Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Shadowlord]

who cares when a fleet of cruisers can glass a planet in a minute or two?

I'd love to know how you do that. When I play Liir, it takes me ~20+ turns to wipe out all the Zuul on a planet just using bombardment, even if I'm disregarding the climate and letting the planet be glassed. (Of course, I never research projectile weapons, so perhaps that's the problem)

By the time my cruisers reach the planet, there's only 10 or so seconds (depending on ship speed) left in the combat, so I have to attack it over and over and over to amass a decent amount of damage to it. I can get a bit more time by changing the section types to one that's faster, but has less powerful weapons, but... eh. Frakking slow cruisers. Of course, this is on a map which has everything at the minimum distance, so it may be making Liir even slower than usual. I'm not sure.

(And yet I have to play each battle. If I use the autoresolve it goes LULZ YOU LOSE SHIPS even though I never do in the actual battles that I manually play. Autoresolve hates Liir. >_<)

[Orb]

Obviously you haven't played Zuul much.

The Zuul main advantage is, of course, overharvest and fast population growth. With about a loss of 200 resources to jump start a colony, you can have double, or even triple, the number of colonies of your opponents easily(something that I achieved frequently when playing against human opponents). Climate 400 colony? Big deal, you'll have it down to size in 10 turns.

With so many planets, it doesn't matter that you don't have a civilian population, your income will still be higher than everyone else's.  This ignores the fact that Zuul start with 2 planets instead of 1, and that they get a freaking NODE CANNON at cruiser stage, which you should look up. Most OP weapon ever. 

Their jump system also allows them to create human node lines between any two planets, the best of any of the drive systems, for the most part. Exploration is a bit slow, but you can strike at any planet from any direction fast.

I could go on, like how their satellites and destroyers get 2 medium turrets, and have the fastest ships in the game, but I think you get the idea.

[BurnedToast]

Shadowlord - of course I mean a minute or two of bombardment AFTER you clear out the enemy fleets defending (which yes, could take 20+ turns sometimes). That's no different from bioweapons, since it's almost impossible to 'sneak' some bioweapons past the defenders - EVERYTHING targets those missiles as priority #1, the missiles can be blown up while still attached to the cruiser, they go slow, and if one missile in each 'bunch' blows up chances are it takes them all out.

As for environmental damage, honestly just don't use missiles - missiles (especially antimatter) will literally glass the planet and make it uninhabitable, but all the other guns are not so bad unless the planets start right on the edge (and even then, there's a 50% chance your environmental damage will push it closer to habitable)

And finally liir are just slow in a gravity well (slowest combat speeds iirc) because of their drive system which is probably why you have trouble getting to the planet in time.

Orb - yes you can claim colonies fast, but so can every other race - the AI is bad at colonization, it's not hard to be #1 for colonies unless the sadorandomizer *really* screws you over. Meanwhile you NEED double the colonies since due to civilians each one of their planets counts as at least two of yours (and yours tick down every turn)

Node cannon is overpowered against the AI, yeah I forgot about that. The ship is also extremely expensive (IIRC around half a million spacebucks for the cruiser version if you armor it and give it real guns) though and otherwise mostly useless in a fight and the cannon recharges slow. You could build a fleet of them but you'd be spending... a lot... otherwise it's just good for taking off a chunk of the first wave (after that, they are usually too close to your ships to use it again). I find it's drastically more useful on defense (have them chase a single cannon around the planet while their fleet eats missiles and node cannon blasts every time it recharges) then offense.

As for the FTL system, I hate it and think it's the worst of all FTL systems but I guess that's a matter of opinion. It combines all the bad of the human drive: can't refuel mid-flight (potential major problem early-mid game), have to deal with specters sometimes, can't realistically intercept other races, and can't fly in a straight line wherever they want (which partially negates the speed boost) but does not have the main advantage of the human drive (surprise attacks) because you need to use that stupid slow boreship first.

