Just finished the DA camp again, overall I found it rather easy except the defense of Drengi mission.

Just thought I could share my experience...

I played at Normal so, maybe some stuff is supposed to be easy, I dunno.

Anyway, the first missions were pretty straight forward, Training-in-game thing, which I like.

Then I hitted the snag... the Defence of Drengi mission, the frakking DreadLords are back. Now later I'll realise that the DreadLords arn't that impresive, but they also killed me a number of times in that mission (thanks god they didn't had any troops nearby), they destroyed systematically every single ships and every single space stations (tho they left the asteroids mining alone for some reason).

I finally succeeded to build a Medium hull that could from time to time hit and rarer still, destroy the damned things (Escorts).

Then I saw the Dread Frigate, I almost cried, renounced to build any stations and put my economy in sleep mode (i.e.: Only one planet produced ships) until it had decided that it destroyed enough and went back the way it came.

After a while of this game, I finally acheived point where I could destroy 1 Escorts with 2-3 of my ships and a Frigate... if I'm lucky.

I continued on, exploring, hangin'on, building ect. then I saw it, the dread lords "homeword" on the other side of the map.

Now, I always put 5 or 10% of my taxes into espionage in a bid to eliminate the enemies spies as they come and on this map I had some to spare so I said "Why not, if it slow them down a bit, that could make my life a bit easier." and put the spies on the dread world.

When the Spy panel open, I almost fell off my chair. I fully expected to see only industrial Sector + Spaceport, no biggie, but they had a Industrial sector on a +700% production tile. I guess I was just terribly unlucky and that this is why they hurt so much, but still...

Anyway, put a few spies there, and the dread lords became much much more tame. Went on to win (anybody noticed how the dread don't react to the least to spies?).

The next mission was the most easy, I mean come on, they are close to me, I have a PQ26 planet right by my side, I rushed them and owning to a lot, and I mean a lot, of cash anomalies, I won before they had the time to mount anything.

The final mission looked daunting, a gigantic map and the dread lords again?, I pushed hard and colonized about 20 worlds in about 2 years.

At that point tho unofficially, I realized that I won. My production, economy, research were all supperior to anybody, soon the Acrean and the Thalans became my allies with a pruned Iconian as friendly.

Thing is, by the time I finished building up my worlds (I'm a turtler unless I see an opportunity) I was up to battleships (Large) and the Korath and DreadLords were nowhere to be seen.

I pushed about 5-10 Battleship and attacked their territories (I used the mini map on ownership to figure where they were), only to realised that they were still hanging on with Heavy Fighters.

They were a push-over and I wondered if I or them had been lucky/unlucky.

All the dreadlords did in the whole game was to make a surprise attack (which by itself is pretty amazing since I had the Eyes of the Universe wonder) on a research mining station and an economy one too which hurt but barely (the map is frakking full of resources) before I destroyed it.

They put up a little fight on their homeworld killing perhaps a total of 5 battleship until my transports came and knocked them down.

All in all, great story, but still I wonder if I should have played on harder difficulties...

Just my thoughts.
(played on Normal, No mods except the H-Q textures one)