What a waste of MY time

Play sandbox to learn the game; the campaign isn't designed to teach it to you, it's designed to tell a story.

Yes, the Dread Lords are tough.  It's actually easier if you play a higher difficulty because then your allies aren't foaming at the mouth and can actually help you.

The lack of retaining progress from one level of the campaign to another has been complained about before and hopefully witll be addressed in GC3, the next iteration, but it's a bit too late in GC2's life cycle to make such a change.

I don't recall specifically which episode in the Campaign you refer to, but a simple strategy that worked for me throughout the DL Campaign was to build fleets of suicide attack ships to fight the DL. The large hulls available for cargo and and colonizing have only 1 hit point but can still carry a lot of firepower, engines, or sensors, and are available from the start of the game. Victory with acceptable losses (2 to 1) against lone DL ships is attainable at low tech levels if your logistics score is high enough to put 3-4 large ships in a fleet.         

There is a campaign?

I've found that in some levels- particularly pre-DL ones, your allies are exponentially stronger than yourself and your enemies at lower levels than higher levels (it balances out at Normal, I think).

Shouldn't this hold true on the other campaign missions?

- Is there a specific player action that causes the DLs to start attacking, or is it just random? 

My first try I went hundreds of turns before they launched, my second attempt they started attacking in well under half that amount of time.  In my second try I even made it a point to Not scout the location of Teth, hoping that if I didn't let them know I was there I'd be able to attack them before they started attacking me. 


- Have the developers ever said why the first few, very easy, scenarios have tech research speed set at normal while this one has it set just slightly above the lowest possible speed?  I would have thought it would be the other way around, considering the Drengi are nothing compared to the Dread Lords.  Especially since we start with no miniaturization, basic logistics, oversized beam weapons that do a whopping 2 damage, and deflectors that are so big and so weak they're not even worth thinking about, let alone using against ships with 200+ attack...

...all of which would be okay, if tech research wasn't set to such an insanely slow speed.

No, seriously, that's really the best you're going to tell this guy?

With many apologies to such a highly karma ranked veteran GC2 poster, but that's not exactly much of a clue for how to deal a scenario that other posters besides him have been calling impossible or nearly impossible since 2006, going from what I found on a board search. 

Don't get me wrong, upping AI intellect is probably a good idea considering how totally useless my teammates have been to me at "normal" level in this scenario, but that's really the best you were willing to post?  Go play sandbox to learn the game, then come back and raise the difficulty level?  Sandbox doesn't prepare a player for this scenario.  Hell, even the first three scenarios in the campaign don't prepare a player for this one.  First you're swatting a drunken fly with a hammer, then you're the drunken fly and your opponent has a nuclear powered sledgehammer.






This can work, to an extent, but from what I've seen in my first two tries, it's really a matter of luck.  Being lucky enough to have the Dread Lords stay at home while you try to research, at least, logistics to a high enough level to be able to effectively use the strategy.  Once they start attacking, decimating planet populations, even if they don't manage to conquer them, and blowing up every ship built as soon as it comes off the assembly line, you'd better be ready to fight because it's all downhill from there.  Even if you are ready to fight, you'd best hope you still have enough cash to stay the course, because both losses I've suffered so far have been mainly from going broke.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not contradicting you, especially since it seems you've won this one and I sure haven't managed to yet.  I'm just saying there's more to it than that.... unless you mean forget about colonizing and researching and everything else and just start building three ship tiny hull popgun fleets immediately?

What level did you play Achilles Heel at?  That's the one where you need to conquer the DL defended planet Teth, the first time they appear in the campaign.  They start with a 201 beam attack ship in orbit around the planet, we start with level one second generation Particle beams (damage 2 size 10 on a 16 cap tiny hull) and level one deflectors (defense 1 size 9 on a 16 cap tiny hull).  I'm asking because I'm wondering if Sole Soul's idea of raising the difficulty level helps.

Hmmm.  I think I just got an idea.  I wonder if the DLs will be nice enough to cooperate.   Probably not, but it's worth a try.

