Seige Campaign Mission

Argghhh !!
Got the same problem.

First I had in previous mission the Drengis helping me to spell the word I-D-I-O-T.
I learned. Made some big clubs and bashed their head with it.

However, in that particular mission, the Dread Lords just raped my fleets, grabed a Drengin by a leg and started bashing me head with him. They landed a transport with 10 (yes, ten) troops on a world where I had 8000 soldiers. They did not lost a single guy.

Lesson learned : blast their transports before they land.

But I am blasted off the map. I fear I should have been more focused on the objective and I should have gone directly guns blazing onto the objective. I cannot see how to defeat the Dread Lords in that mission. They are few, but soooo deadly. A dreadnought just blasted amost half of my military by himself.

Probably the key is : focus onto the objective, outrun the dreadlordsbut avoid frontal confrontation.
I'll try that this evening.

I have tried that solution... Going straight for the planet in the North-Western quadrant... But, you have to have some sort of range to get there. Easiest way? There is a plant that the Yor have below the objective planet. To the east of that plant there is one that is free for the picking. You have to be fast, but if you can populate that you can launch an offensive at the Objective (Drengi) planet. However...

As I statrt building up some transports and some escorts for them, the Dread Lords always come and take the planet.

The key to this mission, as it says in the summary, is to NOT engage the Dread Lords, but...how the heck can't you in this mission?!? I try to stay out of their way, but they hit me anyway!

They rarely take my planets as I have my soldiering up enough that my 5000 guys can take down their 10 with 1.5k remaining or so. I only lose the planet when they send transport after transport.

But you can't wait till you get high enough in the tech tree to beat these guys... So... yeah, bottom line... Need some help for this mission too.

Did you note the the DL battleships have a Mass Driver score of 60! They don't have much in armor, so if you can last a shot or two you can hurt them. I had a mining base that last 1 fight and had 9/33 HP after that. Second escort took me out.

I have one planet that has thwarted 4 invasion attempts. Happy people is the key there. My other planet has thwarted 1 invasion.

Perhaps we should move the 3 starting constructors and colony ship as far as possible, build a base, move on, repeat. Should get us to the NW quadrant.

I believe that you can reach the planet I spoke of in my post from your starting area. That is the only planet you need. I have tried having starbases to extend my range but they are constantly destroyed by the DL's. So the key is head out to the planet to the east of Yor (purple) and settle in there. Get your techs up as quick as possible to get some shields (for the mass drivers) and planetary invasion and get your butt to the Drengi planet.

Tonite I will try a few things to increase spending ASAP on research to get my tech up as quickly as posible. Hopefully they will almost be ready by the time that I reach the planet and get it up and running. My goal is to send 2 transport ships with 3 or 4 escorting defenders. Take them out fast and try to beat the mission. I also haven't lowered the difficulty down all the way yet either. I might have to try that.

I won the level (on Normal).. (took about 6-8 hours, and I had 68bc left in my account . -> Here's what I did..

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The worst part was that I had medium hulls, plasma weapons and 12 turns to make my best offensive ships. They had four battleships running around my territory. My allies refused to go for the goal, and the DLords had to go through my territory to get to my allies. The result was that I had no military and my Allies had a ton of troops (in their own territory).

The DLords did force the Drengin to surrender to the Yor.. Which, when I finally got ships over there, It had quite enough DLord fighters and destroyers.. Not much in the way of Yor military.. Could have ended the game if I didn't have Yor-fighting ships guiding the first wave of transports in.

It took twice, but I won. The first time, I rushed technology and manufacturing buildings.. I gave up when I knew I didn't have the economy to pay for the maintenance.. The second game I only rushed the first couple of research levels, then branched out and made sure I had a taxable population.

The second time, I had a planet which had a 700% manu bonus square and a 300% manu bonus square. I put my manu capital on the planet.. It was costing me 200+ credits/turn to run (and received only 42 in taxes..), but would produce 300-pt ships in 2 turns.. Sometime around 20k (reserve cash) I decided to plasma up my cargo hulls and go after the DLords.. I would take 5 of these beasties, beat one of the two sentried battleships down to 2hp, and he'd run away long enough for me to build another 2 ships.. Then his 'buddy' would come down and we'd repeat the process.

