How to fight against aliances

[Veny]

So, first let me thank Paradox for completely taking all fun from this game. I bought it on day 1 when it was actually fun. Now after all the "improvements" were added, it cannot be even played without specific stategies.
Now, after 40 hours of playing, i am propably stuck. After all the time, there are 2 huge aliances on map, that i cannot possibly fight. I managed to get 300k power fleet only to realize my enemy, that has "only" 30 planets, have some powerful friends that have like 1M power combined.
Of course they stormed my border. Of course defense platforms are completely useless against large fleets (60k platform cannot even defeat 60k fleet). Of course they all stick together so i need 1M fleet to fight them (because thanks to the awesome math of this game, 1M fleet fighting 500k fleet would still survive with like 800k power) AND also actually conquer something or war will never end.
Naturally i cannot build large fleet because my resources are limited and there is some really "smart" population anti-growth system so endgame is like "Wait and enemy will get even stronger or hit now and die anyway".

So yea, is there some magical way how to make defense platforms and starbases actually useful? I seem to be unable to edit starbase equipement and def platforms seem to be useful no matter what i put on them.

Also i wonder whether i can boost my population. Clearly there is clone building that does not really help. Production of robots is even slower. Creating more ringworlds makes things even worse.

[yuzhonglu]

You built the wrong fleets. I've used 300k fleet power to beat 1 million fleet power enemies because the AI sucks at using their fleets.

The AI will split its fleets into lots of smaller fleets, so your 300k fleet can destroy multiple 100k fleets without loss.

Download Starnet once its properly updated, set it on GA with non-scaling, and make every other empire genocidal, and learn how to fight enemies with more fleet power.

If they storm your border with 1 million fleet power, don't fight it. Let it through and go behind the main fleet and conquer all their worlds.

[Viscount Danku]

It seems like your mobility is ♥♥♥♥. All chokepoints should be easily accessible via hyperlane network and nearby gateway, contain planerbase FTL inhibitor and, in extreme cases, a full-scale fortress world with garrisons in thousands. That way you can take wg from the enemy while they will be stuck forever, even with superior fleet. And if they divide their forces, you can easily move around via gateways and HR to crash their isolated fleets.

[Eldi]

You can invest plenty in being defensive.
Why not ally with bigger empires?
Ask to be a vassal.


Even in version 1 you needed 'specific' stratergies in some situations.
Keep in mind your play style means to defend against a 1M fleet you need to pay for 1M in each system.

That's why your behind.

I play the same style to be honest, I find playing weak and becoming a vassal or ally to a big empire works well.
Get the tech up, get gates or hyper relays and then you can build up star bases/platforms and still have a mobile fleet to assist. (Fleets will always be able to over power starbases given enough time)

There are other tricks to getting resources but it very much depends on your race/empire.

[Stromko]

Some people here are talking about playing a game out for like, 400 years? .. I just don't think game is intended to be played out much past the initial 200. That may be why they call them 'endgame crisis': Once you've dealt with said crisis, you've dealt with the biggest hairiest problem that galaxy is intended to throw at you, you've overcome the challenge (or not) and can start a new game.

On the other hand if you wait around another hundred years or so and every empire has glomped together into gigantic alliances, researched every repeatable tech to the nth degree, built (or probably just simulated) their economies to absurd powerhouse levels, it can be a much bigger, hairier problem than the game is really intended to give you, and frankly a big headache to deal with.

I would just say, don't do that. If it's happening sooner than that, within the span of a regular game, the best bet may be to reduce the galaxy size and with it the number of empires. The AI is equally capable of handling an empire of any size (long past the patience/sanity of any player), and banding together to zerg the player, so giving them more space and more empires to work with is inherently going to dial up the difficulty.

[Daan-B]

Personally, i find the early game to be difficult and have little trouble with late game. I generally have four to five fleets because of the command limit. Since they're al the exact same composition there speed is equal so i can move them as if one fleet but split them apart at my leisure. (now granted i've only played two games, but i did win them, and my second one wasn't as militarist)

As long as you make a lot of strongholds you'll have plenty of fleet cap and can become the dominant military power (with maybe the exception of the ancient empires) quite easily. If you're really having trouble then you should use starbases, people say their ♥♥♥♥ but their actually quite usefull.

