Bodyless

I agree with some of your issues.

**** More spoiler warning!


First off, I would like to say really good job overall on the expansion. I really enjoyed the new campaign (played on Obscene) although some of the missions were waaay to easy. The story moved along OK, but...

1. The Dread Lords are now pansies. Spying is the way to go in every mission with them. You can often guess the two or three spots that their home world is likely hiding in. I would send engine/life support pumped cargo hulls out to scout out the map, and crank max into espionage from turn one. Once you find their homeworld, pump it full of spies, and you take them out of the game. Often this means that the Dread Lords will only get out 3-5 ships (probably their starting craft) in the first few months... destroy those and they are out of the game. They never will neutralize a spy, so once they are placed, you just have them down for the whole game. Sure, each of those ships might have 400 attack, but they just don't have the hp to last when they can never build reinforcements. Very anti-climactic.

2. I agree that the Korath are colonization retarded. ESPECIALLY in the last mission. I was still building colony ships in year three and colonizing pure terrain planets just two sectors from their starting location. Any AI setting should be able to colonize close non-colonization tech requiring planets within 144 turns. I did not play on suicidal, but obscene is often not a slouch.

3. Super abilities? For all the talk in the story of the Korath working on creating a super mean virus, I never once saw them use a spore ship. Also, my Drenigan super-dominator ability did not work either. I know the drenigan are supposed to get some free ships when they declare war. In all missions you start out at war with your enemies. However, you can still declare war against third parties that are watching in some missions, and it is possible to get the Korath to sign a peace treaty with you and then re-declare war on them. Throughout, I never saw my super ability work once in the DA campaign.
(Is the Korath going peaceful a bug? How to do it: gain an alliance with any third party, usually the Thalans or Iconians. Then, pay the Thalans, for instance, to go to war with the Korath. Next turn, pay the Thalans to make peace with the Korath. The Korath will sign a peace treaty with the Thalans AND the Drenigan if you do this.) Now you are not at war. Rape the Korath at your leisure.

4. The spy on the Korath mission sucks. Sounded like it would be easy and quick, but took me almost 4 hours to beat. Why? The Korath would not put a fourth improvement on their secret research planet. I was able to shut down the rest of their empire with spies, so I was never in danger of losing. But I couldn't get them to spend any money on that planet, and it was really disenheartening to see that they had three improvements building and consistantly only 1 point of industrial to put into it. when it will take them 288 turns to think about doing something else, that is a problem. I ended up having to culture flip all of their other planets so that they HAD to spend money there. This is not easy to do in this mission, because you only get one culture buff upgrade in the tech tree. So for each planet I wanted to flip I needed to build 16-20 influence starbases along the sector borders, then sell them and repeat. A fun quick mission turned into a ridiculous grind as I waited for my armies of constructors to slowly force the Korath to build something. Not fun.

5. Saving the Torians is waaaay too easy. I want to play through again on suicidal and see if it is random. I started about half a sector away from the Korath in this mission, with the Korath between me and my erstwhile allies (Torian slavelings). This mission was almost immediatly over. I'm always pumping espionage, and by March (turn 12) I had put a spy on the only Korath Industrial sector that was built. From this point on they are done. I sold my economic and research treaties to each of my allies for 10k each, and with my money built a three fast transports and built up my worlds. Invaded their two worlds after dealing with a couple basic defenders (las 1, no move) - whole thing was over by May 2226 (the first year). If the Korath always start so close to you in this mission, it is way way WAY too easy.


Again, sorry if this posting sounds negative... I'm just bringing up what I found as problems in an otherwise great experience. I liked how changes from map to map made you change your tactics... anamolies every three squares in one game, almost no anamolies in the next, for instance. I have done some game design myself in the past, so I know how difficult the task can be. But if there is any sort of fix for the super abilities to get them to work in the campaign that would be great. They are great fun in the sandbox games. Overall, good job Stardock!

I was not aware of this bug. I think the campaign has a few bugs (like super abilities). However, I did not restart (Ctrl-N) on any of my missions, so that doesn't really explain what I saw the AI doing.