What really seemed to change things was getting Warp Drive.. With my impulse engines, I had a speed of 5, like the battleships. They would follow my ships into my allies' territory and my allies would beat them down with the numbers they had built up (from doing nothing).

For advice, I'd say that you never want them to get a second planet. I had AndersonA, and he'd send a ship to clear the planet of defenses about 5 turns before the transport. The attacker would leave just in time for me to put in a defender. I was also able to generally keep a population of 8000 on the planet, which would be reduced to 4500.. I found out that anything less than 5000 population would cause me to lose it. So, when I didn't get a defender there in time, I had safety population, or vice-versa.. I was able to hold it until about 4 turns from the end of the game (when I couldn't have cared less).

..And, Give techs freely to your allies . (Like, give them something every 10 turns, or so..)
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you can avoid getting invaded by doing the following:

in full screen mode:
change the camera angle in invasion screen, then press esc/space

It worked for me everytime, hmmm.

For windowed mode, pressing something like space+esc helped.

A bug that the Devs should probably fix.

The mission isn't too bad.

I speed-built colony ships and grabbed something to the effect of 8 worlds. I lost one almost immediately, but held the rest by continuously building defenders for the enemies to mess w/.

I was lucky - they focused their attacks on my two systems in the bottom right corner. . . I had that world, under the Yor homeworld, and they didn't touch it. So, I teched as much speed and miniaturization as possible, traded allies to get troop transports and soldiering tech, and speed-built 2 transports.

The first two got knocked out by Yor, second two by DLs, and the final two made it to the Drengin homeworld to take it down, 2000 troops to 10,000

if you have a LOT of worlds, they don't seem to prioritize the under-Yor world very highly. This lets you use that as your transport launching area. If you have the world directly under or beside of it (systemwise), you can build some minor fighters to clear out the Yor.

And yes. Get HIGH engine tech.

tzqng8tzqng8 's strategy worked for me. I was also having a nightmare on this level... went all the way down to cakewalk and was still getting creamed within a few turns.

You start with a few initial constructors, take those and your initial coloniser and head for the system south east of the Yor. Once you reach your max range, use a constructor to drop a starbase and continue on. Grab that planet, build up a little, get a couple of factories and a starbase and crank out some defensive ships, then b-line for planetary invasion tech. I used 3 transports (skirted Yor space) with a pile of small fighters and took the Drengin planet with the last transport. I basically ignored the initial 3 planets as they were under constant attack from the Dreadlords - just left them building defensive ships

Nothing else needed, no special techs apart from Planetary Invasion!

There are several lagitamate ways to beat this level even on hard, but Im not going to tell you.

However the people above have some goop pointers.

One thing I did notice (having played it a number of times) if you take any of those worlds to the west of your starting sector, the Dreadlords will go take them off you.... but after that they never seem to bother going for your initial sector. If you don't take any of those planets, you always seem to get a constant stream of Troop Transports, fleets of fighters and the ocassional battleship come marching into your initial sector. It seems to work like a decoy.

I did this too, Spearthrower, and it worked for me. It was a speed mission for me!

I ended up assaulting the dreadlord homeworld on Normal.... kinda by mistake. I didn't pay attention to the mission objectives well enough, and thought that was the goal. Once you get fleets large enough, taking out the dreadlords isn't terribly bad, you just have to get in the first attack. Anyways, once the dreadlords were defeated, it was cakewalk to run over and punk the drengin.

On a side note, I've been using starbases lately as a way to extend my range, rather than taking over enemy planets. As long as you have a fleet to defend the starbase as you build it up, it works fine. However, it may take several starbases to extend your reach accross the map. This strategy can backfire, however, if you don't leave an adequate defense on the starbase (fleet and/or fortification modules). If the enemy takes out the military starbase supplying your forward assault, you'll find yourself stuck deep in enemy space, with no option but to slowly autopilot home.

