Cheap Fleet Tactics

Is your fleet weak like baby kitten?
Or worse, recently destroyed?
Is your industrial base just not pumping out those big ships fast enough or at all?
Is your research progress slow like molasses?
Would your planet's citizens know what a laser was if they saw one?
Is that Ancient Assimilator mocking you while squating on that juicy planet you want to colonize?

Well, never fear. There are ways around all of these impediments to your dreams of conquest. I have solutions for those times of desperation. I also recommend these things if you feel like being cheap cheap cheap.

The Simple and Cheap

There are some assumptions this advice is built around.

1) The AI tends to fixate on single targets and chases them to the exclusion of all other targets.

2) Remnant AI doesn't always return to its original orbital planet. After combat it orbits the nearest planet.

3) It is possible to capture any ship with ground troops. I use the terms, 'assault ship' and 'troop ship' interchangably in this guide.

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Now for the goals.

What we want to do is

1) deal with the Remnant in the early game, even the Ancient Assimilator.
2) deal with enemy fleets in offensive and defensive operations.
3) do both of the above as cheaply as possible

Dealing with Remnant.
The absolutely cheapest thing is to distract them. Build a small fast unarmed ship. Move this small ship close to the Remnent fleet and get it's attention. Then you run. But not too fast and not in just any direction. You want the fleet to keep chasing you and you want to lead it past a worthless planet so that once you do lose their attention they orbit the worthless planet rather than the planet you want to colonize or grab the anomaly.

In cases where there are no other planets in the system to pull them to then you want to preposition your colony ship or troop ship to rush the target planet as soon as possible after the Remnant fleet is pulled away.

Never fear. The Remnant do not invade or bombard planets.

In fact, having the Remnant in your system even after you colonized a planet in that system can act as a free protector for your new colony. This is cheap in money and a cheap tactic. It is taking advantage of game mechanics and a case could be said it is going against the spirit of the game but it works and I'm not feeling guilty. I like cheap solutions.


Fleet distraction can be used to serve other purposes as well. Pulling away an enemy fleet guarding one of their planets will make it easier to invade that planet with ground troops. The troops only have to deal with missles from the planet on their approach.



Now, lets say we want to deal with a Remnant fleet in a more final way but still keep things as cheap as possible. In that case we use a cheap fleet of fast fighters to distract the Remnant fleet while our assault ships filled with ground troops capture the Remnant fleet one by one.

If you don't know:
Selecting your assault ship and then right clicking on the target ship will cause it to try to capture that target ship, or die trying.

One key thing to keep in mind here, if you want the highest chances of your assault ships capturing enemy ships you need to pull the battle away from the gravity well of a planet. You want your troop ships to warp directly on top of the ship they intend to capture. This is the fastest approach speed possible. The troop ship AI tends to perform this manuever successfully after you tell it what ship to capture.

You do not want your troop ships slowly approaching enemy ships using their sub-light engines. Trying to capture enemy ships in this way just means that your troop ships rarely get close enough to perform a capture. Enemy ships engaged in combat will be constantly turning. Troop ship AI seemingly can't compute a collision course at sub-light speeds while both ships are turning. No 'collision' = no ship capture. Your troop ships will get shot up.

I'm not going to tell you how many troops to use in the capture attempts because dice rolls are pretty random. I have no idea how many you will need.

I've thrown 15 assault ships at troop depleted Ancient Assimilators and used maybe two in the capture with the unused 13 still flying around after the capture. I've also done the same with 8 assault ships on an identically troop depleted Ancient Assimilator and it refused to be captured. It ate all my troops. Random is random.


I just described how to capture a Remnant fleet. Capturing the ships from other civilizations can be even easier. The Remnant can have capital ships at the beginning of the game. The other civs will not. This is good.

The rule is simple. Throw enough troops at a ship and you will capture it.

Good luck.


Note:
I haven't mentioned using ship based troop killing weapons to deplete troop strength on target ships because a premise of this guide is that you don't have any fancy late game techs, or big capital fleets, or big industrial output. You just got fighters and troop ships and an industrial output just large enough to build what you absolutely need.

[Cryogenius333]

Lol using BlackBox and Combined Arms.
This guide does not help for either bahahahaha. But good advice for anyone playing vanilla. This will work.

[Sagara Sousuke]

this guide should be named "how to exploit the AI"

[Shane]

Woah, so a remnant ship woth troops would land on a planet I colonized under them? I havent seen ot happen yet. On bb too

[.113]

the black box mod fixes this issue, having remnant forces land on the ground and wiping out your puny colony.

[rogue_phoenix]

set your assault shuttles to "approach and stop" instead of "flyby," wich is the default for some bizzare reason. Probably works for troop transports as well but I haven't tested that. Took me forever to figure this out, but now I can board ships reliably.