Analyze my game . . .

Ooops, afterthought.  Here's my game settings:

DA game, Huge galaxy, 9 opponents all with Gifted Intelligence, Painful difficulty level, no tech trading, 8 minor races, common habitable planets, common planet frequency, common stars frequency, scattered clustering, rare anamolies, common asteroids, normal tech rate.  I think that's the gist of it.

There are two good ways to make people want to not kill you:

1) Have the bigger military (Spin Control Center is the key here)

2) Have them kill other people

None of these seem very viable in your situation, but if you can do it, get a Spin Control Center on a world and fill it with your biggest, toughest ships.

Other than that, if a bit of time is all you need, I can recommend outfitting a few ships with a lot of engines and teasing the opponent, making them chase you. They're stupid like that. Also, it might hold them off long enough for you to get some researching done. Also, cheap weapon and lots of engines makes a perfectly good Trensport killer, again effective for holding off superior forces.

Other than that, I sympathise. I recently got handed by the Thalans because of their obscene production rates and their refusal to negotiate, back when I had Star Furies facing Battleships.

Ultimately, I'd say your hope is to either push the front (taking enemy planets and take the fight there), or somehow persuade the Drengin to attack your other enemies.

I am not very experienced either, but here are a couple of thoughts:

- until you gain more experience, you shouldn't play on harder difficulty then "tough"

- I like planets and stars set to common, just like you. It seems that if you set either of them to "abundant" it drastically reduces the probability of finding bonuses on planet tiles. Bare in mind that this means that the AI probably has some "jewelery" planets of his own

- I think that you don't need that many economy planets. DA economy is not as difficult as TA, and it is better to build things then to buy them. I always try to keep my budget in balance, without much extra cash.

- It also seems that you are not researching enough. Low PQ planets are for research because you can't build anything else on them, but you can't limit your research to 5 below PQ 10 planets.

Don't be afraid of big ships.... invest in logistics, miniaturization and weapon technology they don't have defences for. Then build fleets of 12+ small hulled fighters filled with your deadliest weapon (forgot about shield/armor or point defence, just weapons). Those fleets will haunt your enemy frigates and battleships in their worst nightmares

If you choose the +2 speed ability for your race, you can even forget about putting an engine on your small hull to fit more weapons

The reason those races are being paid to attack you is the Drath, its part of their superability.

First off, as the Yor take advantage of their superability limiting emeny ships to 3 pc/turn. Build some military starbases and get the minus speed mudule on them. Your enemies will be limited to just 1 space per turn!!! I know, hard to get them built and keep then when you are already at war.

At this point in your game I don't think having good relations is possible anymore, you need to fight back as you've been doing. There are many threads describing how not to get ganged up on, I won't get into that now since its too late foir that. Get medium hulls NOW. You can beat off larger AI ships with those, or at least lose fewer until you can get better ships. What you should do too is do whatever you can to get someone else to war with those that are at war with you. With tech trading off you'll have to use cash.

Take advantage of the AI's weakness... Invasions. You may lose a bunch of ships but arn't losing the game until you start losing planets. Get your soldering up. You're not out of it yet.

As for your planetary make up. EVeryone does it differently. I for one, don't specialize many planets. Mine are basically all balanced. I'll have my tech capital that IS specialized and maybe one other planet just for research, but even that will have a farm and at least one stock exchange. All of my planets other than those two are pretty much half production and half economy with one farm and one reserach structure and a starport. Trade goods and wonders get placed where they can be built quickly and I like to have economy starbases boosting production almost everywhere. Thats why I play with tight clusters.

Lately anything less than a PQ10, unless there are very good tiles, becomes a planet with one farm and all stock exchanges. You can never have too much money in this game. Your income is not just to fill your treasury. The more you make, the more that goes to production and research. Many stockexchanges will also add to the influence bonus that will aid your Yor superability.

Anyway hope this helps you, let me know how it goes for you.

Well, I kept playing and things were overall going pretty well.  I used the trick of baiting enemy fleets with a cheap fast vessel and had an armada consisting of three different races chasing it all over the galaxy.  Along the way I think it took out a half-dozen troop transports with it's single laser.  Eventually it got surrounded, but oh well--it had a good run for quite a while.

However, not much longer I suddenly got hit with a bug or something.  All my attack ships and fleets went invisible, the fleet number changed to zero, and all the designs dissappeared from my shipyard.  Looks like the same bug hit the custom ships of the AI too.  Tried reloading the game to no avail, and I don't think I have a recent save that hasn't been corrupted.

Anyone else have this bug before, know what caused it, or know how to fix it?  I interpret it as the game's way of saying that I was fighting a losing battle anyways, but darned it--I wanted to fight to the bitter end!!!

That's the Plague.

Go into your tech tree and research Plague Cure (it'll be at the bottom), then sell it to the AIs that aren't murdering you for gazillions of cash.

Or was it Disease?

Either way, he shouldn't sell the cure to anyone. The game just handed him a win on a silver platter. Why run the risk of anyone selling it to his enemies?

The plague ate my ships?!

Lol, I remember seeing the event video, can't remember how far back it was, and thought to myself, "What in the world does a plague have to do with a spaceship flying over cool looking water stuff?"  Now I know!

