Dreadlors campaign in UE after update to 2.03

Hello and welcome!

1) In Ixith, the initial treasury now is always 3000BC? the next mission will be the same or less?
It's been a while since I played the campaign, but the standard starting treasury has been set to 3000BC in TotA. So I would say, it's very likely the same or more, but never less.

2) Is there a way to declare war to our allies in the first mission?
No. You and your allies are in a team, i.e. a unbreakable alliance.

3) I know about modding, but is the a simple way to restore just the original invasion animation with tanks and soldiers?
Not that I know of. But I have only experience with modding the xml files. If there is a way, it's beyond my knowledge and skills.

One more tip: It is advisable to play the campaigns with the game they were made for. The DL campaign, for example, can be extremely hard for new players (and some old ones, too), if played with DA or TotA, due to changes to the way ship combat works. Plus, it is better to play a few sandbox games first, because the campaign assumes you already know the basics.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the reply.

1) Nice to be like that, if lowered more, my colony rush tactic would be impossible.

2) God, i hate my allies they build starbases every where even near my planets.

3) what a pity, I like the previous animation.

 

About the tip, actually I played the first mission five times:

1° I couldn't hold my debts

2° All my planets had a lot of population (more than 20B, they were all angry faces)

3° The enemy blow up all my defenseless starbases and my poor +1 damage combat ships

4° Crushed the ally (version 1.52) and then the enemy surrender (2500 points in beginner)

5° Update (2.03) and crushed the enemy again (5000 points in normal).

6° In Ixith crushed the enemy again (6000 points in normal, here is my save http://www.mediafire.com/?ab4bca3a6vrwm5m )

 

If you see the save file, you will notice these questions:

4) How do I build a fighter ship with beam defense or missile damage? (Note that the tech tree is nearly completed)

5) A planet full of banks is useless?

6) I should pass to the following difficulty or should I wait?

7) The tech tree hasn't the trade module, but has the techniques of colonize toxic planets and mining the asteroids that are useless in DL?

Thanks in advance.

Sorry, i don't understand about "seeing the save file" but i'll answers these anyway.

4) When designing your ship, go to the weapons modules and click and lace desired weapon tech, do the same for the defenses modules. (double clicking the tech you want will randomly place the tech on a hull point)

5) Errr no, quite the opposite in fact. A planet full of banks is , IMHO,  the most useful planet you could have. Take a PQ 16 with 1 xeno farm 3, 1 VR center, min 13B pop and the rest stock exchanges...that's a whole hell of a lot of income right there, now imagine you have hundreds of those planets in your grasp. You don't build a thing, you just rush buy it.
Money = everything.

6) What difficulty are you on presently? Tough is the difficulty level where the AI is on equal ground with you. Anything under that, they are handicapped, over that they get great bonuses, especially above Maso.

7) Extreme Planets and Steroids were introduced in the first expansion Dark Avatar. Play the campaigns from within the game they are intended for to avoid misteps like that.

The woes of artificial stupidity. Your ally thinks, he's doing you a favor, but doesn't realize, that those starbases have only an effect on himself. There is a UP proposal in the sandbox game, however, that allows starbases to help allies.


You can't. Early in the campaign, certain weapon and defense techs are not yet available.


Like Neilo says, far from it. If you have enough money, you can disregard manufacturing and rush-buy everything you need. Except techs, of course, but you can buy them from other races.


You're playing on normal. The following missions will get progressively harder, so, if you feel confident enough, you could increase it to challenging. You can lower it again, if those missions prove too hard for you.


Some techs are disabled in certain missions. The DL campaign has not been properly updated for the tech tree changes in DA and TotA. That can lead to problems for the AI, because it goes after those techs, even though they are useless. If memory serves, there is a problem in one of the later missions, that makes it un-winnable under DA and TotA, due to a change in the numbering of the races. But I'm not sure, if that has been fixed or not. It really is better to play the campaigns with the game version they were made for.

Some more tips:
1. Try to specialize your planets. Use bonus tiles, if there are any, as a guide line. High PQ planets are generally best suited for economy, but there are some exceptions. Again, look for any bonus tiles and use them to your advantage. The only exception to this are any food bonus tiles on you homeworld and +300% food bonus tiles on other planets.

