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Tactic Center
I.Standard Tactics
Defence Fleet
Building one great defence fleet is usally much better than building ground
defences on the colonys.Park the fleet in the center of your empire and wait for
enemy fleets to come.Try to intercept them as soon as you discover them,and
destroy their fleet.This should be no problem if you have concentrated all of
your ships in this defence fleet,because the KI usally sends only parts of his
fleet.
Sometimes enemy fleets will reach and conquer some of your colonies before you
can intercept them,but you can quickly reconquer them if you have enough tanks
in
your fleet.The AI only leaves few tanks on conquered planets,so this won't be a
hard fight.
Navigation
Imagine you are the green guy and the red guy is your enemy that wants to take
over your planet at the top.
So how can you stop him with your fleet?
The wrong way is to attack him directly.Your fleet will try to reach him
directly
and it will always lose the race - even if you have better hyper- space drives
than the enemy. The right way:order your fleet to fly directly to your colony.
You will have a good chance of reaching it before the enemy does.You can wait
for
your enemy there.
II.Colony Construction
Autobuild options
Usally its best to set the autobuilder to civil - the computer will build basic
buildings like houses,hospitals and parks but you have the chance to build the
factorys or military buildings yourself.
This will produce the best results because the autobuilder doesn't make very
intelligent decisions if set to more complex settings.I.e if you set it to
military it will build a mix of ground and orbital defences which is really
ineffiencent.
III.Colony Defence
Forts
It's always better to destroy invasion forces in space before they can reach
their target planet.But sometimes there could be situations when your entire
fleets gets destroyed.Therefor you should also have some defences on your
colonies,at least at your most important colonies (that with factorys or large
population).
Building forts is the easiest way to defend you colonies as they can destroy big
numbers of tanks (unless it it is a rocket fort).To improve their firepower,you
should build them close together so the enemy will have to fight against two or
three forts simultanousley.
Useless Buildings
Planetary guns: the firepower/firerate of this buildings is too low to do any
serious damage to fleets with more than 2 or 3 destroyers,and the extensive need
for workers (1.500 for the simplest one) will keep you from building a sufficent
number of them.I really hope this will be changend in the full version or with a
later patch.
Planetary shields: this buildings will increase the life time of planetary guns
as the AI always destroys the shields first before it destroys the guns.But this
is still not enough to stop a big fleet.
Rocket forts: the range of this buildings is too short to help against tanks
with
rocket turrets or range extension.Build mg/laser/heavy forts and scrap the old
rocket forts.
Space stations are completly helpless against ships equipped with torpedos as
they don't have any torpedos themselves (except of the heavy space station) and
the range of the other weapons is simply too short.And even if the enemy is
stupid enough to move his ships close to your base he won't lose much of
them.Space stations have great firepower but they can't hold out long without
shields.
IV.Unfair Tactics
Scrapping Colonys
You will sometimes have to fight against empires with strong fleets and
invasion
forces but weak defence on colonys.You could easily conquer some colonys,but you
couldn't defend them against the enemy fleet?
Just scrap the colonys! Soon,your mighty enemy will be really weak - unable to
do
research and to build a great number of ships.
Futhermore,you will get 50% of the build cost for each building back.If the
colony has expensive buildings (like stadions) this can be really a great help.
Destroying Civilan Buildings
If a colony has to much forts for your ground forces,you can use an indirect
method of conquering it..Just destroy some of the civilan buildings (avoid the
forts) and then retreat your troops.Some of the tanks will get destroyed by
their flight,but thats worth the price - the colony will soon revolt and if you
are lucky,it will join your empire.You should scrap the forts then,and wait for
the colony to revolt back.Wait until the enemy rebuilds some of the civilian
building,and conquer the colony.The colony is now defenceless and one tank will
be enough to take over the planet.
Stealing Money
Always short of money? Just use 3 or 4 qualified spys to steal money from your
enemy - again and again.Sometimes they will fail their mission or they
will bring in less than the 5000 credits you spent on their mission,but often
they bring back 15.000 - 30.000 credits.This will improve your financial
situation, and it will weaken your enemy on the same run.
The only way the enemy can protect hisself against this tactic is the putting up
of some really strong counter spys.But the AI doesn't do that - at least not in
the demo.
