against units."

I knew I should have tested something.

[tesco samoa]

also... perhaps you should change your target areas... Use the space to your advantage. If there are nebulas that cancel shields use an all armor fleet to fight the player there... If you have ways into the players systems... Then attack their planets instead. Going on a running riot can be fun and it will hurt the enemy's production and may even cause planets to riot and rebel. Which would hurt more in the long run. Remember you out build so the player must concentrate their forces to match your 2 to 1 , 3 to 1 fleets. You have already won that battle. The concentration of fleets. Now use it to your advantage. Have a 1.5 to 1 fleet as well as the 2 to 1 fleet and have it doing something new that the enemy must counter. Hopefully pulling his fleets apart. Make them react and you should prevail unless the seiv combat engine decides it no longer likes you and lets you take part in one of those you lose 300 ships they have 3 ships damaged....

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Build up massive battlefleets to counter his attacks. Make sure you have at least a 5 to 1 advantage, and focus on defense only.

Then, begin building swarms of stellar manipulation ships - and I mean swarms. Go to the star systems bordering both your empires and nuke their stars if he's got ships in the system, otherwise make nebulae out of them. You could also do both

Then, send your defensive fleets forward into these (hopefully) shield-negating nebulae and watch his ships die by the masses.

Rinse and repeat until all that's left is his home system, then build masses of construction bases in the systems surrounding it and churn out a massive fleet consisting of both warships and landing ships. Use the warships to take down his defenses, but do not glass his homeworld! Instead, land lots and lots of troops on it. Then, if there are still other colonies in the system, simply use his own homeworld's massive production capabilities to build a fleet of approx. 100-200 orbital bombers, then glass his planets. If you're feeling really cruel (or you don't need the system at all), pull out all of your ships and nuke the star.

*****

Another approach:
Build massive fleets of ships armed only with shield depleters, then build swarms of boarding ships. Use the depleter ships to sap his shields, then capture his ships and use his own weapons against him.

[El_Phil]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
*****

Another approach:
Build massive fleets of ships armed only with shield depleters, then build swarms of boarding ships. Use the depleter ships to sap his shields, then capture his ships and use his own weapons against him.

But if he's got any sense he'll start chucking SSDs on all his ships the first time you pull that trick. Now that could be a good thing, if you've got production superiority you can afford to trade several small destroyers for one of his battleships.