(DA) A dismal failure yesterday!

Another sign of a deep game is that different player set-ups require different strategies, but they can be made to work.

But you have to admit, blockading extreme planets is a pretty dismal strategy??

I play with Drengin set to Godlike, the rest on genious (I do this because the Drengin are my favourite 'bad guys' so to speak, and i was getting sick and tired of other races taking them out before i had my chance!) so i know they will be comming for my extreme worlds pretty damb fast, in which case i have to throw everything i've got at blockading, then have nothing available to fend off an attack. The AI is pretty good and pushing a big advantage like that to take me out, so i have no option other than to quit. It may be possible to cat and mouse them for a while, but my technology just isn't happening, so i have no long term prospect for recovery from that situation.

When I play the highest dificulty levels, I concede the extreme environment planets entirely.  I research those techs very late, when I begin to get ready to take them from the nice AI who has so kndly invested so many BCs in improvements for me to enjoy! 

Try a research race, pimp tech to the minors, keep the AIs in wars, and get ready to conquer the first one that declares war on you.

Yes, i can steal worlds out from under the AI, even on suicidal! But i don't play just to beat a high dificulty level, that dousn't interest me, what i like is to foster an environment where i have a powerful AI to test my fleets on!

But as for my original Arcean game, which i have now revisited, The Thalans are a problem because they boarder my territory, and some of my worlds are leaning towards joining them!! They have taken about half the extreme planets in my territory, the ones they did not take were grabbed by other races and then rebelled to my side. So the Thalan extreme worlds inside my territory are certainly not showing any signs at all of rebelling to my side, but i have enough nice worlds anyway, so i'm not so bothered.... plus i have an alliance with the Thalans!! lol

This game is working its way towards a very interesting climax, i think it will become the most interesting game i have ever seen!..... The Drengin just got taken over as the most powerful race by the Korax. This is interesting because i have never before seen the Korax do so well, and their intelligence is only set to genious, while the Drengin are set to Godlike. All the other races are in serious decline except for the Thalans, so like i said, this game is heading somewhare extremely interesting!!!

In the many DA games that I have played, the Korath are the most common top AI.  The Krynn and Terrans share a distant second/third in frequency at the top.  The Drengin seem to hare out of the box and fizzle out by mid-game.

In one that I am trying hard to out-battle OOM crashes, the Arceans have taken the lead.  I think the OOM errors are coming because every race is still there fairly late, including all the minors, and one new minor formed in an event so there are actually more races than the nominal max with which a game can be set up to have at the start.  Maybe I need to conquer a few to settle it out .... 

Interesting? The Korath must have been getting unlucky circumstances in all my games up to this point then? You got me thinking that perhaps the Drengin are not the best race to foster as the ultimate opponent? As for the krynn, i used them a couple of times and they were way to powerful, eating up the whole universe with influence, so i don't use them anymore. I want military powerful, not influence powerful races! Well the Thalans are influence powerful but at least it is not over the top like it is with the Krynn!!

Incidently, one of the toughest opponents i ever faced was a Thalan+Arcean alliance which i just could not crack! The battles raged across the universe and eventually the only way i could gain any ground was to slowly creep forward with military starbase support. But eventually i lost all my trading partners so then i had to run around and steel woulds out from under the AI in order to win, kinda dissapointed i had to resort to doing that..... but my funds would eventually run out and how would i support my army then?

Hmm, well it turns out continuing that first Arcean game was no use either! The Korath went to war with the Thalans and then me because i was Thalan ally. Now the Thalans had stacks of ships and fleets over on their side of my boarder, so i didn't have much defences there. Then something i could not have anticipated, happened all the Korath ships and Thalan ships past right by each other and then the Korath ships started demolishing all my starbases and everything all the while powerful Thalan fleets were cruising by on their way to Korath territory! I was so offended by this turn of events i had no option but to quit!

Playing Arcean is just not possible at the same difficulty i play Terran, since i just cannot keep up in technology because of the sheer imposibilities of tech trading.

You may have to formulate and execute a different strategy when playing the Arceans.

If they still have that first strike advantage, then do not research defenses, for example.  Just go on the attack earlier with less tech than usual, perhaps.

Not sure what difficulty setting your playing on but I play on tough and have no problem getting extreme planets colonized first in my area for the most part. Instead I don't focus on that 1 tech that some races have and deem far to valueable to trade like aquatic world colonization or barren world colonization in the begining of a game. Instead trade for al the other techs so you don't have to research as much other stuff, push a few engines and then extreme colonization depending which extreme worlds are in a bigger supply in your area.... don't waste time on advanced until a bit later and if you have no heavy grav worlds in your areas don't bother pushing it through.