You took the DL planet? I surely suck.

I used the starting cash to build up mfg, economy and a few starbases. None of that lasted long once the DLs showed up. I then tried to build a stealthy task force of transports, constructors (for the starbase it would take for me to reach the other corner), and a squadron of heavy fighters. The DLs caught me and took me out pronto. I lost, and now have a nice cushy 'Love the Torians' mission to do.

I sort of like the plan that I can lose this mission and my game takes a different turn.

It also felt sort of realistic to be battling against hopeless odds.

Night!

I'm unhappy at how the Dread Lords are only attacking me with a single-mindedness that's scary.

My Mk1 attack ships were running scared from them. I felt a bit devious and led the DLs through Alterian space- hoping that DLs would break pursuit and go after my allies, OR that the Alterians would respond to this threat and send their own taskforce.

Nothing of this kind happened, though. Eventually the DLs caught up to me and wiped me out.

This bought me some time to construct an invasion fleet, though. My lightly-armed but fast scouts accompanied by "5 speed" troop carriers to the Drengin world. A bit risky, as I had to skirt around Yor territory to get to the Drengin. The Drengin wiped out my accompaning attackers, so I had to wait for heavily armoured but slow 3rd generation fighters to appear.

Unfortuantely- and this made me suspect that the AI does cheat- as I prepared to invade the planet, the Dread Lords popped up out of nowhere right next to me. Even with their high tech, I'd have thought it close to imposible for them to track me as I stayed away from their fleets. The Dread Lords and Drengin teamed up (aren't the Dread Lords suposed to be at war with everyone?!) and wiped out the fleet. I had no defense back home, and the Dread Lords finished me off.

Well I havent finished the mission yet
But I do have idea ... there is no real need to bit the Dread Lord , you just have to conquer planet, this means all you need is a few powerfull ships and Planet Invesion tech.

To reach there fast just buy Colony ships at first each turn then constructors.

What I've done for all the Dread Lord missions, was to take the planets nearest to them right at the begining, destroy the colony, and repeat, so by the time the Dread Lords mobilize to fight, the planets are uninhabitable. This requires them to go a long wasy to attack our core system, and by the time they get to me, the other aliens on my side are all swarming them.

Since they have to go forever to take over one of our places, it's hard for them to reinforce, where as we (aliens and myself) can get ships built and sent there in just a couple turns. It takes a while, but eventually your economy and tech will actually surpass the D/L 's (according to GNN at least), and you can over run thier core system.

I beat this mission on the first try.

First off I speed-built colony ships and took all but 2 (one went to altarians and one to the yor) of the free worlds at the beginning.
I then sent 5 first generation attack ships to the world closest the DL planet. I was able to take out their fighters with some difficulty, and zap their undefended troop transports. The key is making sure you are the attacker and getting the first shot in. The DL ships have huge attack but no defense (at first). I was forced to reload a couple of times when they started attacking undefended worlds. Eventually I was able to park a fleet over their homeworld and then take it. Wiping out the dregin was a piece of cake at that point because I was so much more advanced than them due to my huge research and production capacity that resulted from my initial land grab.
I didn't read the mission description properly so I thought the goal was to take the Dread Lords' planet. I didn't realise that the objective was the dregin world!

I won this mission through pure dumb luck.

I rushed colony ships quickly and sent them out to colonize the best planets in a straight line from my corner to the drengin world, but the yor had already managed to grab the world closest to them. As I consolidate what I have and try to build an offensive force, the yor and drengin get colony ships on all of the worlds near my allies. At the same time, the dread lords show up and cut me off from the objective, sitting in orbit around my two planets in the middle blasting whatever gets made. They manage to take over one of the worlds, leaving me with that class 12 near the middle and the three in my original corner.

My only hope is to tech up ASAP to fleets that can survive an encounter with a lone DL ship. To buy time, I turn that class 12 into a fortress world. It gets an orbital fleet maanger and the improvement that double the HP of ships in orbit. It also has a tile with a 700% bonus to manufacturing, so I have it crank out constructors while waiting for my tech. They form a fully upgraded mil starbase right next to the planet and DL ships are gobbled like popcorn when they try to attack either the planet or the starbase.