 

I finally beat this yesterday, but I know it was mostly due to luck in that third try.  A little skill and a lot of luck.

FWIW, here's what I did (and it's really not much different from what I did the first two tries):

(Actually you could probably just skip most of this and start reading from the bolded part way down below)

For racial abilities make sure you put a point into Creativity.  This is the one vital ability, everything else is debatable depending on play style.  I also went with +Military building, +Social building, +Economy, and +Morale.  Later, I was sorry that I hadn't put any points into +Population growth.  I picked Industrialist for my political party for the +20 Military and Social building bonuses.


Start by researching the early +population growth techs up through medicine.

Get cartography to spot planet locations, although every star has at least one habitable by all planet.

Rush build (buy) fast colony ships to grab every planet

Rush build (buy) recruitment centers on every planet

Normal build factories, starport, research structures, and marketplaces.  A typical planet would get 2 factories, the starport, 3-5 labs, and 1-2 marketplaces.

I also got Economic and Research treaties from all the AI teammates as soon as I could, and gave my research treaty to the Alturians.  I think the Arcasians are better at research, but in every game I've played with them, almost every tech they research is far too important to trade for any reasonable price)


After I got the +population techs, I traded (sold mostly) them to the AI.  I gave the AI races everything but weapons upgrades, including techs I got from other races, as long as it was a tech they might research to a higher level for me.  I then concentrated solely on beam weapon upgrades.  Eventually I had to trade weapon upgrades for other techs, but I always gave them the lowest level one I could.  The reason for that is, from what I saw, when the Dread Lords start taking too much damage, they start putting shields on their ships.  Not good.


When I got to Phasors 5, I put every shipyard to work making double capacity transports (two modules per ship) or making Medium Hull ships with one life support module and the rest maxed out on offense.  When my shipyards were set, I gave Phasors 5 to all the AI races hoping they'd manage to build some support for my attack.  Or at least something else for the DLs to attack.

Then, as soon as a ship was finished, I launched it at Teth.  Immediately.  That included transports.   My goal was to put so many transport ships in the air that the Dread Lords fighters couldn't get to all of them, and enough attack ships that, even if one lost, another would be right behind it to finish the job. I play with the game option Build Same Ship Until Canceled turned on to make life easier, so from my first launch, there was never a point where I wasn't building ships on every planet.


Now comes the really hard part.  This is probably the only "strategy" any of us need:


Convince the game to give you a lot of creativity research completion events on techs that still have 18-50 weeks left, and convince Voyager to find all the +25% research bonus debris.  You should also convince the game to create a lot of +25% research bonus debris for you, and a lot of 500-1000 BC junk to sell off.  I'm sorry to say it, but this is the real key to winning the scenario.


Any person answering your original post is going to have his own take on what you need to do to win. 

Most of them are going to be very different from what I posted, and they really did win with the strategies they post. 

The part that most of them won't tell you, maybe because most of them don't realize it, is that their brilliant strategies didn't work any better or any worse than my "brilliant" strategy worked for me.  It was luck.  Saving dozens of turns in research with creativity and +25% bonuses means you still have planets to build ships and pay taxes for you.  High research is great.  Breeding a lot of citizens is pretty crucial.  But whether you win or lose will come down to how many breaks you get in research, in AI teammates researching the right techs, in failed invasion attempts by the DLs, and in how long it takes the DLs to destroy Voyager.

Actually it's even worse than that.  For example we start Achilles Heel with Medium scale building as a known tech, but when we move to Apocalypse, we don't even know how to do that anymore. 


Obviously the setup for these DL campaign scenarios was not well thought out.  It's something that really hurts the enjoyability of the story being told, along with the concept that we're actually trying to win a crucial military operation that means the survival of our entire race by breeding new colonists on new worlds to create our entire military infrastructure, research network, fighting force, and economy.


Me, I'd have sent soldiers with guns and set up supply lines from the home world.