Now don't make the mistake of thinking that starbases are a full defense, but they make for a powerfull supplementary force alongside a fleet and starbases have much lower upkeep then fleets. Having a few defensive fleets in combination with well placed starbases can easily hold of 40-50k fleets (especially if you either take the unyielding tradition or take the defense platform ascensionperk {there are entire builds dedicated to starbases}).

If we're talking late-late game as in jump drives then the enemy can jump over them, But you can also jump to them. Jumping gives some severe debuffs, but if the enemy jumped aswell then jumping into the system they took/are in is no issue so long as you still have the bigger fleet. In addition, if you build hangars on your starbases then you might exclude corvettes from your defensive fleet. Afterburners on defensive fleets can also be really usefull if you're having issues with whack-a-mole scenario's. But by this point gateways will also likely become an option, use the ever loving ♥♥♥♥ out of them.

Early game you want your starbases in chokepoints, late game you want them on planets. If you're going a trade focused build then you want to have your starbases on the planets that are producing trade value, and you'll want gateways to transfer that directly on to your capital.

Now if al of that doesn't work, then make your fleets in multiple's of two or four, that way you can split the fleets evenly (if you select a fleet you have the option to split it in two)

And if even that doesn't work. then pick militarist and git gud.

though to be honest, i haven't needed any defensive fleets at all, just starbases and my regular fleets have proven sufficient.

Originally posted by Project Danny:

You can't...

You need to rush and crush as many A.I empires as you can as quickly as you can.

I play on grand admiral with scaling difficulty and I rushed from the start. I wiped out my first A.I empire in under 10 years the next A.I in another 10 years or less and continued that.

I was wiping atleast 1 A.I every 10-20 years or so maybe even quicker but no matter how fast i went thr A.I always forms huge federations so I eventually lost as even though I had a 500k fleet they had hundreds of small 20k fleets from every direction I couldn't be in all the places at once.

I even had multiple fleets of 100k but it was a game of cat and mouse I just couldn't keep up with all empires with all their fleets from all directions.

No matter what... federations or w.e are always gona be super OP compared to being on your own...

When the A.I can bring in like 20 empires to fight you it dont matter how big your fleet is.... your fleet can't be in 20 locations at once. No matter what you will always lose...

Also, have you considered, joining them? If you have the territory winning on economy and diplomacy is pretty easy, if you don't have the territory then a big enough fleet will enable you to turn the AI that aren't in a federation into vassals which you can subsidise whilst integrating them. If you're rich enough you can buy vasalage and loyalty at which point you can obtain territory with influence (which should probably be nerfed tbh).

[Veny]

Originally posted by yuzhonglu:

You built the wrong fleets. I've used 300k fleet power to beat 1 million fleet power enemies because the AI sucks at using their fleets.

The AI will split its fleets into lots of smaller fleets, so your 300k fleet can destroy multiple 100k fleets without loss.

Download Starnet once its properly updated, set it on GA with non-scaling, and make every other empire genocidal, and learn how to fight enemies with more fleet power.

If they storm your border with 1 million fleet power, don't fight it. Let it through and go behind the main fleet and conquer all their worlds.

Quite the opposite, my enemy always keep their fleets together, destroying one my planet after another.
They have some smaller fleet just enough strong to retake systems i took. I could chase them all and kill them easily but that would mean less ships would defend.

[Veny]

Originally posted by VoiD:

You can make some fortress systems, but you need to invest, heavily, on platforms and stations to make them work.

Check 9:25 https://youtu.be/N9eSAVT9IKk

You can also create fortress worlds, even little habitats filled with army bases will do, once you have the FTL inhibitor tech those worlds will not allow anyone to pass through the system before they are conquered, and if they have over 3k army strength, that might be hard to do, so the enemy might try to bomb it from orbit instead.

