If you're any race except human or zuul, it's possible they have a fleet tailing yours moving at the same speed as you/faster than you. Double-click the fleet and zoom in on them; the only way to see enemy ships pursuing your fleets like that is to be zoomed in on it.
I was Hiver, they were Morrigi. Each time they attack me, they have to actually move into deep space to intercept me right? Their fleet was displayed as being at the planet every time.
No, I mean double-click on your fleet, not theirs. They can easily have some ships attached to your fleet tailing it and you'd never know because there's no indicator for it unless you zoom in on your fleet.
Plus, with you being Hiver, your deep space movement is going to be so much lower than a Morrigi fleet. I'd almost bet that your fleet was being tailed. You can also right click on your own fleet and I think that if there's an enemy fleet tailing you, it will appear in the upper right corner, just like a normal right-click does elsewhere.
Okay, so I just got this, was amused playing hivers (though seriously, slowboating gates around sucks. Slightly less so when I started with the long range cruiser heavy gate invasion fleets however.)
A) What the heck do you do about puppet masters. Seriously, even in a defense where it never fired a shot at anything, I lost the world automatically.
Did I just completely mess up? I went from harassing 5DE/1-2CR human fleets coming at me, to meeting an invasion fleet with 12 cruisers to crush it, and they showed up with 30 or so.
I still don't quite get how to up the number of ships you can field at once. I have CNC cruisers but now I can only put in 6 cruisers to a fight. They then have to churn through 40+ enemy destroyers, but atleast I take only a couple losses and there's another 20 cruisers behind those first ones waiting to trickle in.
I still don't quite get how to up the number of ships you can field at once. I have CNC cruisers but now I can only put in 6 cruisers to a fight. They then have to churn through 40+ enemy destroyers, but atleast I take only a couple losses and there's another 20 cruisers behind those first ones waiting to trickle in.
DN C&C modules would be the next upgrade.
Cruisers take a mess of command points, so you can field a few of them and a mess of DEs, or a lot of cruisers.
I can't figure out how much gate mass I can shove through a hiver gate. It makes no logical sense. I can send 3 fleets from the same gate to the same gate with ~10 mass per, but if I try and send one 15 mass group through it freaks, or if I try to send 4 10 mass fleets it freaks, and there seems to be nowhere to check the strength of a lane/receiver.
I still don't quite get how to up the number of ships you can field at once. I have CNC cruisers but now I can only put in 6 cruisers to a fight. They then have to churn through 40+ enemy destroyers, but atleast I take only a couple losses and there's another 20 cruisers behind those first ones waiting to trickle in.
DN C&C modules would be the next upgrade.
Cruisers take a mess of command points, so you can field a few of them and a mess of DEs, or a lot of cruisers.
I can't figure out how much gate mass I can shove through a hiver gate. It makes no logical sense. I can send 3 fleets from the same gate to the same gate with ~10 mass per, but if I try and send one 15 mass group through it freaks, or if I try to send 4 10 mass fleets it freaks, and there seems to be nowhere to check the strength of a lane/receiver.
Look towards the top of the screen. There should be a triangle with a number to the right of it, that's the total gate traffic you can have. If there is a number to the left, that is the current gate traffic you have. This is on the starmap of course.
I'm under freaking siege. atleast half my planets currently have one enroute to them at this moment.
Well, each Hive world will eventually through one out. That queen will attempt to make a new Hive. This will then eventually send out a Queen. At the same time, the original one continues to send out Queens.
So, if someone has let a Hive fester...the Queens will come out in force. Sterilize them ASAFP.
I still don't quite get how to up the number of ships you can field at once. I have CNC cruisers but now I can only put in 6 cruisers to a fight. They then have to churn through 40+ enemy destroyers, but atleast I take only a couple losses and there's another 20 cruisers behind those first ones waiting to trickle in.
As stated, DN C&C.
There is also a tech off of the Cruiser C&C that ups the number of Command Points you get.