V.Spying
Training
One skilled spy at level 10 is much more useful than 10 spys on level 1.
Therefor its important to train you spys,always send them out on missions - even
if it is not helpful for your empire to have them fulfilled.
But don't send spys on missions if their chances are very low - otherwise they
will get catched and you will never see them again.Giving your spys training
missions is safer,but it will cost you much more so only do this if you have
enough credits.
If your spy finally has some expierence,you should decide wheter you want him to
become a spy or a counter spy.
Spys
Concentrate on the "Infiltrate" and "Combat" skill.Good infiltration skills
improves the chance to fulfill missions and the combat skill helps if a spy
meets
enemy counter spys - strong spys can usally escape weak counter spys.
Forget the "Counter Intelligence" and the "Loyalty" - counter intelligence only
helps counter spys,loyalty will only reduce the chance that your spys get turned
in double agents.This doesn't help much,because the AI usally kills catched
spys.
Counter Spys
Concentrate on the "Counter Intelligence" and "Combat skills".Good counter
intelligence skills will reduce enemys chance to do sucessful spy attacks
against
your empire.And it improves your counter spys chance to find enemy spys.If they
find enemy spys and have a high combat skill they will even catch them.
Mission types
Training fast,but expensive way to improve your spys skills
Aquire empire info get some basic infos about enemy empires.This doesn't help
much because the info is not stored in the information screen.
Aquire planet info use this to find enemy planets or to find out how many tanks
there are on an known enemy planet (but spy satellites are better for that job)
Steal credits if it suceeds and the enemy has lots of credits you will get rich
-
but don't use against poor empires or you'll lose money
Sabotage building best targets for this are colony centers (takes months to
rebuild and the enemy can't build other buildings in that time) and forts (if
you
want to attack this colony)
Sabotage ship always target big,expensive ships with this.If your spy can't find
a ship of the chosen type he will simply destroy another one.
Steal invention can be cheaper than researching it yourself - but make sure that
the enemy has really some new inventions.
Incite revolt if it suceeds,the target planet will belong to you (or it will
sometimes join another empire).Use best against colonys with good defences
(tanks
will get lost,but you get the forts)
Hunt for enemy spy only use this if your spy has good "infiltrate" and "combat"
skills.
Kidnap Is only described in the help screen but doesn't exist in the game.
Assinate leader the most difficult and expensive mission - if it suceeds some
colonys of the target empire will revolt.
Counter intelligence use this to prevent enemy spy attacks and to sometimes
catch
enemy spys.
VI. Ways to win the campaigns
Here are some possible ways to win the campaigns of the full game.Most of them
were sent in via E-mail.
Here is a rather unconventional and complex but effective one:
I was playing against the computer and loosing all the time until I tried this
tactic and it worked.
Basically after loosing my fleet due to being jammed to death, i only had a
small
number of ships and was outnumbered by 20 to 1 in ships. I split them into small
groups each holding 20 plus tanks. As the AI just goes for fleets one at a time
whilst one was being chased the others could nip in and steal planets. Also the
Ai will switch to another target if you leave your tanks on a planet and run. If
the AI still chases you, then split your fleet and put them on divergent
courses,
keep splitting the fleet and even if you get persued you might lose one or two
ships but the others get away to rally
somewhere else. Of course your other fleet(s) can be attacking planets as well.
Also I found you cannot have too many tanks on your planets, n fact I found them
to be more important than ships as ships cannot hold a planet. I also used self
destructs on weak planets to wipe out the AI's ground forces, which is worth a
colony if you take all his tanks.
So in the end I went from 10 to 1 number of planets and 20 to 1 in ships to
winning the game just by the above method and luring the AI away from the
planets
I wanted to take over.
The above works against faster fleets as my enemy was Antarian.
Also never do a sim ground battle when the AI attacks your planets as you
can inflict more casualties by doing it manually, always attack using sim
ground and your casuaties are less. Oh yeah self destruct needs 19 seconds
so keep any forces you have moving away from the enemy whilst the countdown
happens.