2. Keep an eye on maintenance. High end factories and labs have a big output, but they also have very high maintenance cost. It is generally better to use several lower end versions instead. This lets you pay less maintenance for the same or even more output. They are also faster to build. You have to disable auto-updating in the Planetary Detail Screen for this to work.

3. You are already doing a good job in naming the starbases, but try to add to your mining starbases what they are mining. This way, you can more easily distinguish one from the other. Especially on larger maps, where you can have much more of them.

4. Starbase defenses are quite useless. Instead, use big fleets of tiny or small ships with high damage to defend them.

Hope this helps.

Sorry, i didn't realize this was specifically pertinent about the campaign.

How does this actually hurt you, though?

It's more of an annoyance really, but their starbases prevent me sometimes from using the optimal placement for my own starbases. The other things is, why does my ally build military starbases around my planets? They can't help me, because they have no effect on my ships. And my ally won't send any of his own to protect my planets. It's such a waste of time and money. Well, that's one of the reasons I haven't played the campaign in quite some time.

It's not brilliant planning on the part of your ally, sure, but I don't get how that translates into being frustrated at your inability to conquer them like the OP seems to be saying.

I'm a bit on a loss there, too. Let's wait and see what he has to say about it.

Wow, thanks all for the replies.

 

Lets start, Gaunathor tips:

1. nice, but I don't get it totally, see questions section.

2. Excellent tip.

3. I was thinking about that, also about outer starbases like adding a reference in sectors and direction like S1 (south 1 sector) to nearest star system, again nice tip.

4. Ok.

 

About Gaunathor warning:

" If memory serves, there is a problem in one of the later missions, that makes it un-winnable under DA and TotA, due to a change in the numbering of the races."

Oh no, I hate those un-fixable bugs, I will need to investigate before advancing in the campaign. I like more the style of TotA because the Toursim income (which is bigger than in DL) lets you reduce the taxes (since I can't have trade routes).

 

About Neilo comment:

"A planet full of banks is , IMHO,  the most useful planet you could have. Take a PQ 16 with 1 xeno farm 3, 1 VR center, min 13B pop and the rest stock exchanges...that's a whole hell of a lot of income right there, now imagine you have hundreds of those planets in your grasp. You don't build a thing, you just rush buy it.
Money = everything."

I will have that in mind next game.

 

About Gaunathor and qrtxian discuss:

I will summarize my point of view:

1- Just like tony stark says in the avengers trailer: "I don't play well with others" even AI.

2- Since you can't declare war with your allies, I could ignore them, but no I can't, because they build space garbage in my nose.

Nevertheless, forget this useless ally topic just like the animation topic.

 

All this information and my playtime brings me these questions:

8) a bank/research planet doesn't need to have 2 factories + 1 farm (except your home world) + optional starport? or 1 starport per sector?

9) what abour influence and entertainment? I have to specialize planets in those types?

10) If I don't have trade routes is useful to build trade goods?

11) The ally intelligence is the same that the enemy? (cause how it does to build 30+ starbases with nearly no logistic research and only one planet class 8 in normal difficulty vs me only 15 starbases with 5 planets class 13/10/16/5/12)

12) In mission 3, I notice a range limitation, I can't go further than 8 parsercs from my borders, that in UV and Ixith I didn't notice? This means that the  mission 1 and 2 there were no range limitation?

 

Thanks in advance.

8) It can be helpful to have a factory or two on any planet in order to speed up construction.  One farm is generally good, while two is normally the maximum you'll want to use.

9) You can specialize influence if you like, but entertainment is on a per-planet basis, so specializing that won't help.  Not many of us bother too much with influence, though.

10) Trade goods have nothing to do with trade routes.  They're basically just Galactic Achievements that you can sell to the AI.  And virtually all of them are useful.

11) Yes, the allies are the same intelligence as the enemies.

12) I'm not aware of the campaign having different range settings per mission, however, the starting range is influenced substantially by galaxy size.  If you've just been downgraded to a smaller galaxy, that could be why.

It is not unfixable. You have to mod the scenario file for one of the missions and change the race number in the winning conditions. I never tried that, so I can't give exact advice on how to do that. But, like I said before, I haven't played the campaign for some time, so it might have been fixed by now. There was also another work-around that involved conquering all non-allied races and using influence to flip the planets of the allied races. Quite appropriate actually, because the mission is named Apocalypse.

"It is not unfixable." this is a relief.

