AP Tips

My approach.

Build scouts and colony ships with cash only.

put spending into social and research with military at zero. Keep government spending fairly low so that you always have an excess of cash. Ships built away from the front line are useless and get destroyed before they can achieve anything. Buy ships at your most forward planet as required. Colony ships to planet hop. Corvets to destroy enemy transports. Scouts for cannon fodder and scouting. Remember the enemy ship only has about 10 moves a turn so keep it occupied while your colony ships take planets.

Once you have a reasonable planet base the game becomes much easier.

Paul.

~SDC~

I must be dense, I capture most of the planets you can, my +1 speed gets me there in time. But after that the stupid avatar kills any ships I build on the planets. Build a corvette against the transports and the avatar comes along and nails him at the home planet. I'ld hate to put the game on easy just to get by this one scenerio. Any thoughts? I'll try it again and see what happens but I dont seriously think you can get to the dreadnaught level, and they are the only things strong enough to take on that avatar. Plus you are probably going to need about 5 or 6 of them.


~SDC~

Oh and opne more thing. I understand the intent was to have you sneak a force up there. While avoiding the avatar.

~SDC~

Have you won the third scenerio Paul?

~SDC~

I've won it a few times now on different difficulties.

Only build the corvette when you see the transports coming. Use some scouts to divert the avatar, build the corvette, destroy the transports, watch the corvette be destroyed.

Go for eyes of the universe as soon as possible as it makes the level much easier!

I tend to be in it for the long slog. I seldom manage to defeat the enemy before dreadnaught stage. Because your planets are undefended I find the AI's constantly send transports, thus keeping their population in check. When they reach battleships and combat transporters arrive the problems really start. At this stage you need to have whittled them down to just a few planets or they will be nearly impossible to deal with.

Tech wise I focus on reaching dreadnaughts asap.

Paul.

~SDC~

I too am having difficulty with this level (as much as I hate to admit it) and I've been playing this game for a while. Paul, you say get dreadnaughts ASAP, butalso get Eyes of the Universe. Sensors and such are not on the path to dreadnought. But if I don't get sensors I can only see the transports when they are AT MY PLANET. So no time to make corvettes or anything. And even if I DO make corvettes, the AIs transports WINS THE BATTLE half the time! So how do you make corvettes that can beat transports? Since the AI gets ALL the resources to mine, including a military resource, I don't see how a corvette will win the game for you.

Also, because there is NO trade, my economy lags so far behind the AI that I can never keep up. If I do trade, the Avatar just sits there destroying the trade ships until the trade route disappears.

I usually take 5 planets in the opening, but never am able to get the economy going to even get to battleship, much less dreadnought. In this last game 3 minor races showed up so that helped me becuase I could trade techs with them, but not for long! The AI took them down fast. Then invaded me using gas warfare taking out two of my most populated planets.

Is there any other tip you can think of that helps on this level?

My start is to rush build a colony ship to get as many planets as possible. Maybe next time I'll just set military to 100% and see how many planets I get that way. But even when I get 5 planets, within a few turns has 8 or more and population and production are screaming. I cannot keep up so any help is appreciated.

I tend to set research to 100% and rush buy colony ships as I need them. Generally, I get 2-4 planets when starting (Large/Rare). With my research so high, I can compete with the AI in resecpt to Economy and Diplomacy techs. As I am playing at maso now, I expect to be behind, then again at Tough, I found this to be the case as well. If you concentrate on the yellow and green techs, the AIs will trade you for military tech. In the mean time, bribe them to keep them happy.

I should also add that this is early game. Once I have Diplomacy researched, I set 100% socail to ge Diplo Trans. After that, I'm running a 15% militatry/25% socia/60 Rresearch spend rate when I make money (adjust the tax rate and spend rate).

Littlewotts, we were talking specifically about Campaign Scenario 3. Although the title is "AP tips" the first message was re: scenario 3. Have you played that? Trading techs with the Altarians in that scenario doesn't work because the AI will not trade evenly (even though we're supposed to be a team).

I'm having a lot of problems on this campaign also. I can't see anyway to defeat the Excalibur in the early game, so I don't really bother building any ships (except colony ships) early on. I tried to go for dreadnoughts, but I only made it to battleships, by that time the Korx are overwhelming me with transports. Any ships that I build are taken care of by the Excalibur so four transports or so take a star system. They make it through my 5 or 6 systems pretty fast.

I am going to try again soon and I can imagine The Eyes of the Universe would come in very handy, but I doubt I can stray so far off the military path, but maybe I will give that a shot. One thing I did try on the last go around was trading with the Altarains early and frequently, I didn't realize that I could talk to them without sending a ship to find them. I am also aware that the campaign hints at "sneaking" units to attack, but I can't figure out how to sneak my slow-moving transports around that damn Excalibur with 10 moves. Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this?
Should I even bother trying to build ships to attack the Excalibur, or just ships to take down the transports when they get in range? I don't normally play a military game so I don't really know these things.
What attributes and party are people using? Obviously using points on trade would be wasted, and I imagine diplomacy wouldn't be that useful although in trading techs to the Altarians it could be useful for getting better deals.

~SDC~

That's really a silly thing, by the way. What's the use of a team partner who won't share all tehcs with you? They've got nothing to lose. It's really poor ai in the sense it's not intelligent at all not to share techs and make sure one researches one tech while the other partner researches another one.

Playing this mission now, normal difficulty. Altarians seemed to trade techs and money fairly. I managed to get by for a long time when the Korx didn't bother sending any transports after me. If you build no ships at all for a while, the Excalibur goes off to bother the Altarians, giving you a chance to send out a colony ship without it getting destroyed.
Now, much later, I have dreadnaught tech, gravity accelerators and eye of the universe. I kept building antimatter missiles until I successfully destroyed the Excalibur (creating trading routes is a good way to distract him from fighting back - he spends a long time attacking the mini-freighters). But by the time I'd got his ship, I was down to three systems and am now totally outmatched in every respect. Can I launch a desperate core detonation attack and take out his homeworld? Probably not.

~SDC~