Also keep in mind that if your alighment is towards the wrong spectrum and such foreign powers aren't so willing to trade with you and want more for stuff.

Thanks for the posts guys,

I'm playing with Drengin set to Godlike and everyone else set to genious.

I restarted the Arcean game back at the original save before the out of memory error stopped me playing the first time. I had made several changes to my strategy.... i realised i already have plenty of ships, but they are no match for the Korath fleets, but thats ok. I repositioned all my crappy ships to defend my starbases and i stopped production of new ships in all my planets. I was previously building allot of constructors but i realise there is no point if i cannot defend my starbases. I have traded skillfully and managed to get HD Spike weapons from the Yor.... i love the Yor, they seem to be the only race willing to trade high end weapons too me!

This is my new strategy in a nutshell - Now i am researching miniturisation and logistics which i was lacking before. So my plan is to upgrade my crappy ships with heavy weaponry as required when the Korath attack. I have stopped spending money on starbases and have now focussed on planitary improvements instead.

Syanis -

It was when I realized that I was able to research extreme colonization and start the second colony rush ahead of the AIs, that I knew it was time for me to move up in Difficulty level.

Then, with just a few tweaks to make my approach a bit more efficient, I moved up again and again.  Then I just jumped to Suicidal (largest galaxy, max others, scattered, abundant everything).  It is at this point that I have had to accept that trying to colonize extreme planets is a fatal mistake.  You need the diplo and influnce gains, you need the economic and morale gains, you need some mil rating, and you need almost all of that more than extra planets.  In fact, the extra planets that produce only at 50% (until you research the Advanced extreme colonizations) can be more liabilities that assets.

So, maybe time to move up! 

Update:

With my earlier mentioned changes in strategy, i did well for a while in that Arcean game, infact i thought it was almost too easy! Even fighting wars on 3 fronts! I have the Korx, the Korath, the drengin and the yor at war with me. But once again Technology is my achillies heel, and as time goes on, my fleets are becomming less and less effective and it is beginning to eat up all my recources just to hold my ground. Soon enough the AI will break me and there is nothing much i can do at all, if i want to advance my weapons tech it will take over 15 turns just for one level of HD Spike. That technology rate is not much use to me at all.

Anyway, i guess i will have to bunker down behind military starbases or just start over, havn't quite decided yet?

I have begun my new strategy!

I am building military starbases which will reduce my losses, once that is under controll i will then be able to build some fast ships and go and start stealing planets out from under the Korath! But the planets i will be stealing are ones the Korath took from the Thalans!! And hopefully i will be able to steal some techs from the Korath while i am at it and then be able to build some fleets capable of operating away from the military starbases.

A new dismal failure! lol

Got overun again before i can establish any military starbase hardpoints. By the time i realised it was hopeless, i counted the incomming fleets - 19 of them! Talk about overkill!!! lol,  The AI definately didn't want that game to keep going.

Oh well, i'm off to set my race back to Terran.

This will probably me my final update for this thread....

This morning, in the 15 minutes i had at the pc before leaving for work i set up another Terran game and managed to snare a map with a 700 manufacturing and a 300 science bonus on Earth!! Wow!!! but Earth is in a bit of an isolated area with a few less planets than what i would like.... for the most part geography is more important than bonuses, but bonuses tend to level off the overwhealming strength the AI has in the early stages of the game, i think i will stick with it and see what happens?

As for my Arcean game, well i will keep that one saved for when i feel like a serious challenge!

Yeah, they still have first strike as their Super Ability

I'm kinda surprised that that sounds roughly similar to what I tend to run into on tough/painful.  The Krynn, Korath, and Drengin are the overall strongest (in roughly that order), albeit with the Drengin being somewhat dependent on who they're next to and how much momentum they can build up early on.  The Terrans are about as strong as those three, but have always wound up a close - but clear - second behind at least one of the "top three".

The Yor have got to be the most annoying race thanks to their speed limit

Well i thought i have to post again, since the forum is a bit slow lately....

With regard to the new Terran game i decided to play after failing with Arcean.... Did exact same settup as Arcean and dominated the game until i got bored and had to quit because i had no worthy opponent to do battle with!!

So there it is, if i play Arcean, i get horribly left behind until i have to quit, if i play Terran i streal ahead and get bored and have to quit!!!

