Dread Lords Non-Event

In my latest game, I got the 'Dread Lords' event. They spawned on a planet within 1.5 parsecs of my major encon planet. I have read the posts of the mayhem that they can cause, and so I was suitably alarmed. When I took a closer look, I was surprised to see that they had spawned without any ships at all, as well as no planetary improvements, other than their initial colony. I rush-built a transport, and sent it to invade their world, and conquered it easily. In two turns, I basically received a gift of a PQ 13. My question: Do the Dread Lords always spawn this way? Or is there some variation?
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Reply #1 Top
My understanding is that they always spawn this way but with pretty much every tech in the game given to them though. A few turns and they will have Huge hulled ships with Black Hole guns on them. So yeah, take them out when they show up and not so much a problem, but leave them be for a little bit and they will keel joo with bullets.
Reply #2 Top
They show up like that. They cover their planet with industrial sectors, nothing else, and starts building those nasty ships. So initially they will be easy to defeat and I have often seen them surrender as soon as war was declared on them simply because they had no ships yet. Haven't played the beta for a while though so I don't know if that is still the case.
Reply #3 Top
The DL also start with a soldiering ability of about 85. If you hit them before they have a lot of improvements, use Tidal Disruption, which knocks their soldiering advantage way down. This is one ground battle where it is cool to watch the animation - the DL hose your guys with something that looks like liquid lightning.
Reply #4 Top
I had the DL show up in a game when I didn't know where the planet was that they colonized. Took me about a year and a half to get to a point where I could go looking for them, luckily they were otherwise occupied warring with the Torians and Iconians and Alterans. About when I started looking, they made peace treaties so I started to get worried that they'd come after me.

I found them, some ways away from my space, with the Torians (the leaders and an ally) between me and them. They had fully built up with Industrial Sectors and had about 4 of their attack ships with some massive numbers (stacked doom rays and lots of PD). At the time no one had researched beam tech or defense, so I had to spend time on that b4 building any ships that could stand to take them on. Another 2+ years later (about), I was ready (including the time to get a couple of those slow Lucky Rangers to their planet that I had been lucky enough to aquire).

To keep them from building up in the interim, I just slammed a bunch of money into espionage and dropped 7 spies on their Industry blocks. Put the kybosh on them quite well until I could come over, blast them, then spore them (didn't want to bother with a ground invasion, cause I hear their insane to beat).

Just saying, even after they come in and get a good build started there is a way to defeat them with espionage tactics.