1000 hp ships!

HOHOHO I guess they got you good I have experienced War party aliens destorying me becuase their ships had 3x the hps of mine :/ But never 1k. Its possible.

~SDC~

I assume those are Excalibur ships. Yup 1000+ hps, 275 atk, 75 def. Most powerful ship in the game. Too bad you didnt get them first huh?

~SDC~

REmember that ships are NOT the important things! Planets and Starbases are. So what if the I-League has near invincible ships. Avoid them (admittedly very hard due to their speed) and focus your attacks on destroying the starbases (especially any military ones) and capturing some planets. Give them some lovely ripe targets to attack (build lots of cheap battle cruisers and sit them just out of range of their powerful ships in the direction you want to lead them. Keep repeating, always moving the powerfuls ships away from your target and then rush attack with your overlords and transports. Take them one planet at a time and avoid ship combat (except for destroying their transports)

Paul.

~SDC~

If they have thousand point ships, they most assuredly have military resources. Hunt down and kill *all* of the I-League's starbases and, preferably, have constructors waiting to claim the newly freed resources. You'll find that his military becomes *much* weaker. About 50% per starbase, perhaps. :-/

~SDC~

73% if he's late enough in the game to have Excaliburs

Oh, right.

(now I have to load that game back up and find out which resource mining tech I missed)

Either way, losing one military resource starbase will make a hyooj difference to their fleet. They're *always* my first targets.

~SDC~

Use Anti-Matter Missiles. For the cost of One Excalibur, you can build enough missiles to take out two of them even if they have 1k hit points.

True, but use them to take out starbases first.

Also, Excaliburs are much faster than missiles.

~SDC~

I you guys don't mind me asking what level AI was this on? I'm starting to get the willies just reading about it.

Does the minor race AI change according to difficulty level? I know the empires are as smart as you make them, but I don't know if the same applies to the minor races.

IME, the minor races tend to kick a *lot* of ass in the lower difficulty levels, since there's not much to challenge them. At about sub-normal, the empires start kicking the minor's asses. Of course, these are observations ranging from the unpatched, bonus pak-less game out of the box to yesterday's patch.

~SDC~

Build yourself a stack of Scouts or Defenders and use them to escort your missiles. They'll attract the Excaliburs and easily deplete their movement points so you can blow them up next turn.

You can use my ship catapult tactic for those missiles too:

http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?BID=GS&id=38605

In my last game, I almost built a ship catapult sector. The utter lack of needing one prevented me, but I nearly did it anyway.

~SDC~

Thanks for the tips, guys. I guess my combat thinking was a bit 2 dimensional "ship vs. ship" kind thing.

The difficulty level was 'normal'.

I'll have to admit, I gave up on that game prior to reading these suggestions and started a new one. The Excalibur ship was devestating, to say the least.

C&P

Excaliburs are the single reason why I tech whore like I do up the ladder. A horde of missiles and a few massive capital ships = excessive weight to throw around. LOL

Once you obtain Dreadnought technology it's a good idea to set your empire on missile production for a few turns instead of constructors. Missiles are incredibly cheap to maintain, and they eat capital ships for breakfast. Stock a half dozen on each of your front line planets and you'll be safe for years to come. This also allows you to sell large numbers of ships to the AI without risk of them becoming a serious problem to you.

It also boosts your military force dramatically, which will discourage other civs from attacking you.

Of course, it's only an illusion of force (since they'll blow up every time).

~SDC~

Yea missiles are bad like that, use up 30 of them in a war, and suddenly your military score drops in half, and you end up with half the games Civs declaring war on you as they see you as an easy target hehe

~SDC~