The ships... yeah. I do like their ships a lot, I don't think it makes up for the terrible strategic state of the race, but cheap fast (though fragile) ships strapped with more guns then you thought possible are lots of fun.

[Daki]

it's almost impossible to 'sneak' some bioweapons past the defenders - EVERYTHING targets those missiles as priority #1, the missiles can be blown up while still attached to the cruiser, they go slow, and if one missile in each 'bunch' blows up chances are it takes them all out.

Use stealth cruisers with bioweapons - the AI most likely won't have good enough sensors to target them,so you can just speed up the battle,hover right beside the planet,and launch all of the biomissles 10-15 seconds prior the end of the battle. Even if he has some defense satelites, there's so many missles fired that almost 80% will hit the planet.

I use such stealth fleets all the time as Liir or Morrigi. All you need is some refinery ships,R&S cruisers,a CnC cruiser to support your assault ships. Before the enemy develops a cure for the plague,it's possible to take out 5-6 worlds(depending on your strategic speed).

[BurnedToast]

In my experience the AI is usually pretty good at including deep scan ships with it's fleets, I've had pretty terrible luck even using cloaking with bioweapons. I do admit I've rarely really bothered researching them though, and don't usually bother researching cloaking either (it just seems unnecessary and more trouble then it's worth).

Regardless, my initial point was that the zuul immunity to bioweapons is not really much of an advantage - the AI rarely uses them to begin with and they NEVER try sneaky stuff like what you mentioned. Fun fact though: I have seen the AI *try* to use bio-weapons against zuul planets... never decided if that was a bug, or the computer being programmed to not meta-game.

[Metalax]

I'm regularly attacked by Liir bioweapons when I play, although they usually fire them at such long range that the only time they ever impact is if I'm going to be loosing the colony anyway.

[timferius]

My biggest issue I seem to have with SOTS, is that the beggining game is rather boring, explore stars, drop colonies, repeat. I haven't actually yet made it to any meaningful interaction with other races...

[Lightning4]

As for the FTL system, I hate it and think it's the worst of all FTL systems but I guess that's a matter of opinion. It combines all the bad of the human drive: can't refuel mid-flight (potential major problem early-mid game), have to deal with specters sometimes, can't realistically intercept other races, and can't fly in a straight line wherever they want (which partially negates the speed boost) but does not have the main advantage of the human drive (surprise attacks) because you need to use that stupid slow boreship first.

Well, Zuul can still have surprise attacks, but are a bit quirkier with it compared to other races. You can still open up paths to other enemy planets to leave them guessing which one is going to be hit. You'll just have to sacrifice a few boreships to get that done. Once the ship arrives, the path is complete, even if it dies.
And then you won't need the boreship again until the path starts collapsing. The early Zuul speed advantage comes into play here.

[nenjin]

One thing this game is seriously lacking is any sort of "Oooh neat!" factor to exploration. It seems like almost no 4x games give stuff that level of attention, and the ones that do like Elemental blow it. I think it has a lot to do with Terraforming. Every designer treats terraforming like it makes every planet the exact same in a "macro" sense. When you're playing a space game, you want the planets themselves to be worth exploring. Planets and celestial bodies with standout, unique features beyond the typical "size, lethality, face indigenous population yes/no...."

I know the goal is to get as far away from micromanagement as possible, but it kind of kills the fun of larger games because every planet quickly gets reduced down to its most salient qualities, either when finding it or after terraforming. I wish more 4x games set planets up so they're each different from each other. This one has volcanoes, this one is a gas giant, this one has killer space bees, this one is made out of crystal, ect.... So boring to just turn each planet into a clone of the ones behind it.

Also, default resource values are way too high in SotS 1. There's like, almost no need to overharvest unless your back is against a wall, hence no reason to really mine. On the one hand, running out of resources no matter how your population is configured would suck. On the other hand, it's almost a meaningless resource. Maybe for the Zuul who get a boost to it, it might be worth it, but max overhavest whacked a few turns off making like 5 cruisers.

