Magic Invisible Starship Engine Strategy

"various Ship Speed bonuses available in the game (bonuses from Drive Speed technology, Ship Speed boosts from Military Starbase modules, Gravity Accelerators)."

Any form of speed increase is expensive.

1. The Speed racial bonus costs a whopping 5 pt for a 1pc/wk boost and 8 pt for 2pc/wk. This is ridiculously expensive since you can get a 30% Economic bonus or a 20% Research bonus for just 4 pt.

2. Only Impulse Drive, Warp Drive, and HyperWarp give you speed boosts of 1pc/wk each. And researching Warp and HyperWarp drives too early will leave you weak elsewhere, and if you don't use engines, you'll be stuck with slower ships until you research these techs.

3. Military Starbases need Stellar Wake and Inverse Tractor Beam modules to boost your speed, and for which you need to have Warp Drive and Warp Drive 4. Also, the cost of starbases gets exponentially higher the more you build, so building many such SBs will be economically difficult, and will give your enemies lots of juicy targets.

4. There are no Super Projects or Galactic Achievements that boost your overall speed. Only Gravity Accelerators, a Trade Good, boosts speed empire-wide by 1pc/wk, but requires you to research the entertainment branch up to it's penultimate tech, Zero-G Sports Arenas and then spend the time to build it(or wait for an AI to do the same). The Hyperion Shipyard Super Project also boosts speed, but only for ships built on the same planet as itself.

HOWEVER, this strategy will be almost unavoidable and necessary for Arcean players in Twilight of the Arnor. The Arceans simply have no choice: they have no idea what the hell engines are, and thus can't research shipboard propulsion systems. The other races also realize this, so they are programmed not to trade engine tech with the Arceans. The Arceans instead get specialized planetary improvements that give their ships speed boosts.

" With just a little miniaturization, you can make cheap colony and constructor ships using Tiny hulls, which I like."

I do this. I bolt a Constructor Module on to a Tiny Hull and call it 'Dummy Constructor', which costs only 95 mp. But what has this got to do with your main topic anyway?

The Tiny hulls don't have room for engines (until you get a bunch more miniaturization).


In my second paragraph, "by taking advantage of the various boosts" I should have mentioned that I wasn't just talking about Ship Speed at that point, but instead, getting the tech for the civ-wide benefits from techs, projects and trade goods, and building just the basic bottom level planetary improvements instead of the top-of-the-line improvements you get from the better techs; that saves some money for quite a while until you actually need the best planetary improvements (like the bloated research buildings you get for being Neutral, for example).

I know this is a sub-optimal strategy, but I don't play at the higher difficulty levels, so I have a fair amount of slack to play around with doing concept strategies like this one. 4x Role Playing. heh.

Motti Khan has an AAR around here somewhere showing using the "slingshot" effect from military SBs in order to not have to worry about having space for engines. I've also used it on a few games. You can take a speed three ship and have him launching from the Starbases at speed 20 or more, depending on amount of SB's and modules. I believe if you want to go all out you could reach speed fifty with those ships, but your talking a mountainous investment probably only worth it for fun or a gigantic map.

Hi!

The bigger the galaxy, the worse results you'll get, because there'a a limit of speed-5 for those ships (6 for ships from a planet with Hyperion Shipyard). If you have the patience to wait such a ship 30 turns to get to your enemy, use it. I won't. I used such ship only in one tiny or small very-slow-tech game, because I couldn't put on it defences, weapons AND engine.

BR, Iztok

yes, they do. at least last time i tested in DA 1.4 or 1.5, they do. has this changed in 1.6 or 1.7 beta? you just have to make sure the ship starts the turn in a parsec affected by more than 1 SB.

another alternative is the "slingshot array." this is where you build 16 SBs on the intersection of 4 zones. you can gather a fleet of slow ships there and "slingshot" them halfway across the map (or give them an insane number of movement points for a blitzkreig-style invasion).