Somewhere along the line, the drengin surrender to the yor, but I finally get the large hull tech and phasers. And since the DLs are using missles, I manage to trade ECM III from an ally. I crank out the new warships and am ready to move out. But the DLs come back, this time with beam weapons and they're using fleets! My fortress survives several waves before I destroy the colony to prevent its capture.

All hope is lost. I just sit in my corner, building ships for a final, futile defensive gesture. The dreadlords push downwards, battling my allies, and I see worlds trade hands many, many times. Eventually, though, the arceans surrender to the altarians. But a few turns later, I see the yor surrender to the altarians. The altarians now possessed the objective world! I won by cowering in the corner! I just couldn't believe it, and I am so glad I didn't restart when I lost my fortress world...

I've been playing through on Difficult, and didn't feel like turning the difficutly level down for this, so after my abortive first attempt I went for a variant on the speed strategy I like to think of as the shotgun. The key to the mission is the obscene amount of money you start out with. On the first turn, buy a factory in each of your starting worlds and queue up mostly factories and labs for them. Go into the economics screen and set military and social spending to 0, research to 100. Raise taxes until your approval rating is 50% and set 100% spending. Once your initial planets each have a lab (turn 2) this will allow you to research Planetary Invasion in 5 turns (turn 6). Buy a colony ship and send your whole fleet west.

On the higher difficulty levels the AI expands aggressively, and I only scored two worlds; knowing their tendencies, I chose carefully: the class 10 world around the star nearest me, and the class 8 world around the star that starts out in allied space with no colonies on the three planets. The three constructors, along with one bought on turn 2, went to the military resource just north of my westmost planet, on the border between allied and drengin space (they got that juicy class 12 world in the middle).

Every turn I bought an improvement in each colony that still had room until I got down to about 5000; by that point all but one of them was fully rigged and I was tearing up the tech tree. Focus on weapons, miniaturization, and engines and by the time the first dread lord battleships showed up I had two fleets of attack vessels, 3 transports, and 2 constructors ready to roll. I also had two ships on patrol just north of my worlds to take out incoming transports. When they spotted the incoming battleships my fleet fled for the relative safety of the allied capitols. I launched west from there, building a base whenever I ran out of range and staying out of the general line of traffic until I got close to the target world, and then I just tore it up.

In both my games i did notice the Dread Lords attacking the Drengin and Yor, though I never saw them take any worlds from them. To be fair, the Drengin and Yor were kicking my allies' butts, so they were obviously harder targets.

I found this one pretty easy (on normal)....just go straight for orbital bombardment and then mass driver every planet between you and the drengin. I had a sort of commando force with 3fighters and 2transports......with extra range. I sent in my flagship to lure the enemy fighters away and sneak past.

Those of you who took the DL world, what difficulty were you playing in?

I beat it on Normal after 5 tries. I bought colony ships and rushed to the 2 planets closest to the Drengin. Then I bought a small fleet to achieve air superiority. The AI was totally weak; they kept building constructors to try to put up a starbase, even though I had a fleet parked next to their world! I bought some transports and gassed the Drengin. You'd think that gassing the Torian world wouldn't be allowed... I won 3 turns after I first saw the DL Destroyer.

Getting the +2 speed attribute made it possible.

Now, I'm playing the Achilles Heel mission, and the DL consistently mops the floor with my face. This is with me beelining to their world and trying to establish air superiority. I'm buying everything and can't punch through their orbit, never mind get a transport through. They start with a 30 attack frigate and then build a 55 and then a 70 attack battleship.

These missions are lame. You shouldn't have to rely on foreknowledge of the terrain and a sucker punch strategy to win. A solid strategy gamer should be able to mount a viable offense against these guys. Although I always have enough pop to withstand their invasions, and I've learned to leave my planets undefended so I don't lose my fleets, that doesn't help me actually take their world, which is the objective. And the longer you wait, the worse they get.