[BurnedToast]

Too bad boreships are so expensive (especially for the weak zuul economy) to be sacrificing like that. If you throw even two CR ones away to get a surprise attack, you might as well just have build a second attack fleet (or double sized main fleet) instead.

I guess you could use DE bore ships, but they are so slow slow and short ranged because you can't upgrade them from fission speed, plus you run into the max nodes per star limit easily.

Either way it's hardly a plus point in favor of the zuul FTL drive.

Fake edit: I agree with the exploration bit, MoO3 for all it's many, many, many flaws did terraforming/planet specials pretty well. To terraform red planets to perfect paradise planets required lots of tech deep in the tech tree, and had a maintenance cost to it once it was done - stop paying for the air generators and solar shields and the planet would slowly revert back to the hellhole it used to be. So you'd end up skipping over some planets, then coming back and getting say the yellow 1's after you got some terraform tech, then later when you got more getting the yellow 2's... etc. There were also lots of specials good and bad, some could be removed with terraforming and others could not.. etc. Shame the rest of the game was so poo.

As for SotS resources - that number is not just used to overharvest, it's also used to determine the I/O of a world. A size 5 wold with 10,000 resources will produce MUCH MUCH more I/O (and thus money for you) then the same world with 1,000 resources. So, high resource worlds are VERY important even if you never intend to overharvest.

Real edit: also there's a research midway up the tech tree (after asteroid mining) called mega-strip mining. It lets you overharvest LOTS more per turn, you can overharvest whole fleets out in just a few turns in an emergency. It really, really drains those resources though.

[Lightning4]

One thing this game is seriously lacking is any sort of "Oooh neat!" factor to exploration. It seems like almost no 4x games give stuff that level of attention, and the ones that do like Elemental blow it. I think it has a lot to do with Terraforming. Every designer treats terraforming like it makes every planet the exact same in a "macro" sense. When you're playing a space game, you want the planets themselves to be worth exploring. Planets and celestial bodies with standout, unique features beyond the typical "size, lethality, face indigenous population yes/no...."

I know the goal is to get as far away from micromanagement as possible, but it kind of kills the fun of larger games because every planet quickly gets reduced down to its most salient qualities, either when finding it or after terraforming. I wish more 4x games set planets up so they're each different from each other. This one has volcanoes, this one is a gas giant, this one has killer space bees, this one is made out of crystal, ect.... So boring to just turn each planet into a clone of the ones behind it.

The Space Empires series is probably the closest, since (especially with mods) planets can be pretty unique (beyond flavor text), and there's things to be found in the galaxy. Terraforming is possible but it's a late game tech. Making your planets relatively homogeneous is even more difficult.
Shame SE:V is pretty mediocre without mods. SE:IV is more or less the same, though.

GalCiv2 has a little bit here. Surface differences exist that improve a specific facility placed there, making planets better suited for that need. And there are the hostile-environment worlds. There's neat events that can trigger when you colonize a planet, though these usually affect empire-wide bonuses and might not have a significant impact on the colony.
Though in the end, most of the differences here are superficial.

[lordcooper]

My biggest issue I seem to have with SOTS, is that the beggining game is rather boring, explore stars, drop colonies, repeat. I haven't actually yet made it to any meaningful interaction with other races...

Play smaller maps and/or have more races in the game.

[forsaken1111]

Real edit: also there's a research midway up the tech tree (after asteroid mining) called mega-strip mining. It lets you overharvest LOTS more per turn, you can overharvest whole fleets out in just a few turns in an emergency. It really, really drains those resources though.

It also, as the tech name suggests, lets you mine the shit out of worlds you don't intend to colonize. A fleet of ~20 mining cruisers can strip most worlds in 1-2 turns with that tech.

[Antioch]

Is it possible to bring down disruptor shields?

[Orb]

Is it possible to bring down disruptor shields?

If I remember correctly, disruptor shields don't block any sort of mass driver attack. So just use mass driver ships to shoot through the shield and destroy the projector, which is one of, if the, weakest ship section in the game.