Fight Dirty?

[Grandpa Kim]

Does he have ships or bases with space yard components on them? If so, steal one of those. Then use the space yard to deconstruct and analyze on the spot! This works, but I don't know if this happens at the beginning of the turn before any combats or at the end so best move it to a vacant sector first.

[Pooka]

Originally posted by Ragnarok:
Here is a tip I don't know if you thought of it yet.
When you capture his high tech ships with your intel projects, take those ships back home and analyze them. You will gain a level in ship construction for free basically this way. If you do this 2 or 3 times, you will have Dreads as well floating around.

Yeah, that was the original plan, but I can't get through the warp-point. He's camping it with 40+ ships. (Mostly destroyers and BCs) I've been hitting his newest, biggest ships with intel and all that does is get them very dead, very quickly. I know he's starting to get frustrated by this and simulator gives me about 70% chance to win if he throws everything at me. (I have a truly insane number of sats on the warp point, plus my own fleet.)

I tried grabbing his shipyard ship to do deconstruct/analysis in the field but I can even run away he just hoses me before the ships get one square of moment.

[Pooka]

Originally posted by Gwaihir:
Sounds like the only WPS in and out are guarded pretty heavily, so that probably won't work too well. Unless he can get one of the blockading ships, and newly acquired ships don't engage on the first turn.

I'm grabbing his blockading ships, he's killing them before they can get movement.

[Pooka]

Originally posted by Taera:
Im not an expert and have little experience in PBW but...

scanners are annoying and if he is the way you describe him he prolly has none.
Remember that Stealth armor gives you cloaking.
Dont send in a fleet - send in hunter ships that would pick on colonies and lone ships. Find his central production sites and plague them (not useful this time tho as it seems). Also find his mining colonies and rad-bomb them. If you need to take on a planet remember to bring in some planetary napalms, they're quite useful.

Vary your tactic - once try on with a lot of fighters and missile cruisers, then when he gets PDC go in with some direct-fire weapons.

For warp-point combat consider the Graviton Hellbore weapon. though many might jump on me here nothing compares with it in a single-shot.
Either that, or ripper beams.
SHield depleters, dont forget these.
And hopefully you do have ID's.

Part of fighting dirty is exploting those special weapons. Some are economically taxing though.

You're psychic? Why arent you using your psychic weapons then? they're some of the best in the game. having cruisers armed with psychic weapons can bring you a couple of victories.

Okay, one of my friends is helping him build ships so he is using PDCs, but not enough of them. I throw fighters, CapMissles and about 30+ swift little DU5 frigates at him in the simulator and they do very well. Haven't tested the new dread designs in the field though. Now that he just blew up the BC I captured I have their designs too. (That's always a nice side effect, steal a ship, kill it, and get his latest in ship designs.)

Sensors he doesn't use, that much I'm certain of. Certainly not scanners. How exactly does cloaking/stealth armor work? This is a very confusing point to me. It's not very well explained. All it seems to do is make me 5% harder to hit. Who cares?

[Pooka]

Originally posted by Xaren Hypr:
Psychic, hmmmm...well, unless he's gone to using exclusively Master Comps, the Alleigence Subvertor would probably do wonders against his ships. And most probably if he's as new to this as you say, he probably hasn't....but then again, I don't know him so I could be wrong.

Really? I've been reading these forums for a while and Alleigance converters seem to take a lot of flak for being useless guns. I suppose I could start trying them out and see how it goes. I've been racing up the intel path though and that takes a lot of RP. I've got stealth armor next on the queue and am looking for project ideas for next. Ripper beams sound easy to get. He does not use Master comps. Atleast not enough to worry me.

[Pooka]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Sounds like you've got some good suggestions already, but I wanted to point out one thing.

quote:

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Originally posted by Pooka:
What's more, he doesn't group his ships into fleets, he just leaves them in a big stack. He's camping the warp point, as am I, but I'm doing so with intent to build Psychic academies and such and build up a fleet of small, high-potency ships to work him over with.

This is very unlikely. More likely he is using fleets, you just don't know it. You cannot see if another person is using fleets or not. From your perspective the other persons fleet just looks like a stack of ships. Even with allies you cannot see another players fleets, only the individual ships in the fleet.

Geoschmo

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Hmmm. Point. Is there any way to discern if they're in a fleet? Intel project of some kind? I doubt he's using fleets, I don't think he knows how to. If he /is/ it's because the guy helping him pointed it out. But the guy helping him doesn't know what he's doing with fleets either. (He always uses Optimal Range/Arrowhead)

[Pooka]

Originally posted by Grandpa Kim:
Does he have ships or bases with space yard components on them? If so, steal one of those. Then use the space yard to deconstruct and analyze on the spot! This works, but I don't know if this happens at the beginning of the turn before any combats or at the end so best move it to a vacant sector first.

I've tried moving a sector away, doesn't work. Before the ship can move it just gets gunned down.

[oleg]

Useless AS ???? For God sake, refit your small ships with AS and get all his Dreads for free Once he swith to MC, give virus to every your ship and replace AS with TK !!! If he is really newb, he is a toast.

[Loser]

Originally posted by oleg:
Useless AS ???? For God sake, refit your small ships with AS and get all his Dreads for free Once he swith to MC, give virus to every your ship and replace AS with TK !!! If he is really newb, he is a toast.

Yeah, that isn't even dirty, that's just the way it is.

Allegiance Converters could turn this tide for you if he doesn't have Master Controls on all his ships. You have their designs, you're sure to know, now.

AS Frigates are mean. What a mess that will make.

And if he is all about the MC, then throw the virus at him.... crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside.

BTW, a MC ship with busted MC is just a floating hulk, right? It cannot be captured or anything else cool that you can do to a floating hulk either... can it?

[Ruatha]

I LOVE the AS.
If you have drones, make AS drones en masse!
Now you can move them back through a wormhole after theyve been used and pick them up again with a drone launch ship and reuse them.
Bus ususally I make ordinary ships with ordinary weapons and one AS. When you're up against some other psychic race and get lucky you can convert his entire fleet in an convert cascade!
(Capture a ship with a converter - that ship captures a ship with a converter....and so on, if you have better offensive/defensive values than the enemy!)

A MC hulk can be capturd with troops, repaired with a shipyard ship and put to use.

[ May 05, 2003, 19:16: Message edited by: Ruatha ]