I've heard of players actually restarting the mission until they get the tile bonuses they need to win. Cheese.

They need to either make the ships less powerful or more expensive.

In the beginning you are given 3 constructor, this is one of the keys.

Put spending to 100% build labs, startports and factories on each planet and that's it. Build 2 colony ships, colonise 2 planets (try to take south-most planets) you will lose one. That is fine. Do not build more colony ships, let AI to expand (I was playing on normal, so they expend fine) Let them do all the fighting. Build you military instead, but do not fight. Stay in your corner.

Trade techs, research planetary invasion ASAP, then logistics. Build 3 fleets of +2 or +3 attack ships (I got 4 ships per fleet). Build like 6 troopers and only then fly all you ships. Do not go directly, instead go from the south, through the allies territory. Build starbase when necessary to move further.

Once you got near Yor Collective (from south direction), it is tricky. You either position one base near it and protect it with 1 or 2 fleets (you need the base to get to the final planet) or capture the planet with your troopers. If you capture it, then you may have to buy few troopers from this planet immediately. After that capture the final world.

The key here is not to engage in the center of the map, let AI do that, and go through south when it is time. They do not attack you planets, so just keep all your fleet there until you ready.

I really feel stupid, I definitely should be looking at the objectives a bit more closely. Ahh well, I found my best strategy so far has been to build a small ship with a ton of sensors and use this as a look out for when the DL are coming with transporters. Then my fast 1 weapon ships swoop in and take them out. Thinking of a constructor class with a weapon payload to try to take out the other ships that come in. Anyone know if they would work on the DL or if it is a wasted idea?

Playing this level for the second time on Normal rather than simple. I was doing alright on the previous lower level but wanted to really experience a hardcore battle. So decided to up the difficulty and start again. Ironically I am now doing better on this level than I did on the previous difficulty.

Strategy - I decided to max max out for my race to colonise all the world asap, boosted economy and am a federalist government.

Tactics - So far I own all the free worlds bar one, I lost this to the Dreadlord due to poor sensor range. They snook in a transport without it ever being visible.

I have researched invasion techo but have been mostly trying to defend my planets from the Dreadlords. Their ships are uber, but I gave all my tech to my allies along with some cheap first generation ships. My allies are actively engaging the Dreadlord within my space. Good for me.

However the problem is that a majority of the DLs are now battleships and my allies are using fighters and heavy fighters. They are getting creamed, I have given plasma beam 3 tech to both of them butI don't think they have the IPs to build capital ships based on plasma beam tech yet. So I have designed a uber anti-DL destoyer with 12 dam plasma beam weapons. If I kick out around 4/5 of these and group them thats an estimated 48/60 punching power. If I get the drop on a battleship I just might be lucky enough to toast it in the first volley. The Altairans have antimatter torp 3 tech that they nicked from the DLs LOL! They invaded one of their worlds successfully I can not believe it.

Future tactics - Morale is at a all time low, I am spending enormous amounts of money on maintaining my tech lead. I need to captialise upon this more quickly. The DLs keep toasting my defence ships and opening them up to invasion. This must be dealt with immediately. I also need to reestablish my starbase network after the DLs completely wiped them out. I lost about 4 SBs to them easily so far. A fleet of 5 x Nova Destroyers need to be deployed against the DLs. If I can do this I can almost guarantee victory at each engagement.

Economy wise I am doing alright, industry and research are lagging abit. Oh the Dreguin surrendered to the Yor, which have a obviously powerful fleet, they have resisted all attempts at conquer by me and the DLs. I really need to hit them with a fleet of Novas. Their military is easily on par with mine and they utilize fleet grouping effectively. My lat battle with the Yor I made the mistake of autopiloting a transporting ship into a fleet of 4 very heavy fighters with 16 beam attack. Oooopies!

Rest assure that I will win this game but only because I rushed with extra speed at the beginning. Besides that all I can recommend is only to build SBs in your home sector and allies sectors and not north.

J

I really hate this mission.