Im just wondering about something (to do with mega events)

LOL. I had something similar happen to me. Ok, it was a large universe, but the tech level was just about that. And the DLs plopped down in the system one over from my home world. Boy did I feel the pain.

but what I did was kept a steady stream of junk ships in my orbits. Let the DLs pound them all they wanted while I researched like a mad little dictator. Can you say focus? it took a while but soon I was able to take out the DL ships, usually by sacrificing a fleet just to take out one. Then I climbed enough out of the hole so that i could take the fight to them.

In the end, it was good for me because I came out of it with the strongest ships in the galaxy.

Almost all of the Mega events are supposed to be painful. I had one where the galaxy got flooded with Spies. I had 30-40 spies in my empire and had no income to train counter-spies as it wasn't part of my strategy.

What I am saying is I don't disagree that they can be painful, and may need some tweaking, but i think that it gives the player a different perspective on how to build strategies. Now I don't build an empire without some spy network infrastructure.

Meh, the Dread Lords isn't even a Mega Event. They're a normal random event.

It's when the what's-their-name Federation takes over and has impressively strong ships galaxy-wide that you really feel kicked in the jimmies.

One thing i don't get, in the sand-box mode for ToA, do the Dread Lords return like in the sand-box mode for DA. If they do return, do they expand or do they just sit there on one mega quality planet.

I want to have a sand-box game just playing against the Dread Lords, i even tried modifying it on the editor, but it won't allow me to do that. I need to have some other race to play with besdies the Dread Lords.

I encountered the dreadlords once in a game of ToA, what they did was sit around for quite a while, take over a single planet (I didn't see them do it, but they had somehow aquired a new planet) and occasionally sent out incredibly powerful ships to destroy any craft of starbases they could find.

In my game, they slowly started expanding. They took over several of my planets. It takes a while (it took a while for me to get powerfull enough to kill them), but they expand.

Well a update haha i played the game more. And well it ended very badly for me and the other races. I took spyders advice and went for a completly dedecated plan of research to get the best weapsons and defences agiasnt the dreadlords. As i built up resreach to even challenge them in a fight the dread lords completly took over terran and took one planet of the Korx (By this time the other planet of the korx lost confidence and fell to my cutural power. but i couldnt hold the planet long as the dreadlords capurated it. a minor race appeared and fell to the dreadlords. dregin lost a planet to the dreadlords. it was looking veeeery bad , i resreached highest sheilds and pretty high mass drivers

so my ship had about 210 shilds and 12 mass drivers compared to a dreadlords 413 lasers per ship

well it didnt go down very well i lost the ships and the dreadlords had 7 planets compred to 3 planets for my race, 1 for drengin and 1 for alterians. maybe i should of hung in longer but it was getting to be too long to research techs (average of 40 turns with 100 production and research and research focus) this probably down to the fact i had only one major reseach planet. i suppose it wouldnt of been too long until the other races were annilated

i think the reasons for such such DL dominacne in this game was because

1) Small map: with 2-3 planets average for each race (not enough planets making things very slow and costly)

2)Dreadlords came too early: DL arrived when no other races including my race even had military ships. also i had not researched even the basic techs for weaspons or defence

3) failed the chance to capuatre their first planet straight away

4) probably could of researched more and built more fleets (but then by this time it appeared that it would be too late)

Anyone got any suggestions or anything they want to say would be lovely lol

any thoughts on it at all?

i may turn off mega events until im used to bigger maps then turn it on for bigger maps i suppose.

Yeah, on that small of a map the only plausable way to beat the Dread Lords was to invade on the first turn. Since they came that early, you could have won non-militarily in a couple ways:

1)Diplomatic. Ally with everyone. The Dread Lords are technically a minor race, so you don't need to ally with them to win. Doesn't matter that they would have crushed you eventually, if you can get the victory first, you win.

2)Influence. Somewhat harder than #1, but doable. Dread Lords generate no influence to slow you down.

3) Lose last. It doesn't matter if you'd lose the next turn, as long as you're the last major civ standing, you win.

Admittedly, none of those are as satisfying as actually beating the Dread Lords, but take what you can get.

For future reference, there are better ways to beat Dread Lord ships than high defense. Try all offense fighter swarms - maybe 4 to 6 attack per ship, but 20+ of them in a fleet. The Dread Lord can only kill so many of them a round, so they can actually finish them off instead of losing to the tie rule.

My preferred way of dealing with them is a bigger hammer. Research large or huge hulls, nano rippers or similar weapons, at least two levels of miniaturization, and engines if possible. Design a ship with maximum firepower - at least 50% greater than any Dread Lord ship existing. Rush build that ship and start a rampage. Sure, buying this ship will likely bankrupt your empire for months, but this one ship will basically win the game on it's own. You might want to build a few transports before you wreck your economy though.

Sounds like some good ideas there

About designing a ship tactic...would defences go on them too ? or is it just pure weapons ? ...i could def see how that tactic could work though cause there ship fleets had two or three ships max.

All offense. To understand how it works, you have to know how the tie rule works. If both fleets are destroyed in the same round of combat, the last surviving ship in each fleet is compared. Each ship is scored by the formula (attack * sqr rt 2) + defense + (current hitpoints/2). Whichever ship has the higher score survives with 1 hp. As long as you have sufficient overkill to take out all ships in the fleet the first round, your ship is guarranteed to survive.

Definitely, and I should have made it clear, go all offense. You aren't going to reasonably be able to create defenses that will stop the DL. But you can reasonably create offenses that will take out their ships. In most encounters, I made sure that I had more ships and REALLY high offense. My ship building was exclusively without defenses so i could squeeze in as many weapons as possible. Then I struck with two or three waves. if I didn't take out the ship in the first wave, second wave came in and finished the job. And any ships I sent, I pretty much planned on getting destroyed.

As far as planetary invasions, I used Mini-soldiers and core detonation, anything that gave me advantage or stripped advantage from the DL.

Regarding your game, yeah, the small universe really hurt you. In my game, although the DL were in the system next to my home world, I was able to shift my major production facilities to the other side of the galaxy so I could mass up larger fleets. Basically I held my homeworld by putting a bunch of junk ships in orbit. If the DL destroyed them, no big deal, there were always more. But they never got a transport in unchallenged.

Sorry I wasn't more precise on strategies. But next time hopefully this will help.