Having difficulty with GC 2 Dread Lords

So, first of all, I've played the Civilization games and a couple of Moos and some other TBS, Alpha Centauri I used to be really into, there was an old Mac OS 9 game called like Starbound II that's basically exactly like Galactic Civilizations in every way except it has really crappy graphics and it was made 10 years ago or something.

Anyway, so, so far I haven't played that much but, the game either seems so easy that I don't feel like I'm doing anything or completely impossible.

I've been playing through the single player campaign for Dread Lords and the first few levels, I think one of the allied computers accomplished the objective (which isn't really accessible to check up on during the game, i.e., after the start). One of them I built a couple ships with the tech I had and invaded somewhere and accomplished it.

Then I get to this Apocalypse level with the actual DreadLord ships and the opening screen says that I will lose in the long term and I have to beat them quickly. Well, exactly how quickly is that?

I feel like I go into debt, -400, buying a bunch of factories on planets and colonizing a few worlds. So then I've got like 5 to 7 planets with 11 spots and factories and starbases. I start sending out fast trade ships, and recovery my economy, back up to enough to periodically buy off ships. I trade techs with all my allies constantly.

The problem is that it still takes like 8 to 16 turns to build a state of the art ship and the dread lords come in with these ships that are 262 mass offense. Now I assume that I'm supposed to attack with fleets so that I lose a ship or two and kill the one there since it doesn't have any defense. But this only occasionally works, often I just lose three state of the art ships and I can't replace them fast enough.

So I see that I can't possibly tech up to enough to defend against their ships and so I don't know what to do. I can't expand any faster and if there's a single one of their ships on a planet of theirs, I can't invade it. The allies seem to start with a lot of ships but they get killed as fast as I do. There's no way that I can produce the volume of ships that I would need to. I mean, has anyone ever beaten the single player campaign?

So then I played just a normal game, not campaign. This was okay, I played as Korx and built a lot of trade ships, and then slowly started building a military. But then suddenly every other opponent attacked me at once because I was "evil". I think I chose the balanced option for all the invasion choices, maybe I hit evil once, but no more than once, and I probably hit good as well. I understand that the evil/good ethical alignments are supposed to maybe represent warring ideologies, but it just was kind of jarring to have them all attack me at once when I hadn't really consciously chosen an ideology and wasn't really aware of the huge impact it plays.

But what's really weird about the game is that... its something about the speed it takes to build a ship and to research a new technology. I felt like I needed to have decent levels of tech on four different branches in order to build decent ships. But I felt like I could only really get one level every so often because of the slower speed of research and then I felt like the slower speed of building ships meant that I would have maybe three at most of that particular ship before it was time to upgrade with some new tech. And the whole thing was slow enough that I didn't feel like I could really keep up with anything

I don't know, I'm just sort of frustrated with the whole thing. It feels like if I paid more attention I might be able to either increase production more so I'd build the ships faster or I could build more labs or something and increase the research speed, and then all the other techs that seem really necessary, the government techs, the social techs and development techs, I feel like there's no time to research any of them.

I feel like I'm doing something really wrong. I looked through the manual but I don't see anything glaringly wrong with my play style.

It feels like there's all this stuff that I need to do, all these different things that I need to survive, but there's only time for one of the five things that I need to do. It feels hopeless.

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What difficulty are you playing on?

In the campaign, if you set the difficulty higher, your allies will play smarter, at least hypothetically.

I haven't played past Apocalypse yet, but I did a search for "Apocalypse" and found several threads discussing strategy for winning that particular scenario. Also, it is possible to destroy a Dread Lord ship, it just takes several of your own. You really need logistics to build fleets to take them on. Also, Luck might help as it raises your minimum damage in combat.

As for the sandbox play, the other races will attack you if your military's too weak. The solution to this is to build small or tiny ships with a weapon or three to boost your military rating. The AI won't pick on you if your military is stronger than theirs.

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Mumblefratz

Join Date 07/2006

+139

It feels like there's all this stuff that I need to do, all these different things that I need to survive, but there's only time for one of the five things that I need to do. It feels hopeless.

I think it's right to start with normal games and not campaign. Also the level of difficulty that you pick makes a huge difference. Start out easy and gradually increase the difficulty. At the lower levels the AI is intentionally stupid and *you* actually get bonuses that make it easier to develop planets.

Don't be afraid to start out at a low difficulty. Colonize planets. This game is a balance between colonizing a bunch of planets and getting them developed. Gradually increase the difficulty. At around tough is where the game really starts. Somewhere in that area the AI has full capability and you get no bonus and the AI gets no bonus.

As you say there is a whole lot to learn even if you do have a background in Civ type games. Also there is a lot to research, one thing that you can and should do is use tech trading to get techs in areas where you can't research yourself.

In particular your ability to negotiate decent tech trades is dependent on your diplomacy level. Try starting out as the Drath that get a free 25% diplomatic bonus and then research up the diplomancy branch of the tech tree and build a few tech wonders. Now you can get decent trades for other techs that you haven't researched. In this case trade anything except diplomancy techs (no point in giving away your advantage).

This is only the tip of the iceberg. There are literally hundreds of paths to victory but each path has it's own idiosyncrasies that you will need to master. Search these forums for strategy advice, there is quite a bit here, try stuff and ask questions. It will take some time but you will find very many hours of enjoyment in this game. The better you get, the more there seems to be to learn. Then once you master the basic version you can move on to the two expansion packs.

