While I never played the first GalCiv, I have played MOO, and other 4X style games. That being said, I am currently sucking hard core on normal difficulty on only mission 4 of the campaign. I'm aware there are two 'victory' conditions for this scenario, one of which is losing all your planets. I've played the scenario at least 5 times now and have always come close to 'winning' in this fashion before restarting the mission. I've never come *close* to the winning scenario of taking the Drengin planet in the west sector.
I've tried going about this mission in multiple ways and all of them have the same end result - the Dread Lords come sweeping in with insane ships and blow up anything that isn't a planet, even if it is nowhere *near* them or a threat to them. Next they come in with their troop transports with 10 troops that get some crazy 500 to 1 odds and can take most planets in one attempt. Let me detail the various methods I've tried to win this mission and see if someone can give me a tip on how to do better.
1. Expand like mad - I just buy buy buy colony ships given the huge amounts of credits I start with and build up the two smaller planets in my starting sector into tech planets so I can start down the path to troop transports. I can take every single planet that wasn't claimed at the start of the game (with the exception of the one right beside the Yor) with this method. Actually, I may retry this method with a slightly different focus. The first time I tried this method I took the closest planets first instead of the furthest one and that's why I didn't end up with the one by the Yor.
2. Go west, young man! I take my original colony ship, send it to the furthest planet it can hit, immediately buy a starport there and then a colony ship. I can take the planet right by the Yor with this method and have actually gotten to troop transports in the tech tree by turning my two smaller planets into tech planets as described in method 1. However, by the time I *get* troop transports I still have very little in the way of offensive ships and the Yor have some crazy fleets of 18/3 or something that blow up my troop transports before I think about getting near them or the Drengin. About this time I set about trying to get offensive tech, only to lose my starting sector to Dread Lord invasion.
I've tried setting up starbases to distract the dread lords, they still have enough ships left over to blow the bejesus out of anything I build in any sector, at the same time. I constantly check in with my allies and trade tech for tech or buy their tech if I don't have anything they want. I find that I can't make fleets of smaller ships to harass the Yor/Drengin as the Dread Lords like to come in with their 389432890 move a turn ships with offense of 40 and blow me up before I even realized they were there. If I research sensors far enough to see them coming, I'm just that much further from getting a decent weapon ship to fight the Yor with.
Suggestions?