So you can get -50% bombing damage from an orbital shield building, -25% from the unyelding tradition and -25% from adaptability tradtion, reducing to the cap of 2% bombardment damage, might take a while for them to get through.

And once they do, they would have to deal with your other 10 fortress habitats in the same system, because why not?

That being said the best defense is a good fleet, and a nice hyper relay/portal network so you can get to and fron every place of your empire near instantly, countering any possible threats with ease, even with a massive territory.

Hehe, onion... orbital rings look cool. Shame they are part of paid DLC. Also they would not work that great with my ring worlds but they look great for defending border systems that have plenty of planets.

[Pieshaman]

Originally posted by Stromko:

Some people here are talking about playing a game out for like, 400 years? .. I just don't think game is intended to be played out much past the initial 200. That may be why they call them 'endgame crisis': Once you've dealt with said crisis, you've dealt with the biggest hairiest problem that galaxy is intended to throw at you, you've overcome the challenge (or not) and can start a new game.

On the other hand if you wait around another hundred years or so and every empire has glomped together into gigantic alliances, researched every repeatable tech to the nth degree, built (or probably just simulated) their economies to absurd powerhouse levels, it can be a much bigger, hairier problem than the game is really intended to give you, and frankly a big headache to deal with.

I would just say, don't do that. If it's happening sooner than that, within the span of a regular game, the best bet may be to reduce the galaxy size and with it the number of empires. The AI is equally capable of handling an empire of any size (long past the patience/sanity of any player), and banding together to zerg the player, so giving them more space and more empires to work with is inherently going to dial up the difficulty.

thats why I play tech x5 with slow pop growth. In a 1000 star galaxy and lots of AI. makes it very interesting for me, cause anything can happen in a 1000 years and things are not already concluded in just 400 years or even less.
The first time i played on normal settings on a 1000 star galaxy I just became an isolated empire that discovered everything without any evolving or exciting "story" to tell.

[Rhapsody]

Originally posted by Pieshaman:

The first time i played on normal settings on a 1000 star galaxy I just became an isolated empire that discovered everything without any evolving or exciting "story" to tell.

And that is how militant isolationists were born.

[Shinobi273]

Here is a stupid thought, what about declaring them the crisis? It will break the alliance and cause that empire to be destroyed. Cultivate the favors needed and destroy them. You can also ironically use favors to have them vote themselves the crisis.

You can get around the pop growth cap by using vassals because it caps based on your empire population. Keep the vassal loyal and they can join you in conquest. Due to the base starting capacities, more empires will always have an advantage over solo. Think of it as using the colony/sector auto setting.

[Elitewrecker PT]

Originally posted by Shinobi273:

Here is a stupid thought, what about declaring them the crisis? It will break the alliance and cause that empire to be destroyed. Cultivate the favors needed and destroy them. You can also ironically use favors to have them vote themselves the crisis.

You can get around the pop growth cap by using vassals because it caps based on your empire population. Keep the vassal loyal and they can join you in conquest. Due to the base starting capacities, more empires will always have an advantage over solo. Think of it as using the colony/sector auto setting.

And ship design, and ship construction, and auto research, and different traditions, policies, etc.

[yuzhonglu]

Originally posted by Veny:

Originally posted by yuzhonglu:

You built the wrong fleets. I've used 300k fleet power to beat 1 million fleet power enemies because the AI sucks at using their fleets.

The AI will split its fleets into lots of smaller fleets, so your 300k fleet can destroy multiple 100k fleets without loss.

Download Starnet once its properly updated, set it on GA with non-scaling, and make every other empire genocidal, and learn how to fight enemies with more fleet power.

If they storm your border with 1 million fleet power, don't fight it. Let it through and go behind the main fleet and conquer all their worlds.

Quite the opposite, my enemy always keep their fleets together, destroying one my planet after another.
They have some smaller fleet just enough strong to retake systems i took. I could chase them all and kill them easily but that would mean less ships would defend.

You don't defend. What you're trying to do is to conquer as many planets of theirs as possible, while destroying their transport fleets and keeping them from fully occupying your systems. If they take the starbase, it doesn't matter so long as they can't take their planets.

