Pirates & Nomads Strat Help

[Ack]

I've been playing this mod for about a week now and I keep getting slaughtered. The lack of resources, the inability to colonize, and the stunted research is making it impossible to keep up with other races. It seems that losing is inevitable. Does anyone have strategy suggestions that could help me out?

[Fyron]

Did you take the Normal Race trait? If not (and you did not take Pirate or Nomad), you will not get colony ships and a lot of other things, which is bad.

If you are playing as a Pirate or a Nomad, you are not supposed to colonize, and the game is supposed to be a lot harder.

[Arkcon]

I'll assume you remembered to select ... Is a pirate.

Now, you're a pirate. Now what. The best game I ever had as a pirate was one where a terrible thing happened. One of the two warp points out of my home system closed. The other one lead to a black hole, which led to a nebula.

Did I say terrible? Silly me, that's only terrible if you’re a normal race. My pirate bases, conveniently located in storm sectors throughout the quadrant soon began carving up ships right and left.

They tried to attack my homeworld, but could never reach it. Bwa ha ha ha. Um, I mean, Yarg, mateys, Ha Ha .

So, you can use the map editor to give yourself a nice secluded section to have your home world.

SJ, what's this I see now. I can't make battle moons as a pirate? But that was to be the crowning glory of my pirate fleet. I gotta mod that function in, I have to imagine the look on their faces.

[ August 01, 2003, 19:59: Message edited by: Arkcon ]

[Suicide Junkie]

Since you aren't able to colonize, you must have chosen either "Pirate" or "Nomad" instead of "Normal" as your race trait.

In order to keep up with research, Steal&Analyse Ships, trade techs, and capture research planets.

If you can manage to con an AI into a trade alliance, you'll be rolling in money (relatively), and will be free to use those funds to build and maintain a very nice force to attack your ally's enemy with.

Don't ever expect to keep up with the number of ships they build.
The trick: Don't fight harder, fight smarter!

Make lots of hidden SY bases in storms and nebulae, perfect for refueling & repairing your ships, and making for great places to haul your plundered booty for scrap on analysis.

Always enter combat with an unfair advantage.
- Pounce unescorted ships with a large fleet in order to minimize your casualties and maximize the chance of capturing an intact ship.
- Always use tactical combat
- Sneak in and lay small mines in the path of enemy ships. Just enough to blow out their shields and weapons for an easy capture, but not enough to kill them.
Using the specialty mines (Ion, Null space, Tachyon, etc) can really help here.

Design your fleets and develop tactics as you would an RPG adventuring party.
A healer, a stealthy armored theif, a solidly shielded close combat Warship, and a long-range missileboat/archer.
Lay traps in the enemy's way, and ambush them on advantageous territory. (Shield depleting sectors and systems are excellent for capturing stuff )

[Ack]

Did you take the Normal Race trait? If not (and you did not take Pirate or Nomad), you will not get colony ships and a lot of other things, which is bad.

If you are playing as a Pirate or a Nomad, you are not supposed to colonize, and the game is supposed to be a lot harder.

Understood but to expand in technology you have to pirate ships. This leads to war, but remember a pirate has a very finite amount of resources and ship yard construction ability (SY ships vs planets). Ergo all a race has to do is outbuild you with ships of a moderate technology and the pirate has lost. There is no way that a pirate can match a planet based economy with their stunted technological growth and limited (and easily destroyed) resource collection facilities.

It seems to me that the best possible outcome is a long stalemate. Unless there is a strategy or technology route that I do not know about. The only thing I can think of is to make use of the lower ship maintenance cost by building huge numbers of ships over time. But this technique will result in vast numbers of obsolete ships against a modern enemy (ugh! Civ3 reference, think spearmen against tank).

[Arkcon]

You kinda have the goal down. Just surviving while everyone outstrips you in technology and numbers is the challange.

Pick one race to be your ally, and let them colonize around you. Ignore diplomacy with everyone else, diplomats ... hah ... who needs their pithy little trade goods anyway,
"Lets trade research resources and advance both our races"
"Yeah, umkay, how 'bout plan B. You research it, and build it, and then I'll just take it"

Let them declare war, that way you can get ships to capture. Peace is death to pirates. Put a spaceyard base and scavanger ship at the warp points. Take 'em as they arrive.

Definitely capture colony ships. They have no defences or weapons. Use these to form colonies. Or research troops, and capture planets.

Remember, if they glass your home world, as long as you have the resources, your ships won't die. And they can't intel you if you have no planets. Build a pirate hoard somewhere no one will find it.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

is it possible to win?
has anybody done it?

[Krsqk]

Originally posted by Ack:
(ugh! Civ3 reference, think spearmen against tank).

Just like in Civ3, there is a chance that the spearmen can win. Tactical combat is a must!

[narf poit chez BOOM]

in civ1, i lost my first ever battleship to a spearman. so i reloaded.

i think it was my first ever. maybe. that was a while ago. it was fortified and the city might have had walls. i dunno.

[ August 02, 2003, 05:10: Message edited by: narf poit chez BOOM ]

[Arkcon]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
is it possible to win?
has anybody done it?

I think I could have in my most recent game. I gave the AI small bonus, and that's not enough, they really do need at least medium.

When the AI gets baseship tech, well, it never builds smaller ships. So a lost planet needs a baseship colonizer, a world depopulated by an event needs a baseship sized transport to repopulate it. All that is too expensive in maintenance, and the AI scraps as soon as it builds.

If they could have found me, they would have killed me sooner. When you reach endgame like this, the AI stratagies aren't so good.

The pinudon were a pain, constantly using intel, and they never built ships. That is, when I took them over, I saw them build, and scrap on the same turn.

The Tolyatan survived pretty good, but then they usually do, but their major system went nova. The terrans were holding their own for a while.

The sergetti were doing very well, building lots of ppb baseships. Really holding their own, even though everyone else had phased shields. I made all the remaining AI's surrender to the Sergetti. With the resource boost they would have been a challenge. An event sent a baseship to my homesystem, and that was the end of me, I wasn't really ready for that to happen. I was relying on a heaviliy defended warp points, and a deep sensor base in cloaking nebula.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have set the game up for high numbers of AI's -- I wanted a diversity of ships to maximize my captures -- but they fought with each other too much. I couldn't even reach some before the were extinct.

I also sholudn't have turned on neutrals, they didn't take the "Is normal" trait, so didn't build resource extracters, complete dead weight. I thought the AI's would kill them quickly and take the planets, but they were too slow.

I wanted to get a battlemoon before I wiped them off the face of the galaxy. But that didn't happen.