Dread Lords Campaign - Mission "Exploitation"

No one plays the DL campaign anymore? I might've known.

Anyway, the diplomatic route seems to be the way to go. To rephrase and broaden my initial question: What's the best way to achieve a diplomatic victory by means of forging alliances?

I haven't played the DL campaign for a very long time, since I first got the game. I loaded my "end-game save" for that mission, and I apparently played it on a fairly easy level. The way to win is with an alliance victory - either ally with the Drengin and Yor, or (the easier way) just wipe them out

The map has several economic resources near your corner, grab them and your economy won't be a problem. There aren't very many planets; I ended with twelve (which included all the ones I purged Yor and Drengin from).

I think the other races (Arcean, Altarian, etc) are listed as "team" players, in which case you shouldn't need to ally with them, just deal with the evil races.

Good luck

I'm playing the DL campaign right now. The first mission("An Unexpected Visitor") was fun, with a small war between the equal forces of the Terrans(me) and the Drengin. Until I cranked up research, rolled out some heavy frigates, and stomped over the Drengin, on Painful. For the second mission, "Ixith", I set the difficulty to Tough, but due to some random bug, the Drengin AI kept getting stuck on Sub-Normal, and the mission was dull due to the ineptitude of the AI.

The third mission("Rising Darkness") fixed this bug, with the difficulty back up Painful/Gifted. Starting with 5000 bc and 1 billion population, I still won the colony rush by using my free Phoenix warships to blockade Karion and blast the Drengin colonizers, while I built a strong economy and tech superiority over time. The Drengin tried to fight back by building lots of heavy fighters and attempting to break out of the blockade, but I upgraded my warships and ended up killing 25 Drengin ships for 0 losses. During the invasion of Karion, the Drengin activated a Precursor device and unleashed the Dread Lords. Now, on the 4th mission, "Siege", I have 30000 bc and 3 billion pop spread over 3 planets, and 3 free constructors, a free surveyor and a free colonizer. This is the most ridiculous starting resource pile I've ever seen, but I guess it's the kind of stuff you need to take the Dreads. While the briefing/debriefing is duller than the DA campaign, the skirmishes and constant warfare is fun.

Here's what I've been using to help make money in the campaign: every new tech you get(barring diplomacy-boosters and heavy weaponry), sell it to your teammates. They tend to pay a lot with Diplomatic Relations techs being unavailable, and I've got 500 bc out of the Altarians on one occasion by selling them Impulse Drive Mk.3.

The beam-only limitation is most irritating though, since I'm accustomed to using more powerful missiles, but I just get over this by using the Psyonic Beam. Can't wait to see the Dread Lords arrive.

Siege is an easy one to win. I rushed to planetary invasions and took out their one world very early.

Apocalypse is where I stalled. Everything I tried ended up with the Dread Lords destroying all my ships and invading my worlds. Plus, when looking up strategies here, I read that Apocalypse tends not to complete when played in DA.

After spending a week, on and off, on the Dread Lords campaign I was finally able to beat the Apocalypse level. In all honesty, &%$@ that mission.

The key is the build lots and lots of small fighters with speed ratings of 6 or more. I gave up on building starbases and went around picking off Dread Lord troop transports while evading the enemy. Make sure you build a custom survey ship that can match the speed of the fighters, as well. When you see the Dread Lords begin to build shields on their ships, switch to mass drivers immediately. They don't seem to ever build shields for them (although who knows, given time).

In order to get an economy going, take over the 7 planets in the corner you are situated in and build up lots of trade centers. Keep the happiness level at about 85% to encourage population growth and by the time the planets reach 2 billion each you should be getting a positive flow of cash.

To win the scenario, its basically attrition; keep the enemy occupied until the friendly AI can take over the Dread Lords. Keep giving them your industrial and combat tech (for money) and the AI should eventually start taking the Dread Lord's planets one by one.

Was that in DL or DA?

Regular DL. I'm going through the DA campaign right now and I'm finding it a lot more coherent than the Dread Lord campaign.

I had beat Apocalypse quite some time ago, and left the DL campaign at Apocalypse, and am now working on advancing my sandbox play up to Masochistic, and dipping a toe into Obscene.

I took all the planets from the Weber system in the north to Markus system in the south, and began developing my economy and technology. I tech-brokered with my allies, giving preference to the Iconians. Soon after the colony rush, the Dreads began sending in 25-Gun Attack transports, taking me by surprise. I responded by buying some 6pc/wk 'Snipe' fighters with 1-Beam Attack, and used the tie-rule to blast 4 transports.

