Blitz Journal #1 (Early game strategy for EASY wins)
Jun 26, 2014 21:54:50 GMT -5
lixxx235 and Officer Genious like this
Post by JayTS on Jun 26, 2014 21:54:50 GMT -5
Hey guys!
So from my previous games, I realised that it gets harder if the alien has too many planets, the game becomes near impossible to win. One of the reasons for this is that, Alien planets would always develop faster than you (their population grows super fast and therefore their exp, CP, money will all grows. But what if you somehow suppress them early on? Well this is my story on how I overcame them in normal difficulty game. So my map was 32 x 64 map with 44 worlds with 1 alien. So I spawned North West corner, and the aliens spawned at South East East.
Here is what I did:
Turn 1-5: Planted De Valtos and Syndicate Rychart colony ships on big red planets. (Red planets have the best material stats and for your first ever planets, you will always have 18 quality on Easy difficulty and 17 for Normal, assuming with the same pattern, harder difficulties will give you lower starting quality on your first planets.)
Took my Cadar Syndicate ship with two templar defenders and moved far south. Once I saw some alien ships, I knew that they were really close; I planted my ship on a red planet right next to another alien world. This will serve as my main base. I built only a hab facility + factory on the Home planet.
Turn 5-10: By now I had finished my first research, so I research starship constructions 1 next so that I can mass produce colony ships. I used my explorer to explore for bonuses. Use your templer ships to scout for enemy colony ships, they will appear as early as turn 5. The more you stop their progress now, the easier it will be for you.
Turn 10-30: Due to Cadar’s CP bonus, I built twice as much as Cadar colony ships than the other two factions, but this is necessary because you need to deadlock and occupy all the planets around the alien home worlds. From now on, the alien only had 6 planets and therefore their growth is limited. Carry on killing Alien colony ships with my 2 templar ships and explorer. Remember to refuel and repair. I only had to go outside of my refuelling area to hunt for colony ships and to explore the fog of war. Always keep an eye on all of the alien world. The areas where the fog of war has been explored diminishes over a span of 5 turns (I think).
Turn 30-80: By now I had 8 Cadar planets, 6 De Valtos and 5 Rychart. The alien still had 6 planets. They are still below level 10 and their population is at 60 cap. They launched their first massive attack but I defended easily with help of two extra strike ships. I replaced the weapons on those canned ships to improve their deadliness. I demolished 1 striker to increase income.
Turn 80-100: First world killer appeared, so I focused on killing them. No world killers, no value for their offence. I built another 3 strike ships and it seemed to be sufficient. I continue to expand my colonies with colony-3 ships. (They are good but not worth the long research time, price and cp cost. I would rather ).
Turn 100-150: Got my own planetary ships and slowly killing their planets. My economy generates 800 incomes while still maintaining my fleet. The game feels more relaxed and it doesn’t feel the aliens are cheating. The aliens stop making as many ships. Easy Win.
Image of my planetary siege on the alien worlds!
TIPS:
1. Search and find alien home worlds. Colony Cadar close to their planet and use it as your offensive base.
2. Patrol and destroy any colony ships that you see. Build an extra strike fighter or two to increase your fighting power.
3. Enclose the alien worlds by colony all the planets around them using Cadar faction.
4. Mass produce colony ships for other factions to fill in all the gaps between your side and the aliens.
5. An idled and undeveloped De Valtos planet will generate lots of income (just hope they don’t increase their population too fast).
6. Build factory first as your first upgrade, this will be more helpful. Try to subsidise the factory so it has 8/25 from the beginning. This will save you 8 turns. Just hope your population does not become 3/2 before you finish the factory. The best scenario is to have 2/2 so you can utilise 2 CP.
7. Strike fighters are your best friends, they are useful, fast to build, and cheap to maintain. They don’t have armor and they are quite easy to get damaged but they do the job to kill enemy ships. Swap out the basic weapon with weapons from “Fighter 3” research. Quantity beats quality in early games and it doesn’t cripple your economy as much. After defending, you can demolish the strike fighters to increase your income.
Observation:
From this playthrough, I found several observations that could be very frustrating:</font>
A. Stupid population growth, too random and no control. My Rift Tradeworld under De Valtos faction has 7 populations, it grew to 3 population before I even had my first building finished. It continued to grow rapidly and forced me to maintain the planet rather than trying to make money off it. This becomes frustrating because I could not build any mines and it generates a negative income. On the other side, my De Valtos Prime stayed at 3 population throughout my game, it becomes an useless planet because it’s CP is too small to build anything big.
Suggestion: Some sort of less randomized population growth algorithm, or add a population control that the player can strategize.
B. Factory requires too much CP. This is the most important building, without the time consuming and expensive Colony-3 ship, all of your new planets will have to build stuff with 1CP. 25 CP is just high of a cost, your planet cannot do anything for 25 turns and if you want to build anything before that, it is just not efficient enough. Sometimes, before I even finished the factory, I would have a population of 4/3; this decreases my morale and makes my new planet a useless piece of parasite that sucks my money from my economy.
