Strategy Articles!

[Stone Mill]

Originally posted by Slick:
Stoney, great article! I have a few neat ideas, none of which I came up with myself. These all apply to simultaneous games.

Since a lot of people attack your fleet by attacking the first ship on the top of the list, if you want to avoid a battle that you think is imminent, break away your top ship on the list and run in a different direction to draw off the enemy fleet. Make sure you (M)ove the rest of your fleet in the other direction a couple of sectors before sending it on its original path. You can avoid this trick by randomly attacking a ship in the middle of the fleet listing.

There are many variations of the Ship Naming Game. Increase the number so the enemy thinks you have lots of that model. Name your attack ship as a "Minesweeper". The possibilities are endless.

Any time a fleet needs to stop for a turn or more, have any spaceyard ships in the fleet emergency build more units. The "slow" build time can be spent during fleet movement.

I think Stoney may have been the original poster of this one in another thread. I think this is a particularly devious one. Make your carriers into Troop Ships. Carry fighters and troops and you can use it to capture planets. Make sure the design type is "Troop Ship" and the strategy is "Capture Planet".

If you know your enemy is heavily guarding a warp point, you can open another WP and go thru on same turn. You can do this by having your WP opener a sector or two ahead of your fleet, give the WP opener the order to open the WP to the enemy system, and (here's the trick), send your fleet to attack or move to a place in the target system (you cannot use the "warp" order because the new WP doesn't exist at the time you give the order). When the new WP opens, the pathing routine will choose the shortest path for your fleet and go through the new WP. For this to work, you have to make sure that your fleet starts off far enough away from the heavily guarded WP so that it will choose the new one. Hope that's not too confusing.

Slick.

Thanks Slick- those are excellent additions!

Added...

[Pablo]

About the point of heavily defended warp point - are you sure guys that it is possible to have 2 warp points between 2 systems? IIRC the message says 'there already is a warp point to that system' and you are not allowed to open another one. What you can do is close the defended warp point and open the new one. This is also clumsy as when I tried this the warp point opened in the exactly same position as the closed one so it became heavily guarded again. My resolution was to open a warp point from another system and get inside
I hope I made my point that you can understand what I mean

[Iansidious]

Just to throw my two cents in I personaly like to take physical strenght,intelligence[i never really use it],cunning,and political savvy down to -50% then bump up construction aptitude to 150% the hightest it can go.Then I like to add my ship atk. and def. as high as I get it.Under advance traits I select temporal knowledge[for the temp.spaceyard]and hardy industrialists in the game this allows me to build with 11kt in construction! Some thing I do slowly during my game I start to convert my min. org. rad. facilities with monoliths then my homeworld can make about 34kt on each resource.This is one thang I have had nice results with.

[Fyron]

Originally posted by Stone Mill:
Only, I'm not sure about the strategy behind
"Change fleet target priorities to kill minesweeping/stellar/supply ships first."
Does this actually work, and what is the value?

If you set your fleets to target non-combatant ships, you can knock out the support ships of large fleets. This has great value if you can not destroy the fleet directly. Knock out their sweepers, and they might just die on your next minefield.

You missed the "launch mines in empty sectors" trick. Launch mines in sectors that are along the ship paths between warp points. People often do not suspect that someone will have launched mines in empty space, only over planets and warp points.

[rextorres]

All these help increase your mobility in a game - they may be "gamey" but they are allowed:

You can order your ship to retrofit and THEN move on the same turn. Move it to a forward repair facility or repair ship and it will get retrofitted, moved, AND repaired - all in the same turn - if you are a retroseries builder this helps a lot.

String training facilities to your front lines - a ship gets training at the end of a movement turn. That way your ship doesn't have to sit in one spot to get trained - it can train as it moves.

You can order a ship to warp and THEN move into and unexplored system. It will then move it's full movement and you won't get stuck at a warp point.

[Slick]

bump.

[Atrocities]

Slick said:
bump. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />