campaign game, 4th chapter

Research soldiering to the max, and zerg rush the DL

Do the Dread Lords use Mass Drivers if so you should consider turning good I know this is hard for some people but if you get arnorian battle armor it is extreamly usefull to turn good research Xeno Ethics if you haven't done so and also resarch medium or large scale building and slap on this expensive but well worth it armor on your ships and see if that helps.

Marc is correct, them Dead Lords WILL KICK !@#$ on your troops if you don't....
Sad to say This I KNOW ...

Byram

Get all your soldiering upgrades right away! This includes the Planetary Defense series, Tidal Disruptors, and Tir-Quan Training Center. You may want to take a soldiering ability as well, for good luck. Watching my troops fight the Dread Lords on the ground (or even in space) is quite entertaining, in a macabre sort of way: my guys shoot lasers and missles, they use what appears to be a Crimson Lightning Ray Of Doom that usually takes out at least half of my troops if I have only researched a few of the soldering technologies. Be sure to build farms and upgrade them, because any ground combat will wipe out at least several billion citizens

Considering that the Dread Lords' weakest ship has 100+ in Beams or Missles, you may want to focus on the first-strike offensive tactic first: gather up a fleet and blast the ships to shrapnel before they can strike back. Then destroy any orbiting their home planet and keep up a blockade until you can get your transports in.

The Privateer improvement is absolutely vital on maps with Dread Lords and any substantial amount of trade. They will usually find a way to slip in past your defenses (if you have any), if only to conquer your home planets, and they will obliberate any trade routes they find.

Finally, you can use the baited trap strategy by leaving an outlier planet defenseless, letting them take it, and then recapturing it during the next turn to acquire high-level technology. This will usually devastate the planet used as a trap, because the Dread Lords usually use destructive invasion tactics like Mass Drivers.

They never fixed that bug with the techs in which you have reasearch the same tech hundreds of times over did they?

try a subspace rebounder or tepathic defenses if they use missles and beams.

I'm pretty new at all of this, but if the suggestion of being good and using the reward from it, armor, is what I think it is, it means the game is long and drawn out while you get your research ramped up, right? I thought the DLs had to be dealt with quick before they got strong. I'm not sure how often they pump out those little ships that blow huge holes in everything, but I don't think I could deal with lots of them running around.

Sadly the idea of getting first strike will be useless soon as that's going to be fixed.

Given that it's a good way to survive this bastard-hard race's attacks, does this mean the Dread Lords will be toned down a bit to improve balance? I sure hope so

Right I didn't play the campaign because of the tech backdraw were you have to research things over and over again but I have played enough normal games to figure that the defense bounus is very effective against many weapon types. This may prolong the game somewhat but maybe optimizing defense against massive ship shreding devices is the way to go.

Everything is sort of like playing chess it is never as fast as you like it to be.

There isn't much point putting defenses on your ships against the Dread Lords until you can fit an absolute ton of them. You're better off trying to load up with weapons and kill them before they get a shot off.

The forth mission is Siege, rigth?
The best thing here us to build up, and stike Yor and Drengin as fast as possible, before DL interferance become to great to move your troops to the front.
Use your allies as buffer zone, since they will be attacked by DL most.
Avoid DL, use sensor ships to see them coming and move your combat ships out of the way.
After you succeed in taking out Yor, try to destroy all Military bases Drengin made on final planet to soft then up (their ships and twice as good with those bases).
After that, do invasion and you won the mission.

Good luck with next one, I still haven't won Acilles Heel after 6 tries.

I guess that post patch change to Instrial Sector needing 400 instead of 800 hammers made these missions a bit harder (Dread Lords industrialize faster). Never played Galciv2 before 1.1, so I don't know.

Anyway, if anyone beat these missions post 1.1 patch, then please share strategy, research path, ship design.

Actually I would advise the exact opposite of what p22 just said! (no offence dude, just the way I play that mission).
Ignore the Drengin and Yor and focus on the Dreads at the start. Dont expand beyond another 2 planets or so (you start with 3 right?). I can never do this mission if I go further at the start.

Go for Plasma and get small ships that can move at least 4 and attack at least 4. Biuld them over and over.
Build up on laser techs, soldiering, drives, logistics and miniaturisations. Dont bother with Defence techs or starbases, just get a ship design to about 8 att 0 def and 6 speed. You will need these in fleets of 5 ships so you may want to avoid medium hulls as well (at the start). Use your economy sliders to get buildings and then techs.

I know it sounds crazy but you can shoehorn an Impulse mk3, 2x phasor cannons, 1x mk3 plasma onto a small hull and get those stats fairly early in the game. In my games the Dreads have 227 missile damage so it doesnt matter the ship hull size coz they all die in 1 hit. So I use the small hull to get more ships in a fleet and it has less impact as I lose one each time the Dread fires. Make sense so far?

If you take out the Dreads that fly around your allies should hold the Evil Twins at bay. You need one transport for each Dread world (invading them is the eaiest part of facing them) and you should get a tech to help you along for doing it. If your lucky it may be a weapon or a drive. They tend to focus on one world at a time if you can keep on top of things so you may want to use a world as bait and let it get invaded then take it back over and over.

Depending on range you may need a stabase in the top corner but take their homeworld and all you have left to do is whatever your allies have left of the Evil Twins which is straight forward "regular" fighting.

Keep trading techs with your allies to save time. Even if you dont have good techs, logistics may save your skin! (lots of crap ships in a fleet is better than nothing against Dreads)

There isn't much point putting defenses on your ships against the Dread Lords until you can fit an absolute ton of them. You're better off trying to load up with weapons and kill them before they get a shot off.

I know they let you keep reasearched weapons and defenses.
do they let you keep miniturization techs to.
btw you should reasearch these prior to the dread lords levels.

@el conquest, from what I can tell you keep nothing. You start the map with a preset tech level. I thought this was fixed regardless of what you get in the last map.

If its not I'm going back to the start and hitting end turn a hundred times with research at 100% before i move on!

I have done the first three levels with the same weapons and defenses but no other techs i researched such as the invasion techs or ethics and stuff.