Suggestion: Decrease the CP cost for the Factory 1 to 20 CP. Or decrease the cost for the first Faction 1 to 15CP. Or create a “Sub Factory” that only generates 1CP for 1 population for 10CP.
C. Maintenance cost too high for some items.
Spice Den – requires $20 per turn, this upgrade is the most important for new planets, however if you don’t have Palace or Spice Den 2 or Spaceport 4, you will have to build a second expensive Spice Den. I know it is justifiable to charge for the cost of spice and +1 research point, but I really find this really expensive to maintain if you consider that you have to build one for every planet.
Suggestion: Decrease the cost to $15 per turn and increase the upfront cost to $250.
Armor of ships - Why do I have to maintain my armor when it is completely undamaged? Some armor adds some really nice bonuses but for now I do not think it is worth the price. E.g. a Duranium Plating 2 will provide 13 armor but it costs an extra 24CP, $256 and $32 per turn. I understand the logic that expensive upgrades requires more maintenance however it becomes ridiculous to pay $150-$200 per turn to maintain the ship when instead you could remove that armor to increase your daily income.
Suggestion: I know I’m complaining about the maintenance cost and it is one of the tactics of this game, however why don’t you make that you would only trigger the maintenance cost of armor when the hull is not above 80%? This would make more sense and it doesn’t drain your income every turn when you don’t even need the ships to fight.
D. All ships require weapons. What if I want to make a utility ship? I don’t want to have any weapons so that I could to use it completely as a repair ship or refuel ship. The weapon unnecessarily increases the mass and maintenance cost.
Suggestion: Make it not compulsory to include weapons but include a warning message to state that there are no weapons onboard.
E. Invasion. I know my gears are mid-game level. I used Heavy Drop Pods, Heavy Assault Brigade with 11 points on Invasion for my Captain. The planet I was invading only has 50 defence and 8 radiation. But I only receive 50% successful rate.
Suggestion: Can you state the success rate for invasion? At least I know what to expect.
Bug: When I received a message for bombardment, it states that there was no quality loss but in actual fact, there was a -1 in quality for the planet. I think there is a text bug.
F. Alien Population. During my gameplay, the alien population does not add up. While invading an alien world, it states that they have 20 populations each on 6 planets but on alien summary sheet, it only says 60 populations. I know that the effective population does decrease by every 2 planet populations.
Suggestion: Either match the population with the summary page or reduce the populations on the planet to 10/10.
So from my previous games, I realised that it gets harder if the alien has too many planets, the game becomes near impossible to win. One of the reasons for this is that, Alien planets would always develop faster than you (their population grows super fast and therefore their exp, CP, money will all grows. But what if you somehow suppress them early on? Well this is my story on how I overcame them in normal difficulty game. So my map was 32 x 64 map with 44 worlds with 1 alien. So I spawned North West corner, and the aliens spawned at South East East.
Here is what I did:
Turn 1-5: Planted De Valtos and Syndicate Rychart colony ships on big red planets. (Red planets have the best material stats and for your first ever planets, you will always have 18 quality on Easy difficulty and 17 for Normal, assuming with the same pattern, harder difficulties will give you lower starting quality on your first planets.)
Took my Cadar Syndicate ship with two templar defenders and moved far south. Once I saw some alien ships, I knew that they were really close; I planted my ship on a red planet right next to another alien world. This will serve as my main base. I built only a hab facility + factory on the Home planet.
Turn 5-10: By now I had finished my first research, so I research starship constructions 1 next so that I can mass produce colony ships. I used my explorer to explore for bonuses. Use your templer ships to scout for enemy colony ships, they will appear as early as turn 5. The more you stop their progress now, the easier it will be for you.
Turn 10-30: Due to Cadar’s CP bonus, I built twice as much as Cadar colony ships than the other two factions, but this is necessary because you need to deadlock and occupy all the planets around the alien home worlds. From now on, the alien only had 6 planets and therefore their growth is limited. Carry on killing Alien colony ships with my 2 templar ships and explorer. Remember to refuel and repair. I only had to go outside of my refuelling area to hunt for colony ships and to explore the fog of war. Always keep an eye on all of the alien world. The areas where the fog of war has been explored diminishes over a span of 5 turns (I think).
Turn 30-80: By now I had 8 Cadar planets, 6 De Valtos and 5 Rychart. The alien still had 6 planets. They are still below level 10 and their population is at 60 cap. They launched their first massive attack but I defended easily with help of two extra strike ships. I replaced the weapons on those canned ships to improve their deadliness. I demolished 1 striker to increase income.
Turn 80-100: First world killer appeared, so I focused on killing them. No world killers, no value for their offence. I built another 3 strike ships and it seemed to be sufficient. I continue to expand my colonies with colony-3 ships. (They are good but not worth the long research time, price and cp cost. I would rather ).