The other way to up your number of fielded ships is to outnumber your opponent. If you have more ships in your fleet than you opponent, you are awarded bonus command points.
I was human, they were the furry guys. I didn't recognize their ship types but looked like they had 6-8 of them. I had 10 destroyers with hammerhead+armor+third level drive. Green lasers and a single missile on each destroyer.
That said... I love this game. It is great fun I just have to get more used to it.
Third level drive... Do you mean some kind of Pulsed Fission? Fusion? Antimatter? What turn is it? Are we early game or mid-game? If "furry guys" are the Zuul, and we are early game, then I think I know what is going on. They may have a bore ship, which has a ton of hit points, and even their colonizers and such have a decent number of guns. I expect they are armed all with Gauss Guns. While innaccurate in real tactical combat, Autoresolve seems to have fleets close with each other at speed, firing when as they get into range, and then stopping at point plank and slugging it out. No overshooting or chaotic maneuvering, and even turret facing does not seem so important. Gauss Guns do a lot better in auto than in real combat. You could try building your own Gauss Gun destroyers (even in the medium mount) and auto again. Given engine parity, Zuul will be your speed or faster in tactical combat, so you'll need Ocillation Overthrusters (the Pursuit section) to catch them. You might want to avoid missiles, as you can't prevent Zuul from closing to brawl and they don't provide as many bonus hit points or raw damage as other weapons.
I was at work, they were the zuul and I had the pulsed fision drive. They weren't kiting me just running away. Thanks for the hint about the dove. I'm running the complete pack off of steam (like 15 bucks for game and all expansions yay).
Home from work now, going to play some more (ok a lot more).
The best early anti-swarm weapon is apparently interceptor missiles, which are a kind of point defense you can get in the fusion era. It's behind one of the micro-fusion something techs you get once you have fusion.
Point-defense phasers utterly rape the swarm, but point-defense phasers rape everything they're capable of targeting and you need Antimatter to get it anyway, at which point the swarm really shouldn't be an issue anymore.
Early on though, yeah emitters if you can get them, or point defense, or even green/UV lasers with a fire control ship are good against swarm. Just remember to include some heavy non-point defense/emitter firepower so you can kill the hive asteroid/queen.
Also, important: Against fully-grown silicoid queens (the ones that attack your worlds), you can shoot their heads off which renders them completely helpless.
Established silicoid hives will spit out a queen at regular intervals and target worlds with asteroid belts. If you have a lot of hives nearby, you'll get a lot of queens. Your best bet is to focus on killing the hives early on and ignore the queens as queens are a lot tougher because they have gravitron beams and railguns on their heads and are escorted by much bigger swarms. Newly established hives take a bit to generate more queens, so if they're heading for an underdeveloped world your best bet is to actually pull all your ships out of the system and scuttle all your defense platforms - if you have no ships in the system they won't attack the colony and you can turn your fleet around and kill the hive once the queen is gone.
ALSO: How to determine what race an AI opponent is based purely on their name:
HUMAN: Generic human names, these should be the most obvious.
TARKA: Names will begin with "K" and have an apostrophe in them somewhere. (This also applies to the Tarkan homeworlds, so if you look on the map and see worlds with names like "Kor've" there's a tarka around there somewhere)
LIIR: Name is something you could apply to a smaller subgroup inside a society, like "The Steelweavers" or "The Wardens" (the liir military is a completely independent entity from liir society so this makes sense).
HIVERS: Usually a "The something" name, and generally has a reference to either queens or children in it, like "The Hungry Children"
ZUUL: Really maganimous one-word titles like "The Firstborn" or "The Pure"
MORRIGI: Names almost invariably follow a "(name) the/of the/who (something)" format, such as "Bob of the Burning Claws" or "Mog'something who strikes last"
I'm under freaking siege. atleast half my planets currently have one enroute to them at this moment.
Well, each Hive world will eventually through one out. That queen will attempt to make a new Hive. This will then eventually send out a Queen. At the same time, the original one continues to send out Queens.
So, if someone has let a Hive fester...the Queens will come out in force. Sterilize them ASAFP.
The Queens DO give you 300-400k when you kill them. Which isn't bad, if you can manage to do it without taking too many losses.
For example, if one decides to try to infest an asteroid belt with an Asteroid Monitor you've hijacked in it.
Now to see how my Cruiser-class Bug Zapper does: Fire Control command, Point Defence Mission. 28 small mounts, 4 with PD, the rest with light emitters. Woohoo!
Now to see how my Cruiser-class Bug Zapper does: Fire Control command, Point Defence Mission. 28 small mounts, 4 with PD, the rest with light emitters. Woohoo!
Emitters already have 100% accuracy. No real point in having Fire Control just for four PD turrets.
As for anti-queen weapons, I find dumbfire racks to be really good since queens and hives are freaking huge so the innacuracy DF racks have isn't really an issue.
Dumbfire racks in general are one of the best early game weapons since you can upgrade their damage easily with the missile techs (and you don't have to constantly retrofit your ships since the missile upgrades apply automatically), do a lot of damage against large/stationary targets like most random encounters, and still pack a punch in endgame unlike emitters.
Also, echo: Are you SURE you're getting more turrets from the FC section? If you click on a gun and it says "# (turret size) mounts", you're actually getting that many copies of the gun when you put it in there - so for instance if the FC section has 3 slots and the hammerhead has 2 but each hammerhead slot has 2 mounts, the hammerhead has more guns than the FC - the FC just provides an accuracy bonus and you can get more distinct weapons into those slots.
Note that putting smaller weapons into bigger mounts will also make the guns double up, which is pretty hilarious with dreadnaughts when some of their medium/large slots can have 5+ mounts in them. Hellooooo, gun that fires 15 phaser shots!
You guys and all your fancy teknologee stuff. Back here over in the research retard (Zuul) section of the crowd, we kill swarms with ~20 green/uv laser destroyers led by a DE CnC with maybe a couple gauss DEs so you can kill the queen under the time limit.
Darkchampion3d on
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence --Thomas Jefferson
Emitters already have 100% accuracy. No real point in having Fire Control just for four PD turrets.
I had FC mostly because it gave me more turrets than Hammerhead on the command section as Liir. :P
FC has 4 small, Hammerhead has 2 medium 2 small, which translates to six small.
Garthor on
0
firewaterwordSatchitanandaPais Vasco to San FranciscoRegistered Userregular
edited June 2009
Annoying Swarm story: Had 3 of my Hiver dreads (one CnC, two impactors) chilling at one of my outpost planets, and I see a queen incoming. Shit, no problem, right? Dreads will tear 'em apart. Wrong.
The swarm tore 2 of my dreads apart before I realized they wouldn't fire on the swarmers without me manually targeting each tiny little bug, one by one. Stupid.
Nuked that queen into last year though. Projectors are awesome.
Okay, so I just got this, was amused playing hivers (though seriously, slowboating gates around sucks. Slightly less so when I started with the long range cruiser heavy gate invasion fleets however.)
A) What the heck do you do about puppet masters. Seriously, even in a defense where it never fired a shot at anything, I lost the world automatically.
Did I just completely mess up? I went from harassing 5DE/1-2CR human fleets coming at me, to meeting an invasion fleet with 12 cruisers to crush it, and they showed up with 30 or so.
First of all, the Puppet Master is a grand menace, one of the games uber-random-encounters. You only get one of them per game, and they'll only show up past turn 100.
The puppet master's main gimmick is a mind-control beam that will instantly subvert and give your ships to it, allowing it to build up a fleet. In AMoC, though, he was also given the ability to mind-control planets, which causes a localized AI rebellion on that planet - if you let him get enough steam, he can come out of nowhere and win the game.
Ways to kill him:
-Long-range weapons to outrange his mind-control beam.
-The corrosive missile line of weapons. Fire them so they drop their AoE cloud directly in front of him/his ships.
-Drones, or if you're tarka the tarkan battle riders.
