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[Shadowgandor]

Holy f***ing God. I recently started playing this game again and I was going pretty well as the Hivers. My empire was expanding quite well and my technology  was pretty good.
Suddenly, I got the message that an unknown fleet was detected. I couldn't see its trajectory but it seemed to be moving towards a Size 3 planet of mine. It looked like a spiky ball.
I decided to send a Dreadnought or 2 plus half of my old conqueror cruiser fleet (about 30 cruisers) to that planet to welcome the big ball of impending doom.
After a few turns, it had finally arrived and I was really curious what this big ball of impending doom was capable of. Lets just say it was a LOT more capable then I could ever have guessed.
A couple of my cruisers were specifically designed to destroy drones with Point Defense and when I say that this big ball of doom was called 'The Locust', I smiled at the thought of slaughtering those bugs....Boy was I wrong.

Literally HUNDREDS of little triangle shaped drones came within sensor reach and had overrun my first line of defense within 20 seconds and one minute later, my satellites had been wrecked as well. Another 30 seconds and my planet was devoid of life. This was when I saw the FleetHome on my screen, the big ball of impending doom. I figured I should focus all my fire on it but I hardly seemed to scratch it.

Needless to say, I lost that battle. All my ships, satellites and all my inhabitants were gone in 1 turn.

I let my 20 or so planets start working on Dreadnoughts equipped with lasers (to deal with the drones) and missiles (to fire at the FleetHome) so that I could brace myself for another attack. Heh.
After 2 turns: 'An unknown fleet has been detected!'. Big ball of doom heading towards a size 6 planet. I immediately build a constructor so that I could build a Command Station. One turn later: 'An unknown fleet has been detected!'. WHAT!? A second ball of doom was heading towards another planet of mine.
I decided to let that planet fend of for itself while all my forces were going to reinforce the other. When The Locust had finally arrived, I had about 10 Dreadnoughts, 20 cruisers and 20 destroyers. The planet had LD and MD sats and a Command Station.

...FOR NZIJAL!

2 turns later and both my planets were lost. My whole fleet destroyed while that...ball didn't even get a scratch.

I abandoned that game after that turn. Oh how I long for revenge against that thing

[forsaken1111]

Mmm... the locusts. Yeah they're Fun.

They consume the resources on the worlds they wipe out, and when they get to a certain number they multiply.

[Shadowgandor]

Yea and luckily for me, they multiplied when they consumed my planet. An A.I. player had died a few turns before he arrived. I wouldn't be surprised if it was because of the Locust

[forsaken1111]

Yea and luckily for me, they multiplied when they consumed my planet. An A.I. player had died a few turns before he arrived. I wouldn't be surprised if it was because of the Locust

Best way I've found to fight them is point defense phasers to take out the tiny craft and heavy antimatter cannons for the 'world' itself.

They're one of the cooler galactic specials in the game.

[Zai]

Locust

Heh. Those can be difficult. In one game as Liir, I barely won my second battle (in open space) with it in which I had a few Dreadnoughts and several Cruisers.

They are indeed quite Fun. =P

[yamo]

Will it be set in the SotS universe?  That would be pretty cool.  The games have a great backstory, but no actual ingame plot other than what you imagine yourself.  With a smaller scale they could possibly get in to this finally.  I remember Malfador Machinations doing something like that once with Space Empires.  Don't know how that turned out though.

It would be cool if on the same server some players are playing the 4x game and some are playing the privateer game...asymetrical mmop

[Antioch]

locusts are the weakest grand menace >_> just have an entire first wave of point defence cruisers (even laser pd works) and then send in the blazers/torpedo's to kill the ball itself

[forsaken1111]

locusts are the weakest grand menace >_> just have an entire first wave of point defence cruisers (even laser pd works) and then send in the blazers/torpedo's to kill the ball itself

Have you actually tried this? Because I have, and it didn't work quite that easily.

[Pnx]

Never encountered locusts... but what do you do when you can't get point defence?

[forsaken1111]

Never encountered locusts... but what do you do when you can't get point defence?

You pray.

More seriously, you try for PD phasers. If you also don't get that, you could just slap on as much accurate weaponry as you can and hope. I beat them once with a combination of PD phaser PD cruisers and dreadnaught heavy hitters. The second time I encountered them was late-game and I had some very strong shielded cruisers which did the trick.

[Lightning4]

Locusts can be plain EVIL if they settle over in some weak AI empire. Before you know it, your galaxy will be overrun with them.
I had one game where there were tons of spiky doom balls roaming around. I think I eventually pushed them back, but they basically consumed half the galaxy of its resources, including my own worlds.

Another fun one:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Puppet master. Especially if it hits a Zuul empire. An AI Rebellion Zuul is a terrifying thing to behold if you allow it to grow unchecked, or don't even know it's growing. You thought the Zuul were zerg-y before?

I've had this happen a bunch of times to Zuul. I abandoned most of those saves. It was so bad that I lost as Hivers who controlled the majority of the galaxy. They just simply washed over me like I was nothing. For every ship of theirs I destroyed, two took its place.

[Djohaal]

For tech tree woes I'd advise this mod. It unlocks all techs but keeps them somewhat balanced by adding weighted costs to the more difficult to get ones.

http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=17910

Going through my first playthrough with it, so far so good

[forsaken1111]

I actually enjoyed the variable tech tree a lot, especially in multiplayer. It makes it next to impossible to develop a tech strategy because you never know what links you will have. It also allows for some rare techs to drastically change the game. I remember once I was Hivers fighting my friend who was playing Tarkas at the time. I was defending heavily, but steadily losing worlds as he was much more technologically advanced than me. His ships used a mixture of heavy kinetic weapons and missiles.

Then I unlocked gravity shields.

For those that don't know, gravity shields completely negate kinetic weapons and missiles.

Wow was that first battle with my new shielded cruisers a surprise for him! The only weapons that could hurt my ships were the small pulse phasers he put on a few of his light mounts. I only had a handful of those cruisers because they were expensive as hell, but I never lost a one as I pushed him back and he scrambled to develop some of the neglected energy weapon tech.

[Djohaal]

The big catch with the random tech tree (and my pet peeve) is that it's randomness is a bit unpredictable sometimes. If you are unlucky you'll end on the bad side of the gauss curve and get fewer overall techs, and perhaps lamer ones. One of my games went downhill because of that.

On other news on my latest game I triggered a grav trap. The portal was caught in it and started to spin wildly off control.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Aaaaand the hivers of the spinning gate survived. They must be reeeally lucky. On other news the interior of the ship is covered in hiver vomit and chopped body parts, as it span around at over 30 RPM....

[Zai]

The big catch with the random tech tree (and my pet peeve) is that it's randomness is a bit unpredictable sometimes. If you are unlucky you'll end on the bad side of the gauss curve and get fewer overall techs, and perhaps lamer ones. One of my games went downhill because of that.

You can always mod the tech tree percentages so that whatever you're playing as has all applicable techs (no Ramscoops for non-Hivers), or download such a mod. Or mod the tech tree percentages to whatever you personally feel like it should be for each race.