Take Planets - It seems simple but there is a tendency to get caught in the moment and get diverted from your goal. You are unlikely to win a galaxy unless you are taking your enemies planets at a faster rate then he is taking yours. When your enemy realizes that they are losing the planet exchange battle they will likely do something stupid. Just make sure it is not you who does something stupid.
Destroying an enemy fleet=good
Chasing an enemy fleet around without accomplishing anything=bad
Be Aggressive - This goes along with taking planets. When you are the aggressor your enemy has to react to you. Assuming relatively equal fleets he has 3 choices:
Follow you, retaking his old planets which are a little worse for wear
Try to take your planets but since you have a headstart he is at a disadvantage
Try to engage your fleet
Don’t Cry Over Spilled Milk - Unless you completely outclass your opponents you will have setbacks. Lost planets, lost systems, etc... Do not get so attached to your former planets that you break off a successful attack to retake them. This is fighting defensively and will ultimately reduce your chance to win. You will not only be losing turns in transit but the planets that you retake will have been bombed twice and have less population and structures. Stick to the planets that can do you some good. A side note to this that often when enemies take your planets they will either raze them or build as much defense as possible on them. If your enemy razes the planet retaking it is pointless. If your enemy builds it full of defenses, not only is he wasting his time since you are not retaking the planet but he is losing valuable production time and may even turn the planet into a drain.
Be Unpredictable When you leave a system change directions once you are out of scan range. Don’t telegraph where you will attack next, this just gives your opponent more time to prepare. Don’t always take every planet in the system. If you leave one planet and then move away there is a good chance your opponent will raze the planet. Causing him to hurt himself. Doing things like this will make your opponent less likely to raze planets in the future.
A pretty simple technique which maximizes surprise. Rally your fleet right outside of your enemies scan range either directly above or directly below your target. If your speed is high enough(or if you are cloaked) they may not even detect you coming. Even if they do detect you it should only be for a single turn if you do it right.
If you and your opponent are furiously taking each others planets as fast as you can then this may not be a great idea. If your fleet is much weaker than your opponents then this technique will minimize the time in which your opponent can react. This way you can still do damage with inferior tools. In XP Galaxy 2 Azazel and myself were situated on opposite corners of the galaxy.
This made conventional war nearly impossible due to the extremely long supply lines. He sent a relatively weak fleet against me and used this technique. I was never able to catch him to my eternal costernation. Lets see this in action:
In the last picture you can actually see my defense fleet for what little good it did me. Most of the planets he took rebelled back to me but they were not in what I would call pristine condition.
A way to frustrate your enemy and slow down his progress is to have troop ships waiting around when he conquers one of your planets. Wait until he moves on and quickly retake the planet before he gets a chance to build any defenses. Ideally you will do this on the exact turn he moves away but some risk is involved. He may leave a couple of troop ships to pick up his subduing force which will prevent you from attacking or he may even leave a couple of combat ships to heal which would cause your unarmed troop ships some pain. You have a few options.
You could wait until the planet is clear of ships before moving in. This increases the chance that your enemy will have a chance to build a light turret.
You could have a small offensive force to destroy any stragglers but this is more difficult to coordinate.
If you constantly update your movement commands you can see if he splits his fleet. If he stays in one big fleet you can route scan them at the last second and if your enemy is moving on you can move in for the kill.
Couple of tips. Positioning your troops ships out of your enemies scan range will increase your chances of success since they will have a harder time anticipating this tactic. Once you take the planet back move your troop ships out of harms way. You can leave your troops behind or take them with you as you see fit.
At some point in any long offensive resupply is needed. The most common way to do this is to have admirals auto-route ships towards your main fleet. This has the effect of creating chains of ships.
While these long lines of ships can seem quite intimidating they are actually very vulnerable. Small fleets of fighter ships can be inserted along these supply lines far away from any nearby support and can proceed to eliminate these ships one by one. Against an unattentive enemy you can end up destroying large numbers of ships. This tactic was performed on me with great effect back in Beta Galaxy 13 by Astax2. I had to go away for the weekend and I had supply lines set up to feed my main fleet. When I got back from my weekend trip I had a large number of battle reports and a much smaller than anticipated fleet.
Here you can see the long list of battle reports. They keep going in case you were curious.
Its generally a good idea to keep all of your combat ships of the same type(either light or heavy). To demonstrate lets take a look at the combat report from the reverse engineering page.
I modified it so now it includes the tool tip that tells you how many of the bottom players ships were killed. I included this to make a point. The next turn the bottom player left the planet even though he had clearly won the battle. Why is that? Because he lost all of his bombing firepower. This is because all of his bombing firepower was light ships and all of his ship-to-ship firepower was heavy. This meant his bomber ships received the full brunt of the light firepower instead of sharing the damage with his other ships. Since heavy ships receive 50% of light firepower and light ships receive 50% of heavy firepower it is generally a better idea to go with all light or all heavy. This way you will mitigate at least a portion of the other players firepower. If you include both types of ships you end up receiving 100% of both types of firepower.
This guide has been created by uncountednose. See the forum contact information.
