how do u actually kill the dread lords in the campaign

In DL?

It is not impossible to beat them.... however it is difficult to beat them if you wan't to tackle them head on.

when you first encounter the dreadlords in DL, you are only allowed one weapon type which leaves you pretty much screwed against their shields. However you do not need to defeat them to win that mission.

At the point in the campaign where you do have to defeat the dreadlords, you are allowed several weapon types which means you can build ships that are effective against the dreadlords.

heres a few hints... use tiny hulled ships only, since no matter how much firepower a dreadlord ship has, he can do no more damage per round than 5-10 hp (whatever your tiny ship has). You might want to look at the dreadlord transport ships,,, so long as you do not garrison planets, their transports will never combine in fleets - this is the key piece of information which leads to victory.

So you are saying that I should try to stear clear of them and never engage them if I can?And what about their transports,are u saying they won't invade my planets if I don't keep all my ships in the starport?

you got it half right,,, yes do not engage their ships, but do engage their transports!

Personally, i managed to hold off the Dreadlords with just 3 fast cargo hulled ships carrying 1 lazer each, but i needed the eyes of the universe for that to be easy. Then i went through the whole tech tree untill i got to doom ray and built some tiny hulled fleets that absolutely massacred the dreadlord ships.

However, you will not need to do that to win, i just did it for the fun of it!

Whats the thing about the tiny hulls?I don't understand how they are so good.

All the dreadlord ships has such a vast amount of attack that it means they will one hit any ship untill you have capital class ships, or untill you get last of tech line defences

Its how the combat system in Dread Lords works. No matter how much fire power your ship has, it can never destroy more than 1 ship per turn. 10, 100, 1000, 10000 attack, it still can only kill one ship per turn.

Please note: the combat system is different in Dark Avatar expansion.

And tiny ships can only kill one per turn also.So whats the difference?

The concept, as I understand it is this:

Dread Lord ships have lets say 20 HP (seen a range from 11 to maybe 40) and has 1 attack per round of 250 damage.

your opposing fleet of 3 tiny ships each ship does 10 damage and has 5 HP each.

round 1:
Dread Lord ship attacks, tiny ship1 takes 250 damage (tiny ship1 dies).
tiny ship2 attacks for 10 damage.
tiny ship3 attacks for 10 samage (dread lord ship dies)

I never used this stratagy, that's just the concept they are trying to convey, I think.

My stratagy was starbases. I found that a single starbase could easily defeat even the most powerful Dread Lord ship if it had around 30 attack in at least 1 category. If you have starbase defenceII that takes 3 constructor ships (1 to build, 2 more for weapons) if you have defence III it only takes 2 constructor ships. chances are high that you'll see the starbase destroyed too, but is well worth it to watch that ship with 120-400 attack blow up.

additionally, you can park your defensive ship (something with 1 attack and 4+ speed) at that star base to intercept any incoming transports. By doing this, you never need to have any ships docked (orbiting) your planets at all. and since you have none at your planets, your enemy AI thinks they are undefended and won't send combat ships to your outer planets.

Instead, the AI will send combat ships to your starbase (where they will get severly blasted) and ungaurded trasports to your planets that you can pick off with your lowely interceptor ship, docked at your starbase.

Another stratagy is military resource mines. each mine you have at max production adds about 100% to all your ships offensive and defensive values. so, if you build a ship with 50 defence, it will gain an additional 50 defence (about) for each maxed military mine you have (in the above example with 2 maxed mines the 50 defence ship would instead have about 150).

Yet another stratagy is your surveyor ship. remember all those seemingly useless +4 to HP mods that ship got? There have been times when my surveor ship has ended up with a ton of HP. upgrade the ship, slap some armor and a weapon on it and it can take out most anything, provided it can return to a planet afterward for repairs.

point is: dread lord ships have insanely high attack, but normal HP. find some fleet or starbase build that can suvive long enough to deal that tiny amount of damage.

Funny, i tried that starbase strategy,, and the dreadlords were consistantly destroying my starbases. I even had maximum defences and weapons installed - including the whole tech tree line for starbase defences.

Yes my starbases would win, about 3 out of 4 battles, but for their cost, that was just useless, i mean i could build a fleet of 20/30 ships instead of one starbase!!!

I have found also that the starbase strategy doesn't work very well.I suppose the tiny ship strategy could work if I could actually research fast enough.

hehehe, yea, well you need the cargo hulled all engine/sensors and 1 laser ships to hold off Dreadlord transport ships while you research.

The dreadlord frigates have only 20hp so you can muster an effective fleet very quickly, so long as you use weapons outside their defences. logistics will be your biggest tech barrier to achieving that goal.

Alright I tryed the tiny ship strategy and it was working farily well.Its just that the transport ships I can't even see them until they are already invading.They are way to fast to pick off.I will have to try again though as I was already about halfway through the mission.

Yes it is difficult to intercept transports untill you can built the eyes of the universe. Meanwhile you could try building a few cargo hulled ships that carry mostly sensors to direct your cargo hulled ships that carry mostly engines.

the easiest way to beat dread lords is to let them take over a planet and immediately or in a few turns take the planet back with a single troop transport ship. Once you conquer the planet...you now have hopefully, stole a weapon technology from dreadlords.

I never tried that strategy? Yea, you could even have transports on standby near a planet, when the dreadlord transport comes,,, clear out most of the planets population, let them invade, then use those same people to retake it!