Dread Lord Problem

from GalCiv2 Forums
Alright, currently I'm playing a scenario called Dread Lords on Parade, on a gigantic map. I start off with 9 races, all on intelligent. I got quite a good number of worlds in the initial colony rush (about 29 planets). And I took your advice earlier about specializing in weapons, and other things necessary for running an empire. Well, after a while, I ran into Dread Lords, but at first they were thankfully very far away. but it didn't stay that way for very long. At this point in the game, they have wiped out 3 races and they are sort of in my back yard. Though my top of the line weapons, the Singularity Drivers and the Graviton Driver Mark I, are doing okay, their weapons are just so overwhelmingly powerful and my defenses are inadequate. My strategy has been up to this point to keep them away from my empire and so I've been fighting them in foreign territory. But the last race they just wiped out, the Drengin, was bordering my empire and they wiped out my main battlefleet with it. In addition, they wiped out all of my military starbases and my early warning sensors along that border. The last I saw, they were headed directly toward my prime influence and economic world. Right now my defenses are kinda scrambled and I'm at loss over what to do. Pretty much, they are prepared for a full scale invasion of my empire and I don't what to do about it, for they are vastly more powerful than I am. So far, I've got an alliance with the Torians and they have some ships stationed in my space for the upcoming onslaught, and I'm busy using my other offensive fleet wiping out the Yor for their planets. I'm wiping out the Yor because they are very far away from the Dread Lords and in the event that Earth and the rest of its sister world are wiped out, I will have a place where I could evacuate and make a last stand. I do have a bunch of defensive fleets back home though and I'm not sure if they are going to hold. I'm wondering what you guys would suggest doing right now. I'm kinda afraid right now, and my chances of survival are a little slim. Also, what are your general overall strategies for dealing with dread lords, and did I do anything wrong?

P.S. When I mean my main battlefleet, I mean my prime offensive fleet. Usually when I have a great number of ships, I divide my armada into large fleets. Typically, I have about 2 to 3 fleets for offense, and about 5 fleets for defense. The main battlefleet usually has 60+ ships in it and is usually used to take the battle against the nastiest races. All of the ships in that fleet have seen alot of combat and are usually equiped for heavy firepower and speed. My other offensive fleets include a secondary one and an expeditionary one. The expeditionary fleet is usually the most technologically advanced fleet but it is alot smaller (i.e. about 30 ships together). It is typically used in very large maps and for keeping a distant empire busy while my main fleet comes in. And then my various defensive fleets are used for either defending the borders and others for individual planets. Given the fact that my main battlefleet has been destroyed in this game, my offensive capabilites have been crippled and I'm forced on the defensive unless I'm able to rebuild it.
strategies
8,490 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The critical weakness of powerful ships are 'tiny' ships. Their massive firepower becomes limited to whatever hitpoints that tiny ship has. You will find the overall fleet damage the dreadlords can do to you will be DRAMATICALLY reduced if you stick to using tiny ships.

Be warned, the tiny ship advantage is fixed in Dark avator.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Aye. In the base game, each ship can only shoot at one target. IE, that Dread Lord ship with 180 attack? All of it is used on your tiny vessel with 6 hp. Since you know you are going to lose a lot of time ships, load them up with weapons. It doesn't need to be top of the line, cause then they just take longer to build. You want to be able to churn these babies out in a turn or two on most of you planets.
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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Mystik and LoneWolf are right, tiny ships are the only sort you should build against dread lords, if you HAVE to build a big ship tho for some reason, like to remain at the top of the military graph, then build a huge one and pack it with defences, so you have about 100 on each one (or more specilies if the dread lords don't have a wepons branch) THEN add wepons.

Tiny ships Tiny ships Tiny ships, no defences, lots of wepons and speed so your fleets can run down dread lord single ships and blow them too kingdom come

Fate,
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Another big problem with your strategy is that you wast your time conquering the Yor with the bulk of the ships. If you knew that the Dread Lords were coming, you should have focused on attacking them with this fleet you're using to take the yor.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Thanks for the tips guys. Oh, and the reason I decided to attack the Yor was that at the time, the Dread Lords were focused on wiping out both the Drengin and the Altarians (They were successful), and I thought I should have enough time to conquer them. Oh well, I'm done conquering the Yor at this point anyway and I only lost 4 worlds out of 44 (29 plus 15 that I have gained from the former Yor Collective) to the Dread Lords. I've never seen so many ships come at me like this before, its like they're throwing everything they've got at me. Well, I'm going to follow your advice, and in the event that they do manage to annihilate the "motherland", I'll retreat to the distant Iconia and its neighboring worlds. But other than that, I still have a huge number of ships left, and a strong industrial base, and I believe I can hold and come out at top  .
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
By the way, your lucky the Dreadlords are strong. every time i have tried to play Dreadlords on parade, they get creamed by the AI. Especially since i am not allowed to reduce the number of AI players, which is a shame.

Mind you, if the Dreadlords weren't so blindly determined to attack me despite all the jucy races inbetween, they might actually have some ships left to use against the AI??

Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
"every time i have tried to play Dreadlords on parade, they get creamed by the AI. Especially since i am not allowed to reduce the number of AI players, which is a shame."

Yeah, I had that experience the first time too. But this game they seem to be incredible. It seems to me that map size and/or amount of world available has a huge impact on their strength. I'm playing this on Gigantic with a huge number of habitable worlds available and so they ended up having a large number of worlds, which made them a very large threat. Also, they focused on some other race first so I did not run into them until much later, and even then they didn't seem to focus on me right away. At this point in my game they control more than a third of the map and I'm having a hard time finding a way to create some sort of counteroffensive  . 
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
A good tip I was given for fighting DL's was to invade their planets (which usually end up being your own planets which the DL's just took and now you have to re-invade), and steal their tech. Then you can steal the high-end weapons techs you need to stand toe-to-toe with them.
Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
A good tip I was given for fighting DL's was to invade their planets (which usually end up being your own planets which the DL's just took and now you have to re-invade), and steal their tech. Then you can steal the high-end weapons techs you need to stand toe-to-toe with them.



yes indeed!

Personally i would like to see tech stealing removed from the game. It would eliminate this kind of easy shortcut when your weak and also when your strong - it would be possible to have a conquoring slugfest with the AI.

As things stand now, you have to be careful to never loose any planets when your ahead technologically - this is kinda booooring.

get rid of tech stealing, it's good for nothing.