I had a fun little war last night in my current Quameno game. I had just recently gotten hyperdrives, was still busy upgrading my ships, and had just landed troops on a very small, populated world when a small Gizurean empire declared war on me. At that point I had 3 colonies in my home system, plus 2 very infant colonies in other systems, a few out system mining bases, and a main fleet of about 5 frigates and 5 destroyers. He only had his homeworld, some outlying mining bases, plus a main fleet of about 11 ships, mostly escorts and frigates. Unfortunately at the start of the war I had really bad intel on him so I only knew of one system where he had influence and didn’t know the exact location of any of his assets, so one of the first things I did was send an intel mission to get his territory map.
When the war started my fleet had just captured that colony and so was completely out of position to defend my main systems, but luckily I had a good amount of orbital defenses at my homeworld, so the enemy was forced to just harass me and raid my out system mining bases. Once I got my fleet back to base and regrouped I had no sign of the enemy fleet, so I sent my fleet in the direction of his worlds to start looking around for his homeworld and some raiding targets.
I had just found a few mining bases and destroyed them when I got reports that the enemy fleet had appeared in orbit of the colony I had earlier captured. Good for me I had left 10 divisions of troops to garrison the planet and had also built a planetary defense unit there to help with the constant pirate raids. The enemy first landed a small force of only two divisions, but that was just the first ship reaching the planet a little early. Thankfully I was able to surround and destroy those two divisions just before the main body of troops dropped. Their main force was about 8 divisions of green Gizurean infantry led by a general. I slightly out firepowered him on the planet, but only by a bit. I also had a +10% planetary defense bonus, plus a beefy +50% for my advanced ground combat technologies, while he had space control for the time being.
It was a fairly long fight that I was slowly winning until a small pirate fleet jumped into orbit for a raid. The Gizureans didn’t have the taste for a fight so pulled their fleet back which took away their troops space control bonus. That left their lines in tatters and allowed my troops to finally finish them off. So in addition to killing off a general and a lot of their infantry, I also now had a good corp of 10 veteran divisions for my eventual offensive.
The only other key engagement of the war came later. I had found his home system and had started raiding mines when he decided to do the same to me. The only difference was I took a look at the massive defenses of his homeworld and wisely decided to stay away, while he decided to send his ships in to raid my homeworld. His move wasn’t quite as crazy as it seemed at first. His fleet was led by a pretty powerful ancient destroyer and it jumped in ahead of his main fleet and got the attention of some of the 200 missile batteries I had over my homeworld, but it’s massive shielding let it absorb most of my firepower. That let the rest of his ships follow behind and start engaging my stations in close. In the end I lost one orbital battery and had another severely damaged, but once I finally managed to bring down the shields of his flagship it fell pretty quickly to a few more missile barrages and then it was open season on the rest of his ships.
At that stage I started getting hit with more waves of pirate raiders and so had to pull back my fleet to the home system to protect my infant colonies there and protect my constructors as they rebuilt some of the damage the Gizureans managed to inflict. The war with the Gizureans is technically still going on, but my raids seriously damaged their economy, and I completely crippled their fleet, so I haven’t bothered to finish them off yet. That and I don’t have the resources at the moment to build the type of fleet it would take to break the defenses on their homeworld. :P
This game just keeps getting closer and closer to perfect with each release. In particular the new ground combat mechanics and rebalanced economy are major improvements to how the game plays. Can’t wait for them to get the pirate mechanics polished up a bit, but the changes to the base game should be enough to keep me entertained for a while.