I'd do more meticulous testing on that point.

i won't, myself. i've done it in the past and clearly remember a +32 speed bonus to ships. but military bases are a poor way to do, well, anything much. so i haven't done it in a while. which, therefore means, things may have changed without my knowledge, though i usually read the changelogs thoroughly.

if you're really interested in this strategy but don't trust my memory, i wouldn't take it personally. i was quite surprised to find that military SB bonuses overlap. you could set up a cheat game to quickly construct the SBs in order to prove or disprove me, but i'm not especially interested in doing so.

Actually, it's my primary strategy. I avoid putting engines on my ships in favour of weaponry, and use speed bonuses and tech to increase speed. Since the AI doesn't usually build faster ships, it usually results in me being faster, not slower, than my opposition. I find the extra firepower to be generally worth the trouble. I make exceptions, though, for transports, scouts (usually cargo ships with sensors), or the occasional raiding ship for hitting soft targets like freighters, some starbases, or transports.

This changes once miniturization and hull sizes get to where they need to be, though. At that point, you're barely missing anything to make your ships faster.

It's just that the last time I tried this, I had Gravity Accelerator and 4 military SBs all with Stellar Wake and Inverse Tractor Beam modules in the zone and the no-engine ships maxed out at speed 6. I'm running the 1.7 second beta version of DA at the moment.

In my current beta 2 game I am using a small array to get no engine ships to launch at 20+ moves. Use Ctrl+Click/drag to select all your starbases and find the best overlap, and the ships have to be their for a turn for the bonus to take effect. Good thing is they also keep that bonus after slingshotting for the remainder of the turn. So my small 36 att. ships with no engine can show up at an AIs homeworld packing about 72 att(including all bonus in addition to bases) and enough moves left to clear defenders.

Ok, that explains some of the things I was seeing: I expected the bonus to be visible as soon as a ship was launched from orbit right after being built, and the bonus wasn't there.

d'oh! i'd originally pointed that out, but my computer crashed twice before i could submit my first reply! yeah, the ship needs to start the turn affected by the SBs - the same way it needs to start the turn in Yor space to have its speed reduced to 3.

and actually, this is something i've wanted to test when i have the time, but i think it's possible to get 20 SBs to affect the same square. the only parsec it'll work for is the one in the absolute middle of a sector... maybe my system will be stable enough for me to try today. if so, i'll post the results here.

You can get 24 to affect a square. Put them in the middle of a sector, down the edge, not dead center. This lets you use starbases from six sectors.

The AI does that all the time. Their defenders are extra tough because they have no engines whatsoever. Only weapons (at least on tiny map at low tech they do).

I sometimes use designs with no engines. Or with one engine. But it all depends on the map. My favorite strategy is to have eyes of the universe and give my ships 1 weapon and all engines. They can see 15 sectors and travel 10-30 a turn (depending on tech and size of ship). Then its just a matter of sniping undefended targets. (i got this strategy as a necessity from fighting the dread lords... I usually KILLED the dread lords using this, instead of "survive and escape" like the mission called for)

oh yes, of course! wow that must be some nice bonus research and production if you get a nice planet in just the right place.

That might also result in extremely, awesomely powerful swarm-fleets of Tiny Hull ships if you use 24 maximized military starbases. With a maxed tech tree, number crunching shows that such a fleet of 29 1-attack Tinys would have an attack rating of 9077...

I've done that a few times. My favourite setup for that is to give the tiny hulls the cheap, bulky armour and whatever mass driver will fit, giving them one attack and two defense while remaining as cheap as humanly possible! I've also experimented with putting a single, more traditionally built medium hull into their fleets. Since the medium hull is targetted first, the heavy hitters of the fleet (the swarm) are spared destruction.

