How to defeat the Contingency

[The Doctor]

After 10 years and my droids have started vanishing. Out pops the The Contingency and their sterilisation hubs are situated all around the galaxy but two of them next to my people. They are slowly exterminating everything I have, a final stand at one of my planets failed to defeat one of their fleets and suddenly two more arrived and destroyed every military asset I had. My allies are almost completely exterminated, their fleets gone. I retreat and retreat to find all my holy worlds burning. My grand fleet decimated. On the way to the homeworld to protect the last bits of my race. The only hope is in an awakened machine empire which is doing nothing. Has anyone got any tips? I'm screwed. Nothing stops them. It is the end of the imperium humanum.

[ZeroMagic]

As soon as your droids start vanishing and you get all the preliminary events you need to convert your entire empire into resource production, depending on the size of your empire you may want to cease all research as in change all research/unity facilities into minerals and energy.
You need to micro everything, I noticed in the 2.0 game I played that they didn't appear to be balanced for the lower fleet sizes of 2.x, the awakended empires in my case didn't seem to be much help with their small fleets.
You should have the capacity to outnumber them 2-1 in most cases and be able to very quickly replace your losses. Start by destroying his wandering fleets and keep him from taking territory and then when your strong enough attack a hub, if its going badly retreat and try again. Try to atleast destroy the defense fleet before retreating.
Finally make sure your fleets are designed to counter them.

[Zi]

Not sure you can do it.

My last achiv was contingency, and I raided 4 their worlds, bombed, cleared em, after all 4 gone - opened option to access to contingency main hub system, so I cleared it.

Thats it.

Was not that hard.
It seems you havent prepared and not expanded enough. Not got enough power and/or allies. Just learn the game then?

[Hat8]

The only things that saved my empire were the Dyson Sphere, resource replicators and sacrifice of the southern half of the galaxy and the Xenophilic awakened Empire that died holding them back.

It's a very brutal event. You gotta be able to focus one planet at a time and that requires an empire capable of fielding a huge death stack. I held the planet that spawned in my empire at bay by building a massive strongpoint. The Xenophilic awakened Empire tanked two of them that spawned right next to it. The other planet basically destroyed a quarter of the galaxy as it was ignored until the other 3 planets were destroyed.

Playing on huge is a good idea. You really do need to be able to use space for time strategy. The final planet that spawns is really easy because you're fully mobilized at this point.

[ZeroMagic]

Originally posted by Zi:

Not sure you can do it.

My last achiv was contingency, and I raided 4 their worlds, bombed, cleared em, after all 4 gone - opened option to access to contingency main hub system, so I cleared it.

Thats it.

Was not that hard.
It seems you havent prepared and not expanded enough. Not got enough power and/or allies. Just learn the game then?

The difficulty depends alot on the galaxy size and the time that they appear, sometimes they appear way too early imho. Also if your playing a federation/friendly empire you will probably lose because it seems that you need to control a very large empire to fight them.

[DrRedeye]

The resource tips above are all good, so I'll add a tip about fleet composition.

The contingency exclusively use large and medium guns, so corvette swarms are very effective because of their high evasion. I use level 2 afterburners and the Contingency are getting a 50% hit rate at best.

In terms of armament, Contingency armour/shielding is pretty balanced so I use three small disruptors on my corvettes. Coupled with the Guardian of the Galaxy (or whatever it's called) ascension perk means they just tear hulls apart without touching shields or armour.

I have two swarms of 200 corvettes with around 60k fleet power each. Each of these can destroy the 90k Contingency stacks with only around 30% losses, which is cheap and quick to replenish. When combined they shred through the Contingency with ease.

[Justice]

well if i assume you play on default settings (crisis starting to roll at 2400/1.0 multiplier) you simply didnt do very well :/
for me the endgame crisis was not even a hustle; the contingency spawned she got rolled over; even the AI did handle them but refused to kill the machine worlds i guess this is coded to not be done by them; at least in single player.
I have to say this happened on a grand admiral/30 AI game though so they were pretty strong.

[Kitten Food]

Originally posted by DrRedeye:

The resource tips above are all good, so I'll add a tip about fleet composition.

The contingency exclusively use large and medium guns, so corvette swarms are very effective because of their high evasion. I use level 2 afterburners and the Contingency are getting a 50% hit rate at best.

In terms of armament, Contingency armour/shielding is pretty balanced so I use three small disruptors on my corvettes. Coupled with the Guardian of the Galaxy (or whatever it's called) ascension perk means they just tear hulls apart without touching shields or armour.

I have two swarms of 200 corvettes with around 60k fleet power each. Each of these can destroy the 90k Contingency stacks with only around 30% losses, which is cheap and quick to replenish. When combined they shred through the Contingency with ease.

This is really good advice. I did something similiar and it was a cakewalk. Disruptors tend to be good versus AEs and the contigency since you just ignore their OP shield/armor. If you don't have very large fleets, you should consider taking Defender of the Galaxy by the time crisis shows up.

Of course none of this matters that much in the OPs situtation. Maybe for a new game.

[Shinzor]

Thats a hard one to come back from, next time(if you can't comeback from this) try turtling at a chokepoint that they have to go through at the start, whenever I am out numbered or for whatever reason can't fight back/go on the offensive I just turtle hard while expanding my economy to support more ships if I can't fight them yet so I can sooner or later go on the offensive, I also try my hardest to get gateway tech before the crisis so I can have gateways at all my frontlines/chokepoints and my shipyards for faster reinforcments, but over all it sounds like you fell behind at some point it happens and really sucks but even the loss will help you for your next game when they spawn, it can be really easy to fall behind especialy if you are going off of how well off/advanced the AI empires tech is

[Shinzor]

Also if need be you can reinforce fleets while they fight by going into the fleet manager to do it since the button on the info card can't be used while in a fight thats not much helpp unless you build corvets only since the other ships take so long to build but it has saved my bum

[Shinzor]

One more thing lol, I find having 8 corvets for every battleship you have works really well since the corvets dodge and the battleships hurt so much, my fleet is normally 2 cruiser, 4 destroyer and 8 corvets for each battleship, seem to work well enough for me, I feel it gives me the best of both worlds for mitigating/doing damage but I am no pro so I could be wrong, I also only use trickster,erudite and the hit and run war doctrin to lower how many ships I lose

[annaliseh]

To make the contingency appear later in game don't do any ROBOTIC research.

[Botji]

Originally posted by DrRedeye:

In terms of armament, Contingency armour/shielding is pretty balanced so I use three small disruptors on my corvettes. Coupled with the Guardian of the Galaxy (or whatever it's called) ascension perk means they just tear hulls apart without touching shields or armour.

I have two swarms of 200 corvettes with around 60k fleet power each. Each of these can destroy the 90k Contingency stacks with only around 30% losses, which is cheap and quick to replenish. When combined they shred through the Contingency with ease.

Even 90% evasion corvettes will only dodge 15-25% of their smaller ships attacks since they have high tracking which is probably why you are losing 30% of a 200 corvette fleet if that is really how many you are losing each fight.

This also means you lose around 18k minerals per fight and I have to question why you wouldnt just build a few battleship fleets instead to easily wipe them out with almost no losses.

Either way OP seems to be in a hole where couldnt use either of these tactics so my advice might have to be to try and learn as much as possible from it and try again :)