First thanks to Sole Soul, however  in 11) I don't agree with him, my altarian ally seems to be more intelligent than drengin enemy in mision UV. The altarain uses the colony rush tactic (in the third turn even in beginner) while drengin (in normal) not even construct an starbase until two years.

 

Returning to the "bug", wait I can make my allies disappear if I build some influence starbases fully upgraded near their last planets by conquering with influence? even in UV?

 

Thanks in advance

Yet another bug. Twofold, this time, and it takes a little bit more explaining.

First, the races in TotA use different AI Personalities (AIP for short), unlike DL and DA, where it was one AI for all races. AIP 7, which is used by the Drengin, Yor and Korath, and AIP 10, which is used by the Torians and Iconians, are considered broken. AIP 7 doesn't colonizes outside it's influence borders. So, if it doesn't get enough planets early on, it's screwed. AIP 10, on the other hand, colonizes like rabbits, but only builds up the first few planets it gets. Actually a sound economic strategy early on, because it doesn't incur high maintenance cost that way, but AIP 10 eventually falls behind in manufacturing and research. On there own, these problems don't prevent the AI from playing a good game (as long as AIP 7 gets a good start), but the other bug does.

There are several typos\bugs\misc errors in the tech tree files for all races, that prevent the AI from making good use of it. In some cases, the tech has a wrong ID or Category, so the AI thinks, that the tech is something completely different than it is. Space Weapons, for example, is categorized as Point Defense for the Altarians instead of Weapons. They will only research it, if they want to protect themselves from missile weapons. Thankfully, this is something we can fix. It is time intensive, but possible. There are currently two mods available, that fix these issues. MarvinKosh' Space Weapons Fix Mod and Tolmekian's TechTree Fix. Both edit the layout of the tech tree and the balancing, however, so you may want to wait until you are more familiar with the game. They are also not compatible with the campaigns.


Yes. You just need time, a little effort and a bit of luck. Your influence on their planets needs to be 4 times more than their own. As soon as that is reached (skull-and-crossbones symbol shows up), you only need a good roll in the random number generator and the planet is yours. This can take some time, however. Unless you go Evil (needs Xeno Ethics) and build the Mind-Control Center (needs Concepts of Malice). Then it's instantaneous.

Thanks Gaunathor.

 

I think that my noob doubts were solved.  I have quite a lot to play and try (+ my life) before asking some interesting questions, so thanks everybody for your time.

 

See you soon.

KBT

 

God, i hate my allies they build starbases every where even near my planets

 

Is it possible to gift a ship or two to the enemy right next to those starbases? My common tactic in DL, sandbox mode, is to gift a ship or two to someone who is fighting anyone who places more than one starbase in my territory, with whom I don't wish war.......yet. Never tried giving one to an existing enemy.....

 

 Seems that whole issue (unwanted foreign starbases) could have been dealt with in a more intelligent manner.....like having someone request permission first, and pay a tribute??? (Yes, I know there a UP vote that deals with starbases not in your sector, but there's no guarantee it will show up, and that still doesn't give you the right to refuse) Can you imagine what would've happened if the Federation had showed up in Klingon space unannounced with so much as a single starship, let alone constructors to build a starbase???

 

 

 

 

I still don't understand why allies building starbases in your space is supposed to be a bad thing. Yes, it's fairly useless for them, but it does you absolutely no harm.

For me, two reasons:

1. I'm a player that uses LOTS of econ starbases. The AI tends to build them in your homeworld sector, mostly. I have all of my trade ships departing from my homeworld and so I cram as many econ bases as will fit around my homeworld cluster. So with the sector limit on starbases, even one starbase built by another faction, ally or neutral, costs me money!

 2. A matter of principal. IMHO, the player should have the right to refuse any foreign starbases in territory under his/her control, whether friendly or neutral......period! 

I'm fairly certain this is incorrect. The limit is a flat limit, not an extra fee, and it only applies to your starbases in the first place.

I am aware that it is a flat limit. I was referring to an encroachment by others on that limit. Perhaps my version of DL" is bugged or not patched correctly. When I attempt to build a starbase that would exceed the sector limit, regardless of race origin, I get a message stating that that base will exceed sector limits.

It's not a problem, really. I just use the method I described above, and someone else takes care of it for me

More to the point is that I get no say in what gets built in space controlled by me....that sucks, IMHO.

Thank you for the reply, however.....