I agree with Iztok the problem seems to be poor population cultivation leading to a negative money cycle. Also, if you start spying on the Korath at all, then they will also try and dump money into espionage to remove spies. It is strangely satisfying/disheartening to "View" every enemy planet and see them with 1-2 Industrial production and that's it. You know you've won, and you haven't even fired a shot yet.

Also, I spent some time doing testing. I can't get super abilities to work at any difficulty level. An easy test is to move your full speed through Yor territory. Has anyone ever seen a super ability in the new campaign??

One thing I like about the campaign is that you're already at war, from the get-go. So it's okay to slap a laser on cargo hulls early on and go survey-ship hunting, and otherwise reek havoc on his asteroids and colony ships. It's liberating.

You could easily set everybody to "at war" in a sandbox game, too, but...who does....

Hi!
Another issue with Korath in campaign: they just LOVE to build research-enhancement building (that new one that gives 25% bonus to research). I found it on almost every planet I took from Korath, in queue or already built, even if on a planet or in queue was just one Research Academy.

Until late game it is IMO pointless to build that research-enhancement building on a planet with less than 3 research buildings, because 25% boost to 3 buildings with 30 research output (+7.5 SP) is still less than a new research building (+10 SP). Only with the second level (50% bounus) it comes out as a better investment.

BR, Iztok

I'm finding the campaign surprisingly easy, too, and it looks like some of you are figuring out why.

What I found a little cheesy was that Bribery scenario--you know the one where you plant 4 spies on Dagor(?) and then the Dread Lords pop up. Then you get this cheesy story about how some Dread Lord tidal wave swept the sector and it zapped all your planets & starbases except for your starting planet. In other words, "I want you replay the same map but this time with Dread Lords, and this is the best story line I could come up with to fit that".

I've found the campaign pretty easy as well. Dunno if it's to do with the difficulty glitch people are talking about or what (I don't restart maps, I just play with what I've got).

Something interesting has been on the last mission, most of the races have just sat around not colonizing much except for the planets in their starting sphere of influence. So I just kinda sat around too, colonized some fairly close worlds, fended off the DL ships that wandered over, researched, etc.

Eventually I got bored and started sending out colony ships to the larger planets that were half a map away. About this same time, the Korath went nuts and started colonizing every single planet on their way to my homeworld. It was like the colony rush at the start of a sandbox game, which was pretty cool. Not only that, when they got near my own far flung planets, they had troop transports on the heels of their colony ships to invade my undefended worlds.

So everything started out passive, but now the Korath have turned uber aggressive. The other races seem to be pretty passive still. It makes me wonder if it has to do with the high level of starting techs in that last mission?

Anyway, the Korath turning aggressive should make for an interesting game now, since I wasn't prepared for that, hehe.

Hi!
I'm finishing the 7th mission of the DA campaign (Defend Drengi, conquer all korath's colonies) with game version "v1.50 Dark Avatar last updated on: Fri Feb 9 14:05:57 2007", AI set on masochistic. I've already won it (Korath have only one small planet left, DreadLords conquered), but am just testing game mechanics and new features.

I've noticed some problems:

1) Spying
There are quite some issues I'd like to address:
- Counter-espionage center doesn't work properly. When I built one on my planet with two AIs' spies on, they both remained there, even after several turns.
- Gaining at least high intelligence level even on a single AI can be hideiously expensive, as there's no possibility to put a spy in "passive" mode to just gather information. I have to block a building, AI nullifies that spy, I put another one, more expensive there, AI nullifies it too. When I checked what my spying expenses were, I was heavily disapointed. Each new spy costed me several hundred BCs in the middle of that game, and several thousands BCs at the end. To give you a comparisson: a large ship, full of psionic beams (base 96 beam attack, ~150 with all modifiers) and a single warp engine, that alone destroyed 70% of korath's navy (9 fregates and 2 heavy fighters), costed me ~1300 BC to build. IIRC in DL I could gain an advanced espinonage level for about 1500 BCs spent. And while I've been fighting a cold war with Korath, I've been collecting AIs' spies on my planets. At the peak I had 5 of them, sitting mostly on my Trade centers, so I heavily suspect Thalans did that, as this would be IMO the least offending position, esp. when I had at the same planet a factory on a 700% bonus production tile.
- Clumsy work with spies. I had on korath's planet 3 spies, but was not able to check them from the main "universe" window if I didn't recall one from "spy" tab, went back to the planet in main window, and click "Spy" button under the planet. Stardock, please made a piece of code that would check if I have a spy on a selected planet and enable the Spy button if it is there.
- I don't remember being notified when two of my spies were nullified in the same turn by Korath.