So I did a test run, researched the plague cure, and sure enough, I can build all my ships again.  The old ones that went invisible though still seem to show up in my F1 ship listing, and also appear in my F4 maintenance list and apparrently are still included in my military rating.  However, the ships themselves have not reappeared.  Anything I can do about that?  Or should I just decomission all the non-existant ships and rebuild my fleet?

And for future reference, if you get the plague event video and quickly research the cure, can you avoid this whole extremely odd and non-intuitive disappearing ship business?

I don't recall having the ships actually disappear-but something funky is supposed to happen because it sets all your abilities to zero (including logistics-so you can't have fleets until you fix it).

You might try saving, exiting, and reloading (try saving it as a -different- game, though).

You can basically do what you want by now. If you're really anxious to make sure that you *do* *not* lose, perform surgical strikes at the other races' research planets so they don't end up researching it (though I think I've read somewhere that the AI doesn't bother?), but all in all, everyone is going to drop dead around you.

There's a glitch in the code-it's supposed to be high priority, but the AI can't find it because it navigates using the tree, and it doesn't exist in the tree until the triggering event happens.

At least, that's how it looks to me.

Another reason is that the AI won't switch the current Tech being researched like a human would. If the plague is the one wityh lost abilities, it could take the AI a long time to get it. I had thos event once and the AI eventually did go for it but it was listed as 52 weeks to research.

The ships arn't supposed to disappear from what I remember. MAybe on your nex turn when those ships need orders the game will center on them and you will know where they are, or they may come back.

Whoa - did the forum have a rollback or something?  There were at least two other posts after my last one (explaining that my dissappearing ship problem was the plague), and another follow-up by myself.  Odd!

At any rate, I ended up scrapping all my invisible non-existant ships that I was still paying maintenance for, used the extra cash to quickly research the plague cure, then started cranking out a new fleet of small ships with 2 psyonic beams each while researching Total Majesty to get a Spin Control Center.  The plague must have taken out the huge invasion force I was anticipating, and I was easily able to handly what few invaders did enter my territory with my new fleet.  Pretty soon my Military Ranking was competitive again, and my enemies were more than happy to enter a peace treaty with some cash to boot!

Not much later I got my Spin Control Center, loaded a cargo ship with lots of psyonic beams, and now I finally have some peace and have gone on a research / infrastructure improving binge.  Once I get my planets arranged the way I like them and get my techs where I want them, I'll start my expansion.

All things considered, things have turned around from pretty bleak to sunshine and rainbows (not that robots get sentimental over sunshine and rainbows . . . or do they?)  I'm not sure how much of my survival was a result of a well timed plague, but oh well--I'm back in business and ready to roll!

remember to use the Spin Control to keep your military rating ludicrous, so they'll leave you alone. Oh, and, if you actually want the game to continue, sell the cure to the other races.

Keep an eye on which AI's have the cure and when they will get it. If its going to be a long time you have time to build up, otherwise you may want to pick at least one race to expand onto, (the Drath since they caused your problems). lol

Until they have a cure their abilities will be at zero, that means zero soldiering-zero morale etc. You can invade any planet using informations warefare and lose virtuallty no soldiers or more likely end with more than you started with.

Can't sell it - tech trading is off muaahahah.  So far it looks like the other races still have ships running around, so maybe they researched the cure already?  What typically happens if they don't get around to it anyways?  Do they just wither and die waiting for an innoculated race to clean them up?

We find the separation of electromagnetic frequencies in our photo-voltaic recharge circuitry quite . . . refreshing, actually. Some days we can almost hold organic life forms in something less than utter genocidal contempt.

Jonn-an mk II

Ahhhh, that explains why the Drengin worlds I took over suddenly went from way more soldiering than me to zero!  Time to build a fleet of transports to seize the day then

ps--I love the smiley icons on here!

Something to say about your planets.

In your case, my planet's would be specialized as follows.......

PQ 12+: Factories

PQ 7-11: Research

PQ 6 and under: Economy

If you haven't already, research better hull, miniaturization, logistics techs. Bigger hulls, more room to place weapons. Higher miniaturization, even more room to place weapons. Higher logistics, more ships with more weapons that you can bring to your battles. Personnally, I'd (in this order) research: hulls, miniaturization, logistics.

The PQ 12+ planets should be all-factories, to pump out those Medium-Huge size ships quickly.

The PQ 7-11 planets should be research, because this way it's more balanced out. Research for me, is a second priority during a war. Ships are the number 1.

And the PQ 6 and under, are all Econ, because where else are you gonna put 'em.

If I find a PQ 26+ with fairly good bonuses to morale, that's where I place the Econ capital. And yes, I am extremely picky with my Econ/Manufacturing/Tech/Political capital placement.

Some games, I am into turn 400 before I place a capital. The only way that this happens of course, is by conquering an enemy world.

I'm picky about this sort of thing, because in the past, I've had a great many killjoys during the colonization phase of my game. I would find a seemingly good planet on which I could place one of my capitals. And the turn after that, I'd find an even better planet on which I could've placed that capital.

Hope this helps (if you still havn't finished that game).

Till next time..........

GO KICK SOME WEIRDLY COLOURED ALIEN ASS!!!!!!!!!