Fight Dirty?

[Pooka]

Originally posted by Hotfoot:
Work up to communications mimic, then screw over all of his alliances. If he is an uber-newb, he's going to be ultra-reliant on trade with his allies. You would seriously hamper his economy, and thus buy yourself some vital breathing room.

The problem here is that he's not reliant on trade, and someone allready botched a comm mimic on him so he'll be wary of that. On the other hand, I'm trying to covert-recon his spaceports and set them up as targets so I can move in and cripple his economy without having to extract him from every single planet in the system.

Also, once you can get into his space, consider sending some plague bomb ships (with as much ECM/stealth&scattering armor/ship&fleet experience as you can muster) in to his colony worlds. Go for the ones least likely to be defended and pick them off one at a time. After that, try to plague his major colonies. Then follow up with your primary invasion force.

This is good stuff, but the entire player group 'cept for 3 of the 8 (myself included) have almost no experience with SEIV personally. I also know the people on the other side of him will rally to his cause if I use plague bombs. (They're hardcore RPers) I've been racing up Intel and ECM as fast as I can, in an attempt to make my frigates more competitive with his dreads. I've also started leaning on fighters and sats and mines since they don't require maintenance costs. I'm close to taxing my available resources (including my current trade income) just keeping a comparable fleet to his going. I'm probably just screwed but I'm hoping to at the very least make the war something worth remembering. Next game I won't be so foolish as to mess with tech I've never used before. I hadn't played with Psychic until this game and expected it to have intelligence bonuses. Boy was I dissapointed.

Thanks for the advice though. I do appreciate it.

[Ragnarok]

Here is a tip I don't know if you thought of it yet.
When you capture his high tech ships with your intel projects, take those ships back home and analyze them. You will gain a level in ship construction for free basically this way. If you do this 2 or 3 times, you will have Dreads as well floating around.

[Gwaihir]

Sounds like the only WPS in and out are guarded pretty heavily, so that probably won't work too well. Unless he can get one of the blockading ships, and newly acquired ships don't engage on the first turn.

[Karibu]

If he is inexperienced, he might neglete using point defence. If so, then your cruisers with missiles will shatter his ships out of existence before he has a chance to shoot.

Oh, I forgot to mention that with cloacking you can get past his ships in the warp point if he uses no scanners.

[ May 05, 2003, 07:27: Message edited by: Karibu ]

[Gwaihir]

ooh, cloaking, good point. But if he has a lot of tech, he prob. has sensors

[ May 05, 2003, 07:39: Message edited by: Gwaihir ]

[Taera]

Im not an expert and have little experience in PBW but...

scanners are annoying and if he is the way you describe him he prolly has none.
Remember that Stealth armor gives you cloaking.
Dont send in a fleet - send in hunter ships that would pick on colonies and lone ships. Find his central production sites and plague them (not useful this time tho as it seems). Also find his mining colonies and rad-bomb them. If you need to take on a planet remember to bring in some planetary napalms, they're quite useful.

Vary your tactic - once try on with a lot of fighters and missile cruisers, then when he gets PDC go in with some direct-fire weapons.

For warp-point combat consider the Graviton Hellbore weapon. though many might jump on me here nothing compares with it in a single-shot.
Either that, or ripper beams.
SHield depleters, dont forget these.
And hopefully you do have ID's.

Part of fighting dirty is exploting those special weapons. Some are economically taxing though.

You're psychic? Why arent you using your psychic weapons then? they're some of the best in the game. having cruisers armed with psychic weapons can bring you a couple of victories.

[Xaren Hypr]

Psychic, hmmmm...well, unless he's gone to using exclusively Master Comps, the Alleigence Subvertor would probably do wonders against his ships. And most probably if he's as new to this as you say, he probably hasn't....but then again, I don't know him so I could be wrong.