-Research EMP weapons and build a crapton of EMP torpedo destroyers at the world he's due to hit next. When he's moving towards the planet, EMP him so his engines get knocked out and he crashes into the planet.
Other grand menaces:
The System Killer: A lone ship armed with a ridiculous amount of missiles. When it reaches planets, it moves towards it slowly and then fires a beam at it; four minutes after combat begins, he finishes and combat ends immediately with a loss, at which point he destroys the entire planet, erases any connected nodelines, and heals to full. Wear him down with deep-space intercepts. Use your best point defense (wild weasels if you have it - it'll turn his missiles around and make him shoot himself), intercept him in deep space as many times as you can before he hits a planet to wear him down, and when he reaches a planet throw as many dreads as you can at him.
The Von Neumanns will build a VN construct if you kill a berserker; the VN construct is a copy of the system killer but isn't considered a grand menace, so if you're really unlucky you can have the SK and multiple constructs in a single game.
Locust Hiveworld: Sort of an uber-silicoid queen, it launches roughly 50 gajillion little drones at you and attacks worlds, draining their resources like VNs. The catch being that the locusts drain the resources to 0 and copy themselves whenever they do so, meaning you get exponential growth and can potentially have 10 of them running around. Energy absorbers/anti-energy weapon armor and long-range corrosive missiles are your best bet unless you can mass dreadnaughts.
Peacekeeper: He announces his intent and then will intervene in one system every turn: if there's combat going on at a planet he'll be friendly to the defender and attack the enemy fleet; if it's in deep space he'll attack indiscriminately, and if there's little combat but a particularly large military fleet building up he'll just attack it. He's armed with a lot of shield projectors which make him invulnerable to whatever target he's facing and some giant super-emitters which fire disintergrator beams. He is, however, completely lacking in point defense and a bit stupid, so you can kill him with mines if you're very patient. If a certain amount of time passes without any combats he deems worthy to intervene in he'll just leave, though, so you can also sit back and just build up your economy until he leaves.
Refugee Ship: I don't know anything about this one beyond that you can suck up to them and get their ship, which is huge and launches dreadnaught-sized drones.
They really seem to have beefed up how well the AI does against grand menaces in ANY, at least the 3 i've encountered so far
2 peacekeepers and a system killer
have all been wiped out by the ai before getting anywhere near me.
The only thing i'm really disappointed in so far though is that the zuul AI appears to still be retarded, coming in last in every game and never posing much of a challenge. of course that might just be due to the zuuls inherent crappiness and not the AI's fault at all :P
If anyone wants to join a MP game we have one open slot.
We are also in vent.
Awww. I won't be home until 5:30 PST. Damn you work, damn you!
Darkchampion3d on
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence --Thomas Jefferson
They are when you find five hives in the first 15-20 turns. :P
So, I started a new game as Hivers. Gate capacity = total number of deployed gates, right? And I can only have one gate deployed per system, it seems?
3 points per gate, upgradeable to 6 in fusion age. Yes, only 1 gate per system.
Darkchampion3d on
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence --Thomas Jefferson
So, I started a new game as Hivers. Gate capacity = total number of deployed gates, right? And I can only have one gate deployed per system, it seems?
If you thought the swarm was annoying, they're even worse as hivers since it takes 20+ turns before you can wipe out an infestation even if you already have a fleet ready to take them on.
PROTIP: If you want a ship near a system but not in it (for instance, if it's a gate and you want it to wait outside a system with a derelict/asteroid monitor until you neutralize/capture it), then you can tell it to stop in deep space by telling the fleet to move to itself while it's in transit.
If you think a world is about to get attacked, do this to leave a gate right outside it. The last thing you want to do is send a bunch of ships to a system only for it to be a feint and for whatever they sent to kamikaze your gate so your fleet is stranded and their REAL fleet can move in uncontested.
Refugee Ship: I don't know anything about this one beyond that you can suck up to them and get their ship, which is huge and launches dreadnaught-sized drones.
