- One of the biggest bitches about someone else declaring war on you early is that you have to scramble for Planetary Invasion and an attack fleet. I like to skimp on engines when it comes to defense, so I often don’t have a strike force ready to go when somebody jumps me. On the bright side, a strong defense CAN deter attack, even if it’s not necessarily suitable for fighting the whole war.
SHIPBUILDING: Four things should dictate your fleet composition and ship production:
I. Production. This is the most important one. Not every world is going to be viable at all as a shipyard. Those that are will vary in output. Powerhouse worlds with precursor factories and shit are more suited to more costly ships, and less productive planets – or ones focused elsewhere – are more able to produce smaller, cheaper craft. This is obvious, I know, but what’s not obvious is making this the first thing you consider. Don’t come up with a magic mix of hull sizes and then try to bend your production to fit unless you have money to burn on ship purchases. There is no hard and fast “small ships or large ships” answer. Produce according to your capabilities.
II. Logistics. Your fleet composition will have to accomodate your logistics limits. Self-explanatory, and often a good reason to avoid going with larger hulls exclusively. If your logistics can support fleets with 1.9 of your biggest ships in them, making only those will seriously hurt you.
III. Technology. You generally want to go with the best stuff, but there will be times to cheap it out. Some things are more vital to research or include than others. Often your defensive fleets can skip engines and support. There are certain ship technologies that are alignment-exlcusive, the most important of these being the Evil weapons. These technologies are very powerful, but also very costly in terms of implementation, so choose wisely. I don’t like to put Psionic Beams on cheap, fragile hulls – for their cost, I want to be able to retreat and repair so I don’t lose my investment. Don’t worry as much about defenses on smaller ships, since they’re more replaceable than survivable.
IV. Your Opponent’s Ships. There is a moderately strong rock-paper-scissors dynamic between the weapons and the defenses. Shields are optimal against beams, armor is optimal against projectiles, and jamming is optimal against missiles. A defense defending against a non-applicable weapon will apply only the square root of its rating against an attack. (This means that the early defenses, with values of 1, are equally good against everything!) Basically, to respond to your opponent’s capabilities, you ideally have defenses over 1 against his primary weapons and are mostly using weapons against which he has no defense. In the early game, these things probably don’t matter very much, since defenses are not very advanced and all similarly effective.
- The Drengin generally have few friends, because they are dicks. I’m not sure other races recognize what invasion techniques you use, even Core Cracking. Depending on the circumstances, some civs may feel threatened by your aggression; others may be impressed by your strength. They started the war, not you, which will help your diplomatic position. The worst diplomatic backlash I ever see is triggered by a civ (often the Torians, the Drengin, or me) invading multiple minors in rapid succession. I think it’s because they’re declaring a war AND wiping out a race, once each per planet.
If you leave a race helpless before you without conquering them right away, they may surrender, probably to somebody else. Then you lose planets you could otherwise have conquered, and often they go to the absolute worst civ possible. (Who the fuck surrenders to the Yor?) With the Drengin only having three planets, it sounds feasible to strip and invade all of them in a very short time frame, possibly a single turn.