2) Asteroid Miners
- when moved by autopilot those miners don't start mining by themself. I had to click Build or Improve button for them.
- When they're building, I can't move them away, to save them from destruction by enemy's ships.
- When they end their work, I can't check the level of the asteroid mine lying below them, so I can't decide if they should continue upgrading it or move to the next one with lower level. This could be alleviated by setting them to Automatic mode, but then they seem to travel first to the farthest non-upgraded asteroid field, before upgrading the closest one to the next level. (EDIT)Well, it is visible in "detail" view, but in "icon" mode where I play because of weak CPU and graphics card of my comp it is not.

3) Combat
- The new combat system highly favors lots of attack power. The additional rule "in case of mutuall destruction the attacker survives with one ship" I also heavily misused. The large ship I mentioned before entered 3 battles with only 1 hit point, and won 2 of them, despite being hit with 20-40 damage in each! Only the biggest koraths' fleet of 2 fregates (60 HP) and 2 heavy fighters (24 HP) was too much for its 150+ beam attack to kill all of ships in the first round, so it lost. If the rule is misused in such a way, are consequence of that misuse:
. I don't need to research logistic at all;
. I don't need to research any type of defenses at all;
. I need to research a weapon with really high attack power (psionic beam for evil, a nano ripper for the rest), a large hull (quite cheap) and some cheap levels of miniaturization, and then put in that large hull one engine, fill the rest of space with that weapon, and go kick-ass. Despite it will be "destroyed" in almost every battle, it will survive and keep killing enemy's fleets. A big cheese if you ask me.
How to solve that? IMO if the ship survived the battle by that rule, it needs to enter a "repair state" before it's able to move. That means it will stay at the position of the battle for the next turn or two, with only one HP, with disabled attack and defense, "repairing" itself (but not gaining HPs). After that period it could move and attack again.
- Close to the DreadLords' planet I upgraded my medium ship without any defenses to a design with one more weapon and a better engine. In the process of upgrade the ship was motionless and with only 1 HP. A DLs' scout attacked it with 96 missile attack and FAILED to destroy it. Since I already had an issue with destroying ships in upgrade, I'd suggest Stardock to check if ships in upgrade can be destroyed at all.

4) AI behaviour
- They don't expand. Korath had a normal planet 4 sectors to their left, and two normal planets 3 and 4 sectors away in center, but failed to colonize any if them. Instead they again started building warships, to the point the maintenance of them ate a half (260 BC) of their whole income (530 BC). Only in very late game, when I already destroyed a half of their fleets, they colonized a nearby barren planet. The same happened with Thalans. They weren't in a war, but they too immediately started building a nawy, and didn't try to capture that same planet in center.
- In a whole game I haven't seen a koraths' ship with an engine. However Thalans did put a warp engine on their fregates quite early.
- Korath had made their planets heavily specialized: on two big starting planets they had mostly research buildings, on the third one they had mostly factories. That would be a good idea if planets' spending could be set individually. Regarding their financial situation I'd expect they'd build much more econ-enhancing buidings, but I've noticed only one on each planet.

5) Miscelaneous
- After I conquered DreadLords' planet with the help of minisoldiers, three tiles simply vanished.
- Destroyed ships leave permanent "holes" in a fog or war, like they'd remain there.
- Despite being at war with the Korath, They have a "+ our historical friendship" in Foreign report tab.
- When checking Economy in Race stats tab, I noticed there are some stats listed twice (tax income, research expense, military expense).

So much for now.

BR, Iztok

Counter Espionage Center is WAI. It only stops new spies, you still need to nullify existing ones manually.

To get higher espionage levels, try saving up spies and dropping them all at once on the most insignificant AI planet you can find, so it's less likely to care enough to nullify them quickly. More spies at once will also get you the info quicker than one at a time.

You can see a list of all deployed spies (and remove them) as well as all spies planted on your planets by enemies (and nullify them) on the espionage tab of the finance window.