DL Campaign with TA Rules

I just discovered GalCiv a couple weeks ago (Ultimate Edition - TA v2.03), and it's taken over my life...

I played a couple sandbox games, then tried the campaign, starting with the original Dread Lord missions. I know, I know - It's all about the Sandbox / Open games - But the DL campaign ended up being so hard with the new TA rules, that I just had to beat them. Most of the other forum posts for this campaign look to have tips / cheese strategies with the original DL (or DA) rules, so I wanted to discuss with TA rules.

(Playing missions on Tough)

1) Has anyone else found these missions practically impossible with the new TA rules? I still felt like I cheesed my way to victory, although my options were severely limited based on what was available before.

2) Achilles Heel - (Small map, one DL planet) - This one I just had to rush and attack the DL planet. I didn't even build any improvements, just a couple fast fighters and transports with the starting tech.

3) Apocalypse - This one was a slow tedious grind. Took me about 3-4 restarts, but I finally made it by colonizing to the south and west - leaving a buffer b/n me and the dread. Focused 100% research for the first year, then phased in some manufacturing. Completely ignored my economy, and survived by tech trading. It almost caught up to me near the last couple months (after I bankrupted my allies), but I finally got it under control (The IR finally developed one tech that lets you build a 50% econ improvement). Eventually I got to the point where I was able to pick off the dread ships one at a time and start an advance - but not before the DL had about 12 planets - including one of their first with a 700% manufacturing bonus tile (talk about gas on a fire...).

Here's specifically what I think makes it harder in TA:

3A) No tech stealing! IIRC, you need to place a planetary spy to steal tech (randomly or during invastion) in TA. I could place "race-wide" spies on the DL, but not on planets - Looks like planetary espionage was specifically disabled in that mission.

3B) Tech Inflation - Weapon techs get more expensive as the game goes on and you've researched other techs, correct? First thing I researched at the start of the game was up to Phasors III, but then stopped...that turned out to be a mistake when I came back to it later...

3C) No first strike / Different Tie Rule - It sucked sending 6 tiny 8/0/0 fighters against a DL escort w/ 1 HP and no defenses, and not having anyone survive. No more attacker first strike. If both ships die, then the one with the strongest HP survives (Correct?).

This is finally how I cheesed my way to victory - I gave the DL a taste of the tie rule and it felt soooo good!

I managed to hold off long enough where I could start churning out large single-attack hulls - about 30/0/0, no defenses, but with more HP than the DL frigates. I then slowly marched my way towards their corner of the map. I could take out one of their 0/0/100 24 HP ships with one of mine that only had 4/50 HP.

I felt like this was a lame cheese strategy - but I couldn't see actually matching their ships with tech inflation and no tech stealing.

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I'm on "Exploitation" now - looking forward to finally playing a "non-Dread" extended mission. Please tell me the DL don't make a surprise appearance...

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I bought the ultimate edition, so I have no experience of playing any of the campaigns with the earlier version, but:

I am having a similar problem.It seems beyond belief that the designers didn't think that people would try to play the ampaign with the ultimate mission.Having tech trees that allow space miners with no asteroids is kinda wierd.

I too had to restart on Achilles Heel, and just bum rush the dreadlord homeworld. By trying to expand first, they had enough time to build some crazy large hull unit (over 50hp and 1000 attack), which was impossible to defeat.

3B) Tech Inflation - Weapon techs get more expensive as the game goes on and you've researched other techs, correct? First thing I researched at the start of the game was up to Phasors III, but then stopped...that turned out to be a mistake when I came back to it later...

This is the first i've heard of tech inflation, I couldn't find any mention of it in the wiki. If you know of the specifics for how it works, I'd be most greatful to hear it.

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I'm afraid no one knows exactly how tech inflation works (or how it is supposed to work).

Briefly the idea is that techs get more expensive the more you have researched.
The first 20-25 techs you research should not contribute to this but afterwards your remaining techs will get more expensive. Sometimes this happens in one huge step (e.g. every tech suddenly more than twice as expensive to research), sometimes it seems to progress a bit more slowly.

Different techs seem affected differently: Esp. planetary invasion and weapon techs are affected strongly, while most others are not affected as much. Therefore it is best to research PI and at least one weapon tech early, imho.

Allegedly this was put into the game because a lot of people complained that research was to fast with big empires.
I do find the concept to be strange though: Why should you suddenly need more time to research something just because you already have aquired a certain amount of knowledge?
Furthermore it can lead to strange AI behaviour. For normal tech rate and tech brokering off you occasionally get AI players that colonize half the galaxy but don't own a single ship, as they don't research weapon techs.
In my current setup (tech brokering on, fast tech rate, no AI surrender) however the AI seems to do quite well.
Maybe that's also a result of patch 2.03, don't know.

And back to the original topic:

I experienced something similar when I was playing the DA campaign with TA rules.
It was certainly possible, but more than once I got the feeling that some things were originally supposed to be done differently.

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