If you let them set up a colony on a planet you control (they'll show up as alien colonists in your pop manager), then they drain resources and piss off your native populace (which lowers morale), but they'll aid in the defense of the planet (and their ship is pretty tough) and they'll also randomly give you technology that you don't have.
If you refuse to give them asylum, then they raid your trade routes.
So anyone have any suggestions for settings and a race to start with for someone who just got this game? I have played some space 4x games in the past. Looked through the thread and it looks like the Liir is one of the suggestions for a first race?
I'd say Tarka. While they both are fairly simple in the strategic map, Liir ships are very frail and you need to be able to micromanage them and take advantage of their maneuverability; whereas Tarka is just "point at them and fire".
I got about as fucked as a person can possibly get in a game this game we're playing right now.
No planets within 25 LY of my homeworld can be used (reasonably), as they are all over 500 HR. Almost all of them are 600 or more, and prohibitively expensive.
I am playing Morrigi and just finally managed to get FTL economics by turn 64 (I still don't have Cruisers, and only have Green lasers). I have 3 colonies, all at planets size 5 or under.
I can't trade. My homeworld is so remote it does not have a trade sector. My other colonies are in secure sectors (I got the ticker bar notice) but they aren't developed enough or populated enough (Morri population growth LOL!).
I've never been this badly off.
Of the 40 or so stars I can see, only about 4 of them can reasonably be colonized by me and I already have 3 of those.
We also have 3 hard AI kicking around, hopefully the Liir will buffer those for me
Posts
Clever girls.
Plus, with you being Hiver, your deep space movement is going to be so much lower than a Morrigi fleet. I'd almost bet that your fleet was being tailed. You can also right click on your own fleet and I think that if there's an enemy fleet tailing you, it will appear in the upper right corner, just like a normal right-click does elsewhere.
edit: make that THREE.
Emitters.
Lots and Lots of destroyers.
Some people say that using Tankers as mobile bombs also work well.
I'm designing an entire line of Bug Stomper-class ships.
A) What the heck do you do about puppet masters. Seriously, even in a defense where it never fired a shot at anything, I lost the world automatically.
DN C&C modules would be the next upgrade.
Cruisers take a mess of command points, so you can field a few of them and a mess of DEs, or a lot of cruisers.
I can't figure out how much gate mass I can shove through a hiver gate. It makes no logical sense. I can send 3 fleets from the same gate to the same gate with ~10 mass per, but if I try and send one 15 mass group through it freaks, or if I try to send 4 10 mass fleets it freaks, and there seems to be nowhere to check the strength of a lane/receiver.
Look towards the top of the screen. There should be a triangle with a number to the right of it, that's the total gate traffic you can have. If there is a number to the left, that is the current gate traffic you have. This is on the starmap of course.
I'm under freaking siege. atleast half my planets currently have one enroute to them at this moment.
Well, each Hive world will eventually through one out. That queen will attempt to make a new Hive. This will then eventually send out a Queen. At the same time, the original one continues to send out Queens.
So, if someone has let a Hive fester...the Queens will come out in force. Sterilize them ASAFP.
As stated, DN C&C.
There is also a tech off of the Cruiser C&C that ups the number of Command Points you get.
The other way to up your number of fielded ships is to outnumber your opponent. If you have more ships in your fleet than you opponent, you are awarded bonus command points.
I was at work, they were the zuul and I had the pulsed fision drive. They weren't kiting me just running away. Thanks for the hint about the dove. I'm running the complete pack off of steam (like 15 bucks for game and all expansions yay).
Home from work now, going to play some more (ok a lot more).
Point-defense phasers utterly rape the swarm, but point-defense phasers rape everything they're capable of targeting and you need Antimatter to get it anyway, at which point the swarm really shouldn't be an issue anymore.
Early on though, yeah emitters if you can get them, or point defense, or even green/UV lasers with a fire control ship are good against swarm. Just remember to include some heavy non-point defense/emitter firepower so you can kill the hive asteroid/queen.
Also, important: Against fully-grown silicoid queens (the ones that attack your worlds), you can shoot their heads off which renders them completely helpless.