Turn 100-150: Got my own planetary ships and slowly killing their planets. My economy generates 800 incomes while still maintaining my fleet. The game feels more relaxed and it doesn’t feel the aliens are cheating. The aliens stop making as many ships. Easy Win.
Image of my planetary siege on the alien worlds!
TIPS:
1. Search and find alien home worlds. Colony Cadar close to their planet and use it as your offensive base.
2. Patrol and destroy any colony ships that you see. Build an extra strike fighter or two to increase your fighting power.
3. Enclose the alien worlds by colony all the planets around them using Cadar faction.
4. Mass produce colony ships for other factions to fill in all the gaps between your side and the aliens.
5. An idled and undeveloped De Valtos planet will generate lots of income (just hope they don’t increase their population too fast).
6. Build factory first as your first upgrade, this will be more helpful. Try to subsidise the factory so it has 8/25 from the beginning. This will save you 8 turns. Just hope your population does not become 3/2 before you finish the factory. The best scenario is to have 2/2 so you can utilise 2 CP.
7. Strike fighters are your best friends, they are useful, fast to build, and cheap to maintain. They don’t have armor and they are quite easy to get damaged but they do the job to kill enemy ships. Swap out the basic weapon with weapons from “Fighter 3” research. Quantity beats quality in early games and it doesn’t cripple your economy as much. After defending, you can demolish the strike fighters to increase your income.
Observation:
From this playthrough, I found several observations that could be very frustrating:</font>
A. Stupid population growth, too random and no control. My Rift Tradeworld under De Valtos faction has 7 populations, it grew to 3 population before I even had my first building finished. It continued to grow rapidly and forced me to maintain the planet rather than trying to make money off it. This becomes frustrating because I could not build any mines and it generates a negative income. On the other side, my De Valtos Prime stayed at 3 population throughout my game, it becomes an useless planet because it’s CP is too small to build anything big.
Suggestion: Some sort of less randomized population growth algorithm, or add a population control that the player can strategize.
B. Factory requires too much CP. This is the most important building, without the time consuming and expensive Colony-3 ship, all of your new planets will have to build stuff with 1CP. 25 CP is just high of a cost, your planet cannot do anything for 25 turns and if you want to build anything before that, it is just not efficient enough. Sometimes, before I even finished the factory, I would have a population of 4/3; this decreases my morale and makes my new planet a useless piece of parasite that sucks my money from my economy.
Suggestion: Decrease the CP cost for the Factory 1 to 20 CP. Or decrease the cost for the first Faction 1 to 15CP. Or create a “Sub Factory” that only generates 1CP for 1 population for 10CP.
C. Maintenance cost too high for some items.
Spice Den – requires $20 per turn, this upgrade is the most important for new planets, however if you don’t have Palace or Spice Den 2 or Spaceport 4, you will have to build a second expensive Spice Den. I know it is justifiable to charge for the cost of spice and +1 research point, but I really find this really expensive to maintain if you consider that you have to build one for every planet.
Suggestion: Decrease the cost to $15 per turn and increase the upfront cost to $250.
Armor of ships - Why do I have to maintain my armor when it is completely undamaged? Some armor adds some really nice bonuses but for now I do not think it is worth the price. E.g. a Duranium Plating 2 will provide 13 armor but it costs an extra 24CP, $256 and $32 per turn. I understand the logic that expensive upgrades requires more maintenance however it becomes ridiculous to pay $150-$200 per turn to maintain the ship when instead you could remove that armor to increase your daily income.
Suggestion: I know I’m complaining about the maintenance cost and it is one of the tactics of this game, however why don’t you make that you would only trigger the maintenance cost of armor when the hull is not above 80%? This would make more sense and it doesn’t drain your income every turn when you don’t even need the ships to fight.
D. All ships require weapons. What if I want to make a utility ship? I don’t want to have any weapons so that I could to use it completely as a repair ship or refuel ship. The weapon unnecessarily increases the mass and maintenance cost.
Suggestion: Make it not compulsory to include weapons but include a warning message to state that there are no weapons onboard.
E. Invasion. I know my gears are mid-game level. I used Heavy Drop Pods, Heavy Assault Brigade with 11 points on Invasion for my Captain. The planet I was invading only has 50 defence and 8 radiation. But I only receive 50% successful rate.
Suggestion: Can you state the success rate for invasion? At least I know what to expect.
Bug: When I received a message for bombardment, it states that there was no quality loss but in actual fact, there was a -1 in quality for the planet. I think there is a text bug.
F. Alien Population. During my gameplay, the alien population does not add up. While invading an alien world, it states that they have 20 populations each on 6 planets but on alien summary sheet, it only says 60 populations. I know that the effective population does decrease by every 2 planet populations.
Suggestion: Either match the population with the summary page or reduce the populations on the planet to 10/10.
.