So you are saying that I should try to stear clear of them and never engage them if I can?And what about their transports,are u saying they won't invade my planets if I don't keep all my ships in the starport?

Whats the thing about the tiny hulls?I don't understand how they are so good.

Its how the combat system in Dread Lords works. No matter how much fire power your ship has, it can never destroy more than 1 ship per turn. 10, 100, 1000, 10000 attack, it still can only kill one ship per turn.

Please note: the combat system is different in Dark Avatar expansion.

The concept, as I understand it is this:

Dread Lord ships have lets say 20 HP (seen a range from 11 to maybe 40) and has 1 attack per round of 250 damage.

your opposing fleet of 3 tiny ships each ship does 10 damage and has 5 HP each.

round 1:
Dread Lord ship attacks, tiny ship1 takes 250 damage (tiny ship1 dies).
tiny ship2 attacks for 10 damage.
tiny ship3 attacks for 10 samage (dread lord ship dies)

I never used this stratagy, that's just the concept they are trying to convey, I think.

My stratagy was starbases. I found that a single starbase could easily defeat even the most powerful Dread Lord ship if it had around 30 attack in at least 1 category. If you have starbase defenceII that takes 3 constructor ships (1 to build, 2 more for weapons) if you have defence III it only takes 2 constructor ships. chances are high that you'll see the starbase destroyed too, but is well worth it to watch that ship with 120-400 attack blow up.

additionally, you can park your defensive ship (something with 1 attack and 4+ speed) at that star base to intercept any incoming transports. By doing this, you never need to have any ships docked (orbiting) your planets at all. and since you have none at your planets, your enemy AI thinks they are undefended and won't send combat ships to your outer planets.

Instead, the AI will send combat ships to your starbase (where they will get severly blasted) and ungaurded trasports to your planets that you can pick off with your lowely interceptor ship, docked at your starbase.

Another stratagy is military resource mines. each mine you have at max production adds about 100% to all your ships offensive and defensive values. so, if you build a ship with 50 defence, it will gain an additional 50 defence (about) for each maxed military mine you have (in the above example with 2 maxed mines the 50 defence ship would instead have about 150).

Yet another stratagy is your surveyor ship. remember all those seemingly useless +4 to HP mods that ship got? There have been times when my surveor ship has ended up with a ton of HP. upgrade the ship, slap some armor and a weapon on it and it can take out most anything, provided it can return to a planet afterward for repairs.

point is: dread lord ships have insanely high attack, but normal HP. find some fleet or starbase build that can suvive long enough to deal that tiny amount of damage.

I have found also that the starbase strategy doesn't work very well.I suppose the tiny ship strategy could work if I could actually research fast enough.

Alright I tryed the tiny ship strategy and it was working farily well.Its just that the transport ships I can't even see them until they are already invading.They are way to fast to pick off.I will have to try again though as I was already about halfway through the mission.

the easiest way to beat dread lords is to let them take over a planet and immediately or in a few turns take the planet back with a single troop transport ship. Once you conquer the planet...you now have hopefully, stole a weapon technology from dreadlords.