qrtxian

Join Date 03/2010

+30

Your friendly neighborhood Dread Lords

Strange happenings on Milky Way Custom Map

I posted a similiar thread about the Dread Lords on Parade scenario in DL, but it died off, so I'm posting this separately.

I started a DA game as Terrans on the Milky Way custom map today. I only bought DA and TOA recently and had never tried the map before. I noticed a number of unusual events, most of which involved the Dread Lords that started at the center of the map.

1. The DLs did not begin at war with all the races, and when they did go to war, they routinely made peace. In fact, after I destroyed the defenders on their homeworld, they popped up to ask me for peace (I said no). I had heard about the DLs doing this, but thought it was a bug that was fixed in the updates.

2. Not only did the DLs often make peace, but at one point they even gifted the Drath 3 "scouts" with 80 mass driver attack. In what was possibly the greatest case of A-not-I I've ever seen, the Drath then upgraded the DL scouts - which could easily destroy every other ship then built - to normal unarmed Drath Scouts. I wasn't certain whether to laugh or cry.

3. In DL, the presence of the Dread Lords in the game (for instance, in the Dread Lords on Parade scenario) prohibits wars from breaking out between AIs. Although you can still bribe them into it, they won't go to war on their own. Here, though, the DLs seemed not to prevent wars so much as delay them. The first war broke out five years in (the Drengin vs. a minor race) followed by the Drengin declaring war on the Torians a few months later. The DLs had made peace with both the Drengin and the Torians before then; I wonder if that had any bearing on it.

4. Presumably from the effects of the peace between major civs and my Super Diplomat ability, I've managed to ally with every major race I've met so far - all but the Yor and Korx. Right before the DLs went down, the Yor declared war on my Iconian allies. I honored the alliance and am at war with the Yor. Although I've never met them, they've now appeared on my foreign relations screen. I've never before gone to war with a race I haven't made contact with - is this normal?

Basically, I'm curious if anyone else has had any of this happen to them, either on the custom map or anywhere else involving the DLs.

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In the "Apocalypse" scenario the Drengin and Yor are at war with the Alliance while it's the Alliance's job to deal with the Dreadlords.

I enjoyed that scenario so much I'm going to write it up in a separate thread.

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qrtxian

Join Date 03/2010

+30

Yeah, but that's a preexisting part of the mission. What I'm curious about is new wars breaking out between AIs when the DLs are around.

I've actually never played the Dread Lords campaign all the way through. I probably should. I had a lot of fun (in a challenging, panicked, "I'm gonna die" sort of way) fighting them on the Milky Way map.

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They have a couple of weaknesses you can exploit (if by "exploit" you take my meaning as "barely survive").

First they don't adequately protect their non-combat shipping. Knowing this I'd say is about the only thing that will keep you alive.

Second they don't organize their warships into fleets, so they are vulnerable to an alpha strike -- but if you nail them too many times with one weapon type they'll build defenses, and their tech is so off-the-scale that even the wrong defense will still make their ships scary-tough.

Third, their target priority for starbases is so high it makes their movements predictable and their ships more vulnerable to an alpha-strike ambush, even with ships slower than 11 psc/turn (Dreadlord "cruising speed").

If you get to fire first, especially with a fleet, it evens the odds a little bit.

The scenarios are very fun. They seem to be in decreasing order of difficulty, but that might just be the learning curve on my part. Fighting the Dreadlords forces you to scan, intercept, and evade in order to survive. In regular GC2 games it's more about politics. Dreadlords games are much more about tactics.

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qrtxian

Join Date 03/2010

+30

Well, I do know how to fight the Dread Lords (although the new combat system in DA certainly scrapped a few favored tactics). The war against them on the Milky Way was never as hairy as your "Apocalypse" writeup - they never so much as took a planet - but for most of the time it felt like it was about to become that bad, particularly after they did begin fielding frigate fleets!

Not helping matters was my lack of support from the other races. Only the Thalan consistently helped fight them - most other races kept making peace - and the Thalan ships were worthless against the DLs (jammed full of DL-useless armor, but only a few weapons). The starbase thing was a real pain, as I didn't have enough life support to reach their HW Mascrinthus at the very center of the galaxy. So my two objectives were to prevent any of their transports from breaking loose to the poorly defended worlds of the AIs and me, and keeping my starbases alive long enough to take Mascrinthus. Once the frigate fleets arrived things looked bleak - but they all went off chasing a Carinoids fleet (go minor races!) and I snuck an attack force through, took out the defenders, and got a spd 28 transport to Mascrinthus before the frigates returned. Bye bye Dread Lords. Of course, now all my ships need to be redesigned to use defenses - no good against DLs, but essential against my new Yor enemies.

Now, except for the much more aggressive behavior and the fleets, this was pretty standard DL behavior on the "Dread Lords on Parade" scenario on the original GalCiv II, except their habit of making peace with AIs, and the AIs' willingness to fight among themselves even while the DLs were alive. Does anyone else have experience with this?

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Dreadlord fleets ... yikes. At least that limits their coverage -- two speed-11 Frigates in a fleet are better than two independently-patrolling speed-11 Frigates for the long period of time where you couldn't take out a single Frigate anyway.

And I'd rather have 20 speed-5 Frigates in 10 fleets than 5 of those speed-11 monsters operating alone. Speed is an awful, awful thing for a Dreadlord to have.

Species playing politics with Dreadlords is also pretty lame. It's like, "I'll worship Cthulu if he promises to take me last." Somebody somewhere would do it, but it's not very smart.

The infighting despite the Dreadlord menace reminds me of the Communist faction of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. They were more concerned that the leadership of the Republicans be Communist than that the Republicans defeat the Nationalists.

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