Terror Stars - Useful???
GalCiv2 Forums
Any one out there like terror stars?
I just finished a game in which I used them for the first time. Here's what my experrience was.
The game was on a medium size galaxy with everything random (I am going through each race in turn in TA to get a feel for each race's strengths in this expansion - opponents tough). The game set up as super abundant everything - lots of stars each having at least four habitable planets. I was the Drath and the Korath Klan were the bully boys. They rapidly took down everyone else and owned about 85% of the galaxy when they declared war on me.
I eventually got the upper hand, was pushing them back and had a won game. It was taking forever to grind through to finish the game (there were hundreds of planets). It seemed that terror stars would let me win faster by wiping out whole star systems at a time.
Not really so. The research for them takes a long time, you have assemble a fleet of constructors to build them quickly, but once that's done there is then a ten turn power up delay before they even start to move, and once they do move, it's only one square at a time. On top of that, you need a strong force to defend the terror star since the AI will make an effort to take it out.
It was my experience that over the same period of time I was able to take out four or five star systems through normal invasion tactics as opposed to only one using a terror star. In addition, many enemy planets would often flip over to my side by the time I was finally able to get to their star to destroy it.
The ONLY advantage I saw in using terror stars was that they would draw out the big enemy fleets from deep in their territory into an area where I could more easily destroy them (useful, but was not the reason I built the stars).
It's obvious that a lot of effort went into the development of terror stars, but I don't see any strong reason to use them because they are not very efficient in their present form. I would not want to use them on anything larger than a medium sized galaxy because they are so slow to put into action and move, nor would I ever consider using them in any game having less than five or more habitable planets per star regardless of galaxy size.
Any one out there have a different opinion?
ALSO - FOR THE DEVS - in this game I built three terror stars. During the running of the game, one of them went POOF! (it just disappeared - did not exist anymore). They next day, restarting from my QuickSave file, it was back! I have no explanation for this and don't know if anyone has turned in an error report on this problelm.