In the meantime you take as many of their planets as you can. Do as much damage as possible, force their war weariness to 100% by killing ships, and getting a status quo where you're in control of as many systems with planets as possible.

If they keep their main fleet together, you never engage it. Just kill their transport ships.

[ScreamCon]

Originally posted by Veny:

So, first let me thank Paradox for completely taking all fun from this game. I bought it on day 1 when it was actually fun. Now after all the "improvements" were added, it cannot be even played without specific stategies.
Now, after 40 hours of playing, i am propably stuck. After all the time, there are 2 huge aliances on map, that i cannot possibly fight. I managed to get 300k power fleet only to realize my enemy, that has "only" 30 planets, have some powerful friends that have like 1M power combined.
Of course they stormed my border. Of course defense platforms are completely useless against large fleets (60k platform cannot even defeat 60k fleet). Of course they all stick together so i need 1M fleet to fight them (because thanks to the awesome math of this game, 1M fleet fighting 500k fleet would still survive with like 800k power) AND also actually conquer something or war will never end.
Naturally i cannot build large fleet because my resources are limited and there is some really "smart" population anti-growth system so endgame is like "Wait and enemy will get even stronger or hit now and die anyway".

So yea, is there some magical way how to make defense platforms and starbases actually useful? I seem to be unable to edit starbase equipement and def platforms seem to be useful no matter what i put on them.

Also i wonder whether i can boost my population. Clearly there is clone building that does not really help. Production of robots is even slower. Creating more ringworlds makes things even worse.

Alright so you do not need to get much more powerful than them. ALL you need to do is ensure a couple things.
1. Your alloy output is as high as your build can reasonably sustain. Balancing science and raw resource is important.
2. Your fleets in any pack of ships is x4 or more larger than the enemy. The enemy could have 1M fleet but split up you can pick them off.
3. Your Ships in the fleet are as big as possible so they have more hp. Battleships are the biggest. Unless you can somehow get corvets not to be hit. This is so that killing 1 ship requires a minimum threshold of firepower to do so. Meaning that if you get the fleet power ratio good enough you don't lose a ship before you kill them.

Important* The firepower to firepower ratio is a measure of how much you lose egaging, BUT if you reach x4+ extreme ratios of firepower to them it becomes how quickly you kill their fleet. The faster you destroy their fleet the less you lose, less shield health and amour you lose, and the faster you can war destroy a target.

Once damage reaches absurd levels who ever gets the first shot kills with good ratio first. Meaning you want weapons that attack as far as possible. Large x slot weapons and hangers do this. Don't rely too much on hanger but they make nice' additional firepower in a death stack with ratios properly skewed.

Get admirals that give more range ability and sit at the 150 range as your combat chip allows. Just make sure your main dealing weapons can still hit. If you can't do 150 try large weapons at 80 range. Not quite as good but gets job done.

And as such the death stack. Set your front line planets and habitats to have max amount of police so hard to take and be stronghold worlds to taking bombing. This will buy you time as you move your death stacks around.

Hope this helps # big alliances you want big alliances backing you.

For pop problem you don't want livestock or non indentured slave as they restrict you late game when free specialist pops are needed. Pops are as good if not better than currency as they produce much currency.

[Veny]

Thanks everyone for advices... i thought you may be interested in a small update.
Soo 30 hours later, i am turtling a bit. It seems coalitions and factions comes and goes. Civilizations fall apart, new ones are formed. I am doing quite good, i am harvesting small civs and rebel factions, i found out efficient strategy to counter larger civs. I hoard resources so fleet over limit wont ruin me, i wait for a moment when enemy is fighting other large faction, then i strike, stealing few systems with each successful war. All i need to do is hold long enough and enemy will force me into peace even if i am not clear winner.

I use neutron sweep which now looks like a mistake due to terribly slow pop reproduction in late game, which then slows down my economy that barely grows. Approx. 15% of a map is now mine, i play with the largest cluster (1000 systems is it?) so it may take few more dozens hours to finish.

[mss73055]

Why are you not part of this awesome federation?