Campaign help

When i first played the dreadlords campaign, i wondered this too?

This is what i recommend - build nothing for them to kil! simple! then protect your planets from transports with cargo hulls loaded with engines, sensors and 1 little weapon. They are fast enough to evade all Dreadlord combat ships while they are at it. That works good while you research better techs but.... eventually the Dreadlords will fleet up a transport with an escort combat ship, then your cargo hulls cannot stop them taking your planets!!. But by then you should be able to build fleets of tiny hulled ships powerful enough to kill Dreadlord ships. You will probably find it necissary to have some reasonable engine speed on your tiny hulled ships otherwise the Dreadlord ships will be able to pick them off before they can fleet up.

Remember the power of fleets.... this is how you will defeat the Dreadlords.

Edit: Oh i forgot to mention.... don't bother trying to use any defences on your ships, it is a waste of time. The enemy firepower is so strong that defences and hitpoints are irrelevant. This is why i recomended using tiny hulled ships.... each weapon on the Dreadlord ship will be limited to the hitpoints of each tiny hull! So if a Dreadlord weapon is capable of doing 100 points of damage, and your tiny hull has just 6 hit points, well then all that extra power is lost for them. In earlier versions this strategy was even more valuable, because ALL weapons on the Dreadlord ship fired at the one Tiny hull per round, but this was later fixed so it is now each individual weapon, but still, a good strategy using Tiny hulls.

SO wait a second, Sensors and Engines play a role in defense/offense??  I can understand engines, but what role do sensors play?

None in actual combat. They do help with keeping tabs on where the Dreadlord ships are so you can pick off the transports and evade the heavy stuff, though. Same with engines, no effect on combat, but they let you determine when and where combat will take place. Often you can identify which ship a Dreadlord ship is chasing and lead it all around the map without ever being attacked, if you have enough speed and range to stay ahead of them.

Yea you need sensors so you can spot the incomming dreadlord transport ships which can easily be killed by anything at all, since they have no weapons!

If you do not garrison your planets or build any freighters or starbases, the Drengin combat ships will not even bother entering your territory, because there is nothing to attack! But since your planets are not garrisoned, they are vunerable to enemy troop transports - hence the need for fast cargo hull vessels which can be used to find and kill those transports.

I like to spot a number of these cargo hull vessels along my boarder and set them to guard. As soon as anything enters that sector, they activate and let me know something is comming. As Willy says above, sometimes a Dreadlord combat ship will decide to chase one of your cargo hulled vessels. If that happens, you need to run him off and hopefully have a replacement ship to guard his position while he is off running around.

I find that the best way is to research medium hulls.  Then builf fleets that have at least enough attack to take the dread lord ships out in one round that way at least one ship will always survive with one hit point