Really there should not be such great difference between the races like that, there should be 'some' difference, but not that much! The problem is caused by the diplomatic ballance being to hard on the Arceans, and as a result they are effectively banned from tech trading! I will have to wait and see if i can find a mod one day that fixes the ballance of diplomacy so races other than Terran can also trade techs with the AI.

If you build your grand strategy around tech trading, are you not using the basic Terran advantage?

If you want to play a different race with a different intrinsic set of advantages, I would think that you would need to change your grand strategy to better match up to those different advantages.

For example, one of the races (Korx?) has huge trading advantages and get get the trade-based goods early (including Privateer in DA).  It would seem the Korx would use a BC-based strategy of buying what they want.

Some of the other races seem to be structured to attack in early-game wars, the earlier the better.  That is, start attacking and invading even before the Colony Rush is done.  They colonize, you invade.

I am guilty of the same thing.  My preference is to grab a decent bit of space (not more than ~20 - 25 planets), run down the tech tree as I fill my planets, try to keep all the AIs constantly enmeshed in multiple wars among themselves, and only then begin my conquests with my usual victim the first AI unwise enough to declare war on me.  If none declare on me, I determine which will not make an Alliance with me, and go after them.

So, no matter what race I play, I tend to try the same basic approach, but it works best for me as Altairians and I get crushed when I try it as some others on Suicidal.  I have been able to win on a couple levels above Tough playing almost any way - - just research and build and war.

I think tech trading is pretty important to any strategy i use, because at the difficulty level i play at with at least 1 race set to Godlike and the others on Genious, the AI will streak ahead in leaps and bounds. When i get the research rate reports, i'm typically reported to be doing 3 - 5 percent of all the research occuring, even with several planets with research levels up into the thousands!! The AI is a reseach MONSTER on higher difficulty levels. And when i play as Terran, i am usually trading AI techs that are so advanced that in comparison, it makes my own research look like a microbe on a flea, on a dog in a car riding a ferry!

I think tech trading is pretty important to any strategy i use, because at the difficulty level i play at with at least 1 race set to Godlike and the others on Genious, the AI will streak ahead in leaps and bounds. When i get the research rate reports, i'm typically reported to be doing 3 - 5 percent of all the research occuring, even with several planets with research levels up into the thousands!! The AI is a reseach MONSTER on higher difficulty levels. And when i play as Terran, i am usually trading AI techs that are so advanced that in comparison, it makes my own research look like a microbe on a flea, on a dog in a car riding a ferry!

I think tech trading is pretty important to any strategy i use, because at the difficulty level i play at with at least 1 race set to Godlike and the others on Genious, the AI will streak ahead in leaps and bounds. When i get the research rate reports, i'm typically reported to be doing 3 - 5 percent of all the research occuring, even with several planets with research levels up into the thousands!! The AI is a reseach MONSTER on higher difficulty levels. And when i play as Terran, i am usually trading AI techs that are so advanced that in comparison, it makes my own research look like a microbe on a flea, on a dog in a car riding a ferry!

I think tech trading is pretty important to any strategy i use, because at the difficulty level i play at with at least 1 race set to Godlike and the others on Genious, the AI will streak ahead in leaps and bounds. When i get the research rate reports, i'm typically reported to be doing 3 - 5 percent of all the research occuring, even with several planets with research levels up into the thousands!! The AI is a reseach MONSTER on higher difficulty levels. And when i play as Terran, i am usually trading AI techs that are so advanced that in comparison, it makes my own research look like a microbe on a flea, on a dog in a car riding a ferry!

I think tech trading is pretty important to any strategy i use, because at the difficulty level i play at with at least 1 race set to Godlike and the others on Genious, the AI will streak ahead in leaps and bounds. When i get the research rate reports, i'm typically reported to be doing 3 - 5 percent of all the research occuring, even with several planets with research levels up into the thousands!! The AI is a reseach MONSTER on higher difficulty levels. And when i play as Terran, i am usually trading AI techs that are so advanced that in comparison, it makes my own research look like a microbe on a flea, on a dog in a car riding a ferry!

Had a bit of a browser problem resulting in multiple posts?

People manage to beat the game on the highest difficulty levels without using Terrans, so there are other ways of doing it.

Like LTJim said, you have to play to your race's strengths.  Your problem was that you were playing to the Terrans' strengths despite the fact that you were using the Arceans.  Arceans are much better fighters than the Terrans, but you seem to have been trying to play as a diplomat instead of a Super Warrior.  If that's how you play, then that's how you play.  Just don't blame the system when you ignore the tools you have and instead try to use tools that you don't.