Iain Colledge
This one is more classical:
There are a few steps to make a lot of money (I'm talking about 10.000.000$ and
more)
1. Research some basic inventions (corvett, stadion, large house, and so on)
till
you have
an acceptable technological background
2. Set the taxrate to low (important to get large populations)
3. Set all planets with MORE than 150% production rate to (Auto construction)
Ship-production
4. Set 1 - 2 planets to trade and order 1 to build spy centers
5. Colonize as much planets as possible - at least 7, but not more than 20 (it's
too complex otherwise)
6. Wait till you find another race...
7. Gather your ships at only 1 - 3 planets so you will have some strong fleets
8. Then make a non aggresion pact with this race ...
9. Order a big fleet (ships:100 fighters:1300 tanks:50) to conquer the planets
of
your enemy
At the beginning you'll be about 0$ this is normal!
Simon A. R. Erat
This one was stolen (hope thats ok) from the GT forum:
- In the beginning of game colonize all planets you can
- Research rapidly, you will need following techs: 1. Battleship, 2. Self-
destruct, 3.Mega-tank, 4. Ion-turret and 5. Best defence fortifications
- When you have more than, say 10 planets, build Self-destruct to all
colonizations you make/take
- When you take planet, leave 1 tank there
- If enemy comes to ground battle, destroy your colonization with self-destruct.
This kills all
attacking tanks and thus cuts the invasion and prevents enemy from taking more
planets
(when enemy has mega-tanks, this is only reliable way to do this).
- Put destruction rays (or paralyzer and mezonguns) to your battleships
- Adjust your production colonization taxes to low, and others to high (keep it
none if there
is less than 10000 people)
- You can weaken nasty opponents by killing only civilian buildings on ground
battles (and
retreating once you killed enough those buildings)
- Use spies to do damage on early game for your opponents, and steal all techs
you can
- If you are on shiran campaign, you will get alliance with humans (remember to
be on
humans side when you are asked for). So dont act hostile towards them
- Remember that you cannot sit on your ass if you wanted to win this game
on 'normal' or
'impossible' levels (this means: conquer everything you can)
Thats pretty much all I could think off now, just on more tip: use your
imagination and
improvise in the game.
I.Standard Tactics
Defence Fleet
Building one great defence fleet is usally much better than building ground
defences on the colonys.Park the fleet in the center of your empire and wait for
enemy fleets to come.Try to intercept them as soon as you discover them,and
destroy their fleet.This should be no problem if you have concentrated all of
your ships in this defence fleet,because the KI usally sends only parts of his
fleet.
Sometimes enemy fleets will reach and conquer some of your colonies before you
can intercept them,but you can quickly reconquer them if you have enough tanks
in
your fleet.The AI only leaves few tanks on conquered planets,so this won't be a
hard fight.
Navigation
Imagine you are the green guy and the red guy is your enemy that wants to take
over your planet at the top.
So how can you stop him with your fleet?
The wrong way is to attack him directly.Your fleet will try to reach him
directly
and it will always lose the race - even if you have better hyper- space drives
than the enemy. The right way:order your fleet to fly directly to your colony.
You will have a good chance of reaching it before the enemy does.You can wait
for
your enemy there.
II.Colony Construction
Autobuild options
Usally its best to set the autobuilder to civil - the computer will build basic
buildings like houses,hospitals and parks but you have the chance to build the
factorys or military buildings yourself.
This will produce the best results because the autobuilder doesn't make very
intelligent decisions if set to more complex settings.I.e if you set it to
military it will build a mix of ground and orbital defences which is really
ineffiencent.
III.Colony Defence
Forts
It's always better to destroy invasion forces in space before they can reach
their target planet.But sometimes there could be situations when your entire
fleets gets destroyed.Therefor you should also have some defences on your
colonies,at least at your most important colonies (that with factorys or large
population).
Building forts is the easiest way to defend you colonies as they can destroy big
numbers of tanks (unless it it is a rocket fort).To improve their firepower,you
should build them close together so the enemy will have to fight against two or
three forts simultanousley.
Useless Buildings
Planetary guns: the firepower/firerate of this buildings is too low to do any
serious damage to fleets with more than 2 or 3 destroyers,and the extensive need
for workers (1.500 for the simplest one) will keep you from building a sufficent
number of them.I really hope this will be changend in the full version or with a
later patch.