I sent my flagship in the direction the Dread transports had come from, and discovered that they had 4 worlds covered in Industrial Sectors. So as my economy improved, I kept placing more and more spies on their worlds. They tried to fight back by placing spies on my worlds, but I knocked them out with Counter-Espionage Centers.

The Arceans, Altarians and Torians did nothing at all to help(except for buy my tech and go broke), but since the Iconians were holding off the Yor and Drengin quite well, I even gifted them tech or some cash when they were going broke. Up in the far north, meanwhile, the Drath and Korx had become targets of the Dread Lords. The Dread warships were tearing apart every ship they built, yet they sent all their transports in my direction(which kept getting killed).

The Dread Lords then did something that was not too surprising by storyline, but quite surprising in the game: they signed a peace treaty with the Yor Collective! Upon seeing the peace treaty message, I initiated diplomatic negotiations with the Dreads in hope for some tech or temporary peace. They just laughed in my face.

After a while, when my population was up, and my research was going well, the Dread Lords sent more transports towards me. This time they brought warships along as well. I had awesome early-warning capabilities with my Eyes of the Universe, so I managed to snipe all the Transport, but I lost a few of my aging fighters as well. In response, I upgraded all my remaining fighters and built half a dozen extra new-spec QuickSnipe fighters with 4-Missile Attack and 10pc/wk speed. The Dread Lord frigates were left biting dust as their transports were torn down.

Now I had Mk.2 Photonic Torpedoes, Warp Drive 5, Expert Miniaturization, a Hyperion Shrinker, and Large Hulls. With this tech, I rolled out 5 new battleships(whose name I'm forgetting) with 46-Missile Attack and 6 pc/wk speed. The Dread Lords' frigates and escorts got a taste of the tie rule and I steamrolled ~7-8 of them without losing a ship. They brought in a frigate and 3 escorts as reinforcements from the Korx-Drath front, but they got killed as well. I beat them back to their base worlds and knocked out the remains of their military while my troop transports approached. They began building a few defenders with point defenses, but my troops stole the superior Mk.4 HD Spike Driver(!!!) weapon from the Dread Lords to blow their chances. I fitted these Spike Drivers on my battleships, shot down the Dread defenders, and the Dread Lords were soon overrun.

OK, I'm definitely NOT one of you uber-players who laugh in the face of anything less than Painful difficulty. I play strictly on "normal", and I had a really hard time with the SIEGE mission.

But APOCALYPSE was, I think, pretty fun. I started by colonizing everything in my little corner of the galaxy, and some of the other races were able to grab most of the planets near the middle of the map -- making them work as a "buffer zone" between my worlds and the Dread Lords. It took a pretty long time for the Dread Lords to make their way down to my corner -- but when they did, they pretty much demolished everything I owned. But I had a handful of small, fast, single-attack scouts, which were a little faster than their transport ships, so I was able to keep them from taking any of my worlds.

Two strategies I think helped me win: First, pick your targets. When the Dread Lords first appear, there's really no need to fight all their ships, just try to get all those unescorted troop transports. And you don't really need a whole "swarm" of small ships -- if you get to Photon Torpedo or better, a most-sized fleet of 6 or more small ships will destroy any single Dread Lords ship at a cost of maybe 2 fighters. So at first, build an occasional ship, then hide it until you can stack 'em up. When I got 8 fighters in a fleet, I could go up against their Frigates and lose one fighter per Frigate -- and the Dread Lords do NOT replenish their fleet very fast, so this was really the turning point for me.

Second, I traded tech with my allies VERY freely. Even GIVING them stuff for free sometimes, if it looked helpful. Later in the game, the NPC allies were actually reclaiming their worlds from the Dread Lords and attacking Dread Lord fleets and WINNING, which was a big help.

I just finished EXPLOITATION and found it really easy. Not sure why, but I had no problems with that one. I took the worlds and resources in my "corner", built the biggest economy s/b I could near my 3 homeworlds, and pretty much walked right in and took over both the Yor and Drengin planets in that corner. My allies did much the same thing in 2 of the other corners -- the Yor surrendered to the Drengin, and then the Drengin surrendered and the good guys won. I think it took maybe an hour.

