Well this is absurd... (invasion)

from Stardock Forums
I was just playing a game where I planned to be the Conquoring Warlord (admittedly, not something I'm good at). I managed to find my first victim quite early, a minor race. I immediately amped up research for transports and snapped out a couple (like I said, very early in the game) to invade, but by the time my transports managed to drag themselves over to the enemy, they had defenders.

Colony ships. Two unarmed colony ships in each of their two systems, that's all they had, and it was enough to prevent any invasion. Does anyone else think that's more than a little absurd? Precisely what could they do to stop me besides ramming my transports (and yeah, tell me just what kind of person would order/obey an order/stand by and let it happen just that?)?

By the time I had sped-researched starfighters and gotten one over there, they had already conveniently built a defender at their primary colony. I took over their secondary, bought the defender they had under construction there, blew away their defender (costing me my fighter), and continually failed in my invasions until I quit the game in frustration...
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Very early game invasion tactics are tough, so don't feel that you somehow missed the boat. If you want to invade that early it will simply take you a few games of practice to get a good feeling for what you need to build and research and when you need to wait and when you need to make your move. I've found early invasions to be cost-ineffective (I'm not saying they have to be, just that I've found them to be), so I usually wait till mid-game to do such things. But then, I'm not primarily a militaristic player.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
My problem is simply that they could completely prevent my invasions with only colony ships. By what distorted logic could that happen? >:(
Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
There's an entire thread on early game military campaigns over in the strategies forum, and the common consensus there as I read it is that the early campaign is mostly useful for destroying colony ships and constructors to keep that AI from expanding so that you can colonize more planets and capture more resources.

personally, I wouldn't consider trying to capture a system until frigates/battlehammers are available.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
You should have *also* sped up to have Starfighters, or if possible use your Hero ship if it has gotten some attack bonus early (quite usual).
But Ok, the game handles this in a simplistic way, but no big deal ...
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
I just had this issue come up at the start of my current game. A minor civ was one sector north of Sol (as luck had it, it was the last direction I explored). All they had for defense were two colony ships and a starfighter... plus a population of about 500M... on a class 22 planet! Woot! About-faced Hero from about 6 sectors away (the only ship I had with ATT score), and focused on getting Tech for transports. Unfortunately, by the time Hero got there (at a swift 3 parsecs/month) and I had transports researched and built, the minor civ had a pop of over 2000M... and 2 defenders in orbit. :(

I took the world, but of my starting 1000M invasion force, there were only about 80M left to colonize the world.


~SDC~