Planetary shields: this buildings will increase the life time of planetary guns
as the AI always destroys the shields first before it destroys the guns.But this
is still not enough to stop a big fleet.
Rocket forts: the range of this buildings is too short to help against tanks
with
rocket turrets or range extension.Build mg/laser/heavy forts and scrap the old
rocket forts.
Space stations are completly helpless against ships equipped with torpedos as
they don't have any torpedos themselves (except of the heavy space station) and
the range of the other weapons is simply too short.And even if the enemy is
stupid enough to move his ships close to your base he won't lose much of
them.Space stations have great firepower but they can't hold out long without
shields.
IV.Unfair Tactics
Scrapping Colonys
You will sometimes have to fight against empires with strong fleets and
invasion
forces but weak defence on colonys.You could easily conquer some colonys,but you
couldn't defend them against the enemy fleet?
Just scrap the colonys! Soon,your mighty enemy will be really weak - unable to
do
research and to build a great number of ships.
Futhermore,you will get 50% of the build cost for each building back.If the
colony has expensive buildings (like stadions) this can be really a great help.
Destroying Civilan Buildings
If a colony has to much forts for your ground forces,you can use an indirect
method of conquering it..Just destroy some of the civilan buildings (avoid the
forts) and then retreat your troops.Some of the tanks will get destroyed by
their flight,but thats worth the price - the colony will soon revolt and if you
are lucky,it will join your empire.You should scrap the forts then,and wait for
the colony to revolt back.Wait until the enemy rebuilds some of the civilian
building,and conquer the colony.The colony is now defenceless and one tank will
be enough to take over the planet.
Stealing Money
Always short of money? Just use 3 or 4 qualified spys to steal money from your
enemy - again and again.Sometimes they will fail their mission or they
will bring in less than the 5000 credits you spent on their mission,but often
they bring back 15.000 - 30.000 credits.This will improve your financial
situation, and it will weaken your enemy on the same run.
The only way the enemy can protect hisself against this tactic is the putting up
of some really strong counter spys.But the AI doesn't do that - at least not in
the demo.
V.Spying
Training
One skilled spy at level 10 is much more useful than 10 spys on level 1.
Therefor its important to train you spys,always send them out on missions - even
if it is not helpful for your empire to have them fulfilled.
But don't send spys on missions if their chances are very low - otherwise they
will get catched and you will never see them again.Giving your spys training
missions is safer,but it will cost you much more so only do this if you have
enough credits.
If your spy finally has some expierence,you should decide wheter you want him to
become a spy or a counter spy.
Spys
Concentrate on the "Infiltrate" and "Combat" skill.Good infiltration skills
improves the chance to fulfill missions and the combat skill helps if a spy
meets
enemy counter spys - strong spys can usally escape weak counter spys.
Forget the "Counter Intelligence" and the "Loyalty" - counter intelligence only
helps counter spys,loyalty will only reduce the chance that your spys get turned
in double agents.This doesn't help much,because the AI usally kills catched
spys.
Counter Spys
Concentrate on the "Counter Intelligence" and "Combat skills".Good counter
intelligence skills will reduce enemys chance to do sucessful spy attacks
against
your empire.And it improves your counter spys chance to find enemy spys.If they
find enemy spys and have a high combat skill they will even catch them.
Mission types
Training fast,but expensive way to improve your spys skills
Aquire empire info get some basic infos about enemy empires.This doesn't help
much because the info is not stored in the information screen.
Aquire planet info use this to find enemy planets or to find out how many tanks
there are on an known enemy planet (but spy satellites are better for that job)
Steal credits if it suceeds and the enemy has lots of credits you will get rich
-
but don't use against poor empires or you'll lose money
Sabotage building best targets for this are colony centers (takes months to
rebuild and the enemy can't build other buildings in that time) and forts (if
you
want to attack this colony)
Sabotage ship always target big,expensive ships with this.If your spy can't find
a ship of the chosen type he will simply destroy another one.
Steal invention can be cheaper than researching it yourself - but make sure that
the enemy has really some new inventions.