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Mumblefratz

Join Date 07/2006

+139

To expand a bit on the above you need to focus on what is essential to your strategy and not be distracted from what is truly critical by what is merely nice to have. This is truly critical as you increase the difficulty levels. As you increase the difficulty the AI begins to get bonuses and it's impossible to keep up. However the AI tend to research low levels of everything evenly whereas if you focus your research on one specific area then you can gain an advantage in that area and use that advantage to win.

As you begin to play, focus on just trying to survive. Pick off a target of opportunity when you can. Develop enough military might so that you are not the target. Once a pair of AI's start a war join in and "help" the stronger by picking off a planet or two from the weaker opponent.

Yes it's nice to have Warp Drive early but is Warp drive critical to your strategy to win? If the answer is yes then go on a single minded research to get Warp drive, but if it isn't then make do with Impulse and focus on what *is* critical to your stategy. Different stratgies will have diffent things that will be important.

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Yeah, I should have searched for "apocalypse".

Like I said, I feel like my techs as good as I can get, I'm trading, etc., also, I know I can destroy their ships, I just know that I lose more of my own and can't build them fast enough.

Searching the forum, I guess my basic strategy should be don't try to tech up on weapons at all but just builds tons of little ships with very basic weapons and focus all the colonies on military production, no research.

That's the other thing, they invade so easily: advantage "500 to 3". Which is also kind of strange to me: why have this screen that gives these odds that flicker until you click. Why not just set them randomly (i.e., why have the player click... is this so you can gain some skill in hitting it at just the right time. Its like those console sports games where you get a goal or a basket only if you wait to hit X until some little bar lines up with some spot? I guess its to make it feel interactive.) and why doesn't it say clearly that its a random advantage. It was a little nonintuitive at first. I see that I have 3900 troops and they have 10, and fine, they have better tech, but still seems like its unnecessary information. I get it... I can't beat them on the ground, ever. The invade, I lose a planet.

I was playing on normal or challenging and I'm aware of the AI benefits, but even with the idea of swarming them, its hard to imagine winning. I mean their ships have offense of 262 and 22 hps, even if I get a single shot in per battle, I'd need something like 11 fleets of ships to take out one of their ships and they have a decent number. Meanwhile they're killing all of my allies and taking out my trade ships.

I think I'm going to just give up on the campaign stuff.

But as for the normal game, I did get the diplomacy thing and the idea of not trading the adv diplomacy tech in order to maintain that tech trading advantage. But I still sort of feel like... well...

It feels like there's all these little things that are really necessary, stellar cartography, sensors, trade techs, diplomacy techs, three different weapon techs, three different defense techs, social development techs, etc., etc., and I feel like if I fall behind in any one of these techs, I'll fall behind in the whole game. But I feel like if I build lots of xeno labs and research centers then I'll fall behind in production even if I keep up with research.

Is the idea that you have one planet devoted to research, one to production, one to economy and then you buy as many ships as you can? It just feels like even on normal and challenging difficulty levels I'm always trailing or 4th out of 6th or something...

I get that you're supposed to balance these different things in order to play well, I just don't see how that balance is possible. I probably just got frustrated with the campaign and need to play a few normal games to get it out of my system.

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Yes it's nice to have Warp Drive early but is Warp drive critical to your strategy to win? If the answer is yes then go on a single minded research to get Warp drive, but if it isn't then make do with Impulse and focus on what *is* critical to your stategy. Different stratgies will have diffent things that will be important.

I just saw your second post there. Thanks, I think that's probably what I'm missing.

I'm thinking of this as a TBS like civilization, etc., where I need to balance different things, balance the economy, balance the weapons and social research, balance production and development. But its not that at all. I'm starting to think that really GC2 is a lot more like an RTS game in that you choose a strategy, and then you focus just on that one strategy at the expense of everything else and hopefully force your opponent to develop a counter to it. I should have realized this when I saw the 3 different weapon and defense techs lines.

Edit: Actually, its possible all these games are like this and this one is less lenient about it. Maybe I would have done better at the Civ games if hadn't tried to balance things.

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Well, I wrote about half of the same post you wrote about the Dread Lord campaign before I realized that it'd been discussed, so don't feel too bad.

Plus, more discussion never hurts.

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Mumblefratz

Join Date 07/2006

+139

I'm thinking of this as a TBS like civilization, etc., where I need to balance different things, balance the economy, balance the weapons and social research, balance production and development. But its not that at all. I'm starting to think that really GC2 is a lot more like an RTS game in that you choose a strategy, and then you focus just on that one strategy at the expense of everything else and hopefully force your opponent to develop a counter to it. I should have realized this when I saw the 3 different weapon and defense techs lines.

You will eventually *have* to research pretty much everything sooner or later. One thing is that when you take an opponents planet you often capture a free tech. Once you start doing this is when you can really catch up in the tech department but you clearly need enough to start the process to begin with. I usually go up only the beam tech branch at first because it's the least costly and quickest to get to something useful.

Once you can survive a bit you need to think about going evil. Evil is overpowered in this game. The Mind Control Center gives a 100% empire wide economic bonus, the Artifical Slave Center gives you a hard coded 50% bonus to military production that is multplied by all other production bonuses you may have and the special Evil weapons like Psionic Beam can take out most anything although they are expensive. However being evil you need to be prepared to be the target and need to be able to survive the onslaught of the good and neutral (and even other evil) AI's. Once you can do this then Evil is the way to go.

Also everything flows from having a good economy. In this game morale is money. The higher your morale the higher you can set your taxes and the more money you earn.

Like I said there is a whole *lot* of stuff that you need to absorb and it will take a lot of experimentation to find what works for you.

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