How to Kill a Dark Avatar

If they have beam defenses, go with either of the other options. Missiles are generally a better option, but guns will work.

If you played Dread Lords, you beat them in that campaign with simple firepower. The combat mechanics for Dark Avatar and Twilight are somewhat different - defending ships get to fire back, even if they are destroyed that round. A round where both fleets get destroyed is settled by the tie rule - the last surviving ship of each fleet is compared, and the one with the higher attack value survives with 1 hp. To beat a Dread Lord now, you must get arround the tie rule. There are basically three ways to go about this:

1) Fighter swarm. Get your logistics as high as possible, then cram a fleet full of the best tiny hulled ships you can build. The Dread Lords can only kill as many fighters as they have weapons each round, so some will survive to fire a second round. This tends to be hard on the fighters, but they're cheap.

2) Defense. Research up the defense to whatever the Dread Lords are using, the get as many medium hulls as possible into a fleet. Each one should have a decent weapon and as much defense as you can get on it. It's the same principle as the fighter swarm, hoping your ships can tank more hits than the Dread Lords can dish out.

3) The Glass Cannon. AKA the bigger hammer. Research up to at least nano rippers, two or three levels of miniaturization, and huge hulls. Engines are recommended, but not required. Design a ship with the maximum firepower you can get on it - make sure it's well above what the Dread Lords have on any one ship. Then rush build it on whatever planet's nearest - this will likely bankrupt your empire, but this one ship will win the game.

Last time i dealt with them this way. I would put spies on all their factories, then produce a large amount of small cheap ships with appropriate defense and attack but no engine. I work a little on logistic and amass a fleet of something like 28 ships ( 4 fleets of 7 ) with around 6-2 ( attack/defense) each ship. I bring them all close to the DL planet then attack with everything the same turn. Usualy that would deal with 1 dread lord unit. Then when their defense is down i usualy conquer their world with 1000 soldiers + planetary bombardement. I was also wondering if it would not be best to ignore defense completely on the small ships. Since they are probably gonna be destroyed with one hit anyway. Maybe a more advanced player could answer this. BTW : I play twillight of the arnor at painful difficulty.

I'll hang a big YES on ignoring defense. It's nearly impossible to get enough defense to matter against a Dread Lord.

Makes perfect sense, thank you.

Yeah, I finally beat them back. With some custom made ships ar,med to the teeth with missile launchers I could beat them everytime. I was a little suprised when they kept coming. I had to keep ships on every planet I had. But I found the new rule for ties working in my favor as when we killed each other I survived and by the time they came back again I was fully healed. I don't know where they were coming from. They had no planet, no bases and yet ships kept coming till the end of the game.

I am playing Twilight of the Arnor as well.

Are they invincible or what? I prepared a long defense to take out one of their ship that was aiming for one of my starbase, I made fleets of cargo ships loaded with the best weapons. I figured, with 12 hp they would die before they could hit all the 3 ships in the fleet, well one hit from one ship brought him to 1 hp... and then! Nothing, he just began to hit all my ships in a row and destroys the first fleet. Then I immediately send out my second fleet to finish the bastard, I bring him to 0 hp and he does not die, he just hit everyone again in a row like it was always his turn to attack. Then he goes back to his planet with 1 hp when he was supposed to have exploded!

I play with max long research... I don't have the time to make a terrorstar to destroy his planet... they are damn annoying, disable them everytime.