The next one looks to be a real pain. Am I getting near the end of the campaign? I had kinda expected APOCALYPSE to be the final mission -- c'mon, am I DONE soon? I wanna finish this so I can play Sins...

Question for PeskyFly and darkviking - how did you manage to kill transports with 1-attack ships? The tie rule gives the win to the transport in that match-up. A small early-game fleet can kill one while only taking minor losses, but one on one attacks by fast fighters with a single gun just don't work. Did you guys use fleets of your fast fighters for transport-hunting?

I also don't see how fleets of 46 attack value Large hulls are going to kill DL warships without losses. Kill, yes, but they should die at about a 1:1 ratio, I'd expect. Again, if the tie rule ever applies it will work in favor of the DL (according to the wiki, the formula is weighted towards attack and none of the posted ships come close to even a DL Escort in attack value). Could someone please explain what I'm missing? Thanks in advance!

At this point I'd also appreciate any thoughts on the rest of the DL campaign. Is it worth the bother of grinding out a win in "Apocalypse"? I'm fairly sure I can do it, but the tedium of moving all my ships to dodge DL ships every turn caused me to put this one on hold for now (playing the DA campaign instead). The Drath are gone, I have Medium hulls with 16 attack as my best ships, so it's going to be a *long* time before I make any progress... Adding insult to injury, since the game uses the DA engine, the only captured techs thus far are Space Mining II and Extreme Colonization.

FYI, the tie rule gives the win to whichever ship has the highest maximum hp. If the fight is between fleets, the fleet containing the ship with the highest maximum hp wins with only one ship surviving at 1 hp.

Thus in Dark Avatar at least, high-speed(6-9pc/wk) fighters flying alone work against the armed Dread Transports since the transports have only 1 hp while the fighters have 5 or 8. So one fighter stationed near each planet gives you immunity to Dread invasion.

Of course, 1-attack fighters stand the risk of rolling a 0-shot and getting killed, but if you have a 25% luck bonus, a 4-attack fighter will result in a definite kill. If you have a 50% luck bonus, a 2-attack fighter does the trick.

The Dread Escorts/Defenders have 11 hp. 25% of 46 attack = just over 11. Enough for a definite one-hit kill. If you went with 50% luck, a 56-attack ship can one-hit kill even a Dread Lords Frigate. The tie rule rocks in this aspect.



I had to do more dodging on the mission "Siege" than on "Apocalypse". This was, however, purely a coincidence. Anyway, to me, dodging is fun. Every time a group of Dread Frigates chases one of my pesky 4-attack fighters around in circles but never catches it, you can't help but snicker at those losers.

I also had a lot more luck with tech stealing on Apocalypse. The first Dread planet gave me HD Spike Driver Mk.4, allowing me to upgrade my ships to these things:




After this the last of the Dreads fell in a cascade. Exploitation turned out to be a much easier mission, and after completing it, I've left the DL campaign. For now.

It wasn't the last I saw of the Dreads though. I've played them more recently in the "Dread Lords on Parade" scenario and on the "Milky Way" custom galaxy. They always seem to be present in the Milky Way, whether you have them on or not, on their high-class homeworld of Mascrinthus at the center of the galaxy. This map is also interesting because all the races start out with different levels of resources, and habitable planets are as sparse as they should be with most of them being hostile environments.

Thanks! It's good to know how the game actually works. My Terran interceptors must have been rolling 0s a lot. Their Drengin counterparts in the DA campaign have been doing quite well for me lately. Still, I should do a redesign to get that precious 4 attack value.

I like the sound of that Milky Way map, I'll have to check that out when I'm done campaigning.

I found the apocalypse scenario to be a bit of a challenge until I hit on the idea of a fast decoy, starbase defense tech and fleets of constructors combined with spy's on their worlds. They pretty much ignored me until I set up a star base on a nearby military resource then they came after me however with specialising in the starbase techs I had massive defense and good offense. Kept a few extra constructors nearby for repairs and absorbed all the dread lords threw at me. Got my tech up a bit and threw a couple of medium fleets at the Yor and Drengi taking them out then the DL's were a cakewalk. Did need to keep a few fighters on the homeworlds so the DL transports could be dealt with. Found that keeping worlds at a low tech, starbase only the DL's would not conquor them, too much work to build up their infrastructure I guess so could colonise to get more range and not need to worry about developing the world until I could afford to buy the markets, industry etc one after another.