Incite revolt if it suceeds,the target planet will belong to you (or it will
sometimes join another empire).Use best against colonys with good defences
(tanks
will get lost,but you get the forts)
Hunt for enemy spy only use this if your spy has good "infiltrate" and "combat"
skills.
Kidnap Is only described in the help screen but doesn't exist in the game.
Assinate leader the most difficult and expensive mission - if it suceeds some
colonys of the target empire will revolt.
Counter intelligence use this to prevent enemy spy attacks and to sometimes
catch
enemy spys.
VI. Ways to win the campaigns
Here are some possible ways to win the campaigns of the full game.Most of them
were sent in via E-mail.
Here is a rather unconventional and complex but effective one:
I was playing against the computer and loosing all the time until I tried this
tactic and it worked.
Basically after loosing my fleet due to being jammed to death, i only had a
small
number of ships and was outnumbered by 20 to 1 in ships. I split them into small
groups each holding 20 plus tanks. As the AI just goes for fleets one at a time
whilst one was being chased the others could nip in and steal planets. Also the
Ai will switch to another target if you leave your tanks on a planet and run. If
the AI still chases you, then split your fleet and put them on divergent
courses,
keep splitting the fleet and even if you get persued you might lose one or two
ships but the others get away to rally
somewhere else. Of course your other fleet(s) can be attacking planets as well.
Also I found you cannot have too many tanks on your planets, n fact I found them
to be more important than ships as ships cannot hold a planet. I also used self
destructs on weak planets to wipe out the AI's ground forces, which is worth a
colony if you take all his tanks.
So in the end I went from 10 to 1 number of planets and 20 to 1 in ships to
winning the game just by the above method and luring the AI away from the
planets
I wanted to take over.
The above works against faster fleets as my enemy was Antarian.
Also never do a sim ground battle when the AI attacks your planets as you
can inflict more casualties by doing it manually, always attack using sim
ground and your casuaties are less. Oh yeah self destruct needs 19 seconds
so keep any forces you have moving away from the enemy whilst the countdown
happens.
Iain Colledge
This one is more classical:
There are a few steps to make a lot of money (I'm talking about 10.000.000$ and
more)
1. Research some basic inventions (corvett, stadion, large house, and so on)
till
you have
an acceptable technological background
2. Set the taxrate to low (important to get large populations)
3. Set all planets with MORE than 150% production rate to (Auto construction)
Ship-production
4. Set 1 - 2 planets to trade and order 1 to build spy centers
5. Colonize as much planets as possible - at least 7, but not more than 20 (it's
too complex otherwise)
6. Wait till you find another race...
7. Gather your ships at only 1 - 3 planets so you will have some strong fleets
8. Then make a non aggresion pact with this race ...
9. Order a big fleet (ships:100 fighters:1300 tanks:50) to conquer the planets
of
your enemy
At the beginning you'll be about 0$ this is normal!
Simon A. R. Erat
This one was stolen (hope thats ok) from the GT forum:
- In the beginning of game colonize all planets you can
- Research rapidly, you will need following techs: 1. Battleship, 2. Self-
destruct, 3.Mega-tank, 4. Ion-turret and 5. Best defence fortifications
- When you have more than, say 10 planets, build Self-destruct to all
colonizations you make/take
- When you take planet, leave 1 tank there
- If enemy comes to ground battle, destroy your colonization with self-destruct.
This kills all
attacking tanks and thus cuts the invasion and prevents enemy from taking more
planets
(when enemy has mega-tanks, this is only reliable way to do this).
- Put destruction rays (or paralyzer and mezonguns) to your battleships
- Adjust your production colonization taxes to low, and others to high (keep it
none if there
is less than 10000 people)
- You can weaken nasty opponents by killing only civilian buildings on ground
battles (and
retreating once you killed enough those buildings)
- Use spies to do damage on early game for your opponents, and steal all techs
you can
- If you are on shiran campaign, you will get alliance with humans (remember to
be on
humans side when you are asked for). So dont act hostile towards them
- Remember that you cannot sit on your ass if you wanted to win this game
on 'normal' or
'impossible' levels (this means: conquer everything you can)
Thats pretty much all I could think off now, just on more tip: use your
imagination and
improvise in the game.