Established silicoid hives will spit out a queen at regular intervals and target worlds with asteroid belts. If you have a lot of hives nearby, you'll get a lot of queens. Your best bet is to focus on killing the hives early on and ignore the queens as queens are a lot tougher because they have gravitron beams and railguns on their heads and are escorted by much bigger swarms. Newly established hives take a bit to generate more queens, so if they're heading for an underdeveloped world your best bet is to actually pull all your ships out of the system and scuttle all your defense platforms - if you have no ships in the system they won't attack the colony and you can turn your fleet around and kill the hive once the queen is gone.
ALSO: How to determine what race an AI opponent is based purely on their name:
HUMAN: Generic human names, these should be the most obvious.
TARKA: Names will begin with "K" and have an apostrophe in them somewhere. (This also applies to the Tarkan homeworlds, so if you look on the map and see worlds with names like "Kor've" there's a tarka around there somewhere)
LIIR: Name is something you could apply to a smaller subgroup inside a society, like "The Steelweavers" or "The Wardens" (the liir military is a completely independent entity from liir society so this makes sense).
HIVERS: Usually a "The something" name, and generally has a reference to either queens or children in it, like "The Hungry Children"
ZUUL: Really maganimous one-word titles like "The Firstborn" or "The Pure"
MORRIGI: Names almost invariably follow a "(name) the/of the/who (something)" format, such as "Bob of the Burning Claws" or "Mog'something who strikes last"
The Queens DO give you 300-400k when you kill them. Which isn't bad, if you can manage to do it without taking too many losses.
For example, if one decides to try to infest an asteroid belt with an Asteroid Monitor you've hijacked in it.
Now to see how my Cruiser-class Bug Zapper does: Fire Control command, Point Defence Mission. 28 small mounts, 4 with PD, the rest with light emitters. Woohoo!
Emitters already have 100% accuracy. No real point in having Fire Control just for four PD turrets.
I had FC mostly because it gave me more turrets than Hammerhead on the command section as Liir. :P
Dumbfire racks in general are one of the best early game weapons since you can upgrade their damage easily with the missile techs (and you don't have to constantly retrofit your ships since the missile upgrades apply automatically), do a lot of damage against large/stationary targets like most random encounters, and still pack a punch in endgame unlike emitters.
Also, echo: Are you SURE you're getting more turrets from the FC section? If you click on a gun and it says "# (turret size) mounts", you're actually getting that many copies of the gun when you put it in there - so for instance if the FC section has 3 slots and the hammerhead has 2 but each hammerhead slot has 2 mounts, the hammerhead has more guns than the FC - the FC just provides an accuracy bonus and you can get more distinct weapons into those slots.
Note that putting smaller weapons into bigger mounts will also make the guns double up, which is pretty hilarious with dreadnaughts when some of their medium/large slots can have 5+ mounts in them. Hellooooo, gun that fires 15 phaser shots!
FC has 4 small, Hammerhead has 2 medium 2 small, which translates to six small.
The swarm tore 2 of my dreads apart before I realized they wouldn't fire on the swarmers without me manually targeting each tiny little bug, one by one. Stupid.
Nuked that queen into last year though. Projectors are awesome.
First of all, the Puppet Master is a grand menace, one of the games uber-random-encounters. You only get one of them per game, and they'll only show up past turn 100.
The puppet master's main gimmick is a mind-control beam that will instantly subvert and give your ships to it, allowing it to build up a fleet. In AMoC, though, he was also given the ability to mind-control planets, which causes a localized AI rebellion on that planet - if you let him get enough steam, he can come out of nowhere and win the game.
Ways to kill him:
-Long-range weapons to outrange his mind-control beam.
-The corrosive missile line of weapons. Fire them so they drop their AoE cloud directly in front of him/his ships.
-Drones, or if you're tarka the tarkan battle riders.
-Research EMP weapons and build a crapton of EMP torpedo destroyers at the world he's due to hit next. When he's moving towards the planet, EMP him so his engines get knocked out and he crashes into the planet.