2 defense? That's useless. All you need is a basic Mk 1 Railgun, and this way, each Tiny would cost only 41 MP. There are not enough defense-assist starbase modules available to protect the tiny swarms from self-destruction at the hands of larger, more conventional ships, so both the swarm and the normal fleet will destroy each other. But the swarm will still win, due to the tie rule. A maximum-tech all-attack Dreadnought fleet will only be packing an attack rating of about 4000-4500, but with the swarm having a whopping 9077 attack(bonuses not included!), the tie rule should choose it to be 'stronger'.

If you use Tiny Hulls with Constructor modules bolted on to them and nothing else, even the starbase array would be (somewhat)cheap to build since each 'Constructor' would cost just 95 MP. With the Tiny Swarms moving at 52pc/wk, the only way to crack the network would be for the attacker to somehow remain unseen and try to pick off the military bases, or else throw fleet after fleet of heavy-defense Dreadnoughts at the array and take attrition until the defense eventually gets overwhelmed.

Of course, this 24 Military Starbase array would require serious effort to build in a real game at any reasonable difficulty level, but once built, it would be very hard to break, and devastating in a Tiny or Small galaxy. The array would be a rather mediocre offensive weapon in a larger galaxy since the swarms' combat range would be limited, unlike that of conventional warships.

i have to say it'd be pretty severely devastating on any map size; the +48 movement bonus alone would be the basis of a devastating first strike capability; the movement bonus alone isn't the only advantage, but also the extra space for weapons and defenses it frees up (though I would still include at least 1 engine to help them return faster). remember you needn't destroy an AI's fleets to destroy the AI--they're nothting without planets.

with a sufficient budget, you can also multi-task your array defenses and fleets of constructors needed to build an additional array (if your really that ambitious). armadas of constructors themselves - by putting a single weapon on your mini'structors, will also get the bonuses provided by arrays like these. fleets of them can serve as defense, and also be jettisoned across the galaxy to build even more SB arrays. the cost would be absolutely enourmous, of course: this is really only the sort of thing you do for S's & G's at the end of a game you've already won in some obvious way.

I mispoke, with the setup I was describing they would have 1 armour.

How do you figure that, though? To start with, the default armour is incredibly cheap, and can be fit into a single fighter with a higher level railgun and some miniturization. It would be difficult to get the cost higher than 70, if you were really pushing it.

On top of that, there are far more modules for defense assist than attack assist. The end result is that each fighter in a swarm can have a substantial amount of defense in each category. Even a lowly 6 hp fighter will take a beating once its defenses are at 10 each, and while that may not be enough to save the ship from advanced battleships, it will drastically reduce the number of ships that may be taken out in one blast, which ultimately increases your damage and reduces the number of ships you need to replace. Armour plating is really a no brainer addition to a swarm fighter as such, in that regard.

Now, an array of 24 starbases is pretty impractical, even with tiny hull constructors to spam, but you don't need that many to have a formiddable defense array. Four of them are more than enough to turn fleets of tiny, garbage fighters into unstoppable killing machines.

Also, what's all this talk of dreadnoughts and fleets with attack ratings in the thousands? That's a rare scenario with most game setting, and is end game tech even with very fast tech research. The swarms are more likely to be facing mid game frigates with only a relatively few starbases to back them up, which is where their true usefulness as a defensive tool shines.

what? i think you have it backwards. there are tons of attack assists, but only 4 defense assistst (protection fields, and an addition module per defense type).

^Correct. You have 22 attack assist modules, 4 defense assist modules, 2 speed assist modules, and 2 enemy speed inhibiting modules.



If you really want to add engines and defenses, then you need 1 Tiny Hull(25 mp) + 1 Railgun MK1(16 mp) + 1 Armor Plating(3 mp) + 1 Ion Drive(20 mp) = 64 mp per fighter.

Is there a definitive list somewhere of exactly which technologies allow you to build all of the various starbase modules? Seems like that information is spread all over the place.

Yes. The Wiki. The only missing module is the Warp Field Disruptor(Enemy Ship Speed -2) which becomes available by researching Warp Drive.

I figured the Wiki wasn't completely up to date with DA.