Other grand menaces:
The Von Neumanns will build a VN construct if you kill a berserker; the VN construct is a copy of the system killer but isn't considered a grand menace, so if you're really unlucky you can have the SK and multiple constructs in a single game.
Locust Hiveworld: Sort of an uber-silicoid queen, it launches roughly 50 gajillion little drones at you and attacks worlds, draining their resources like VNs. The catch being that the locusts drain the resources to 0 and copy themselves whenever they do so, meaning you get exponential growth and can potentially have 10 of them running around. Energy absorbers/anti-energy weapon armor and long-range corrosive missiles are your best bet unless you can mass dreadnaughts.
Peacekeeper: He announces his intent and then will intervene in one system every turn: if there's combat going on at a planet he'll be friendly to the defender and attack the enemy fleet; if it's in deep space he'll attack indiscriminately, and if there's little combat but a particularly large military fleet building up he'll just attack it. He's armed with a lot of shield projectors which make him invulnerable to whatever target he's facing and some giant super-emitters which fire disintergrator beams. He is, however, completely lacking in point defense and a bit stupid, so you can kill him with mines if you're very patient. If a certain amount of time passes without any combats he deems worthy to intervene in he'll just leave, though, so you can also sit back and just build up your economy until he leaves.
Refugee Ship: I don't know anything about this one beyond that you can suck up to them and get their ship, which is huge and launches dreadnaught-sized drones.
The only thing i'm really disappointed in so far though is that the zuul AI appears to still be retarded, coming in last in every game and never posing much of a challenge. of course that might just be due to the zuuls inherent crappiness and not the AI's fault at all :P
I always blast the head off with my Blazer Heavy Laser cruisers, then pour more heavy laser and UV laser fire down the gaping neck hole.
Its just the numbers of them, despite all the hive's I've already destroyed.
We are also in vent.
They are when you find five hives in the first 15-20 turns. :P
So, I started a new game as Hivers. Gate capacity = total number of deployed gates, right? And I can only have one gate deployed per system, it seems?
Awww. I won't be home until 5:30 PST. Damn you work, damn you!
3 points per gate, upgradeable to 6 in fusion age. Yes, only 1 gate per system.
If you thought the swarm was annoying, they're even worse as hivers since it takes 20+ turns before you can wipe out an infestation even if you already have a fleet ready to take them on.
PROTIP: If you want a ship near a system but not in it (for instance, if it's a gate and you want it to wait outside a system with a derelict/asteroid monitor until you neutralize/capture it), then you can tell it to stop in deep space by telling the fleet to move to itself while it's in transit.
If you think a world is about to get attacked, do this to leave a gate right outside it. The last thing you want to do is send a bunch of ships to a system only for it to be a feint and for whatever they sent to kamikaze your gate so your fleet is stranded and their REAL fleet can move in uncontested.
If you let them set up a colony on a planet you control (they'll show up as alien colonists in your pop manager), then they drain resources and piss off your native populace (which lowers morale), but they'll aid in the defense of the planet (and their ship is pretty tough) and they'll also randomly give you technology that you don't have.
If you refuse to give them asylum, then they raid your trade routes.
I love dumbfire racks. "Wall of Explosives" is just so fun.
No planets within 25 LY of my homeworld can be used (reasonably), as they are all over 500 HR. Almost all of them are 600 or more, and prohibitively expensive.
I am playing Morrigi and just finally managed to get FTL economics by turn 64 (I still don't have Cruisers, and only have Green lasers). I have 3 colonies, all at planets size 5 or under.
I can't trade. My homeworld is so remote it does not have a trade sector. My other colonies are in secure sectors (I got the ticker bar notice) but they aren't developed enough or populated enough (Morri population growth LOL!).
I've never been this badly off.
Of the 40 or so stars I can see, only about 4 of them can reasonably be colonized by me and I already have 3 of those.
We also have 3 hard AI kicking around, hopefully the Liir will buffer those for me