Antarans broken late game?

[Nekomancer]

Hey guys. Ive been playing this game for months and have finished about seven diffrent sessions with the Antarans active and all of them and ive noticed one universal thing about them.

They are managable early to mid-game but late game they get really broken with fleet's numbering in the hundreds, defense values reaching six (and as high as ive seen) and up to ten digit numbers and they always have the next best technology over you (with the Orion Death Laser and armor tech should a race acquire them at any point during the game)

Typically you dont have to worry about them if your a fairly small empire and pack fairly small fleets but for big empires and players who are going for the conquest/diplomacy aproach they are an absolute livid nightmare to fend off, especially until you get the warp portal tech which makes rallying fleets to protect a single world possible, but half the time you end up giving up the world in favor of protecting fleets which can be really hard going forward if your trying to mantain your colonys and a hassle since you have to move people from other colonys to restore the one that just got hit. And the worst part is that they get stronger each attack (meaning bigger fleets and higher values every time they appear)

I get the idea they are supposed to be more or less a military power check, but they just get up to stupid levels of broken late game. I hope im not the only one that feels they need to be nerfed or fixed at least.

[Skree]

I agree they are a bit overwpowered. Plus the cutscene bug.

[ashbery76]

Well sounds like you got beat.This does not mean they're overwpowered.I just have one test game so far and kicked their butt.

[Zanteogo]

Originally posted by ashbery76:

Well sounds like you got beat.This does not mean they're overwpowered.I just have one test game so far and kicked their butt.

Every time you beat one of their fleets the next attack they send increases in power.

However, it creates a crazy snowball effect and it quickly gets to the point were they have so many ships your computer just locks up.

[Nekomancer]

^^^^^

And there is no point in hitting auto-resolve because the game can bug out and just auto-wipe your entire fleet.

Antarans are fun, but I feel like when they are supposed to be agressive raiders, their raiding fleets shouldnt be able to tripple yours in size.

Their armor and shields may be pretty weak, its their weapons you have to worry about as their really strong so typically my strategy to deal with them is lots of Cruiser and battleship class vessels. Just battering them with long range attacks and torpedos tears their numbers apart pretty quickly,

Beam weapons are effective if they have the heavy mount or enveloping modification and torpedos help because near the late game when their fleets are pretty big, your torpedos will usually one shot the frigates and destroyers and will destroy cruisers and battleships.

Though back to the point, the Anttarran fleet during the final battle when you open a portal to the pocket dimension is really tame, especially if you spent time building your fleet and you have very high level weapon technology. The last fleets size will never change, but its pretty jarring to see the anttarran raiding fleet's become so large that the last fight becomes tame in comparison.

[fmalfeas]

Well, they're not really 'raiders'. They're exterminators. Genocidal maniacs (which is why the Orions bottled them up). They've put a crack in their prison, and every fleet they send through widens the crack, letting them send more. They've got Orion-grade tech, and have been in that dimensional pocket unmolested for hundreds of thousands of years.

I just miss being able to board them with Elerian assault shuttles, haul the captured ship off the front lines of the fight, and after the fight, scrap it and get their tech without going to Orion. :)

[Texas Aggie]

Last fleet does change - it scales with the player - I've watched it for 100 turns and it keeps going up

[Nekomancer]

Im bringing this thread back from the dead but for good reason.

So ive been playing with the Antarrans for a while now and ive found a few ways to help minimize the dammage they can inflict and make weaker fleets viable against them.

They do have advanced technology but half the time they have very very weak armor and alot of their ships use heavy mount weapons. (specifically the frigates and destroyers usually)

Ive found the best way to combat these fleets is to often heavily min/max and customize your fleets rather than follow the standard AI upgrade path. The enemy fleets usually destroy the weak, AI assembled ship specs when you auto upgrade, but when you take time to adjust the specs yourself, you can drastically impact the kind of power even the small fleets have against large Anterran fleets.

Specifically, investing in heavy mount weapons yourselves like the cannons or beam weapons goes a very long way to making your fleets very capable of surviving the Antarran attacks and making defenses viable.

At the start of the battles, they seem to try and branch out, this gives your fleets time to move in close and once the Antarrans attempt their pincer, your heavy mount weapons would have already started tearing them a new one long before they can do any real dammage.

Ive definantly found that in this new update, the Antarrans can be easily beaten if you mess around with ship roles and loadouts going forward.

EDIT: Note ive been playing usually on hard mode or higher in all of my games so this comes from alot of experience over many diffrent fights with them.

[fmalfeas]

Also, they're far too fond of huge swarms of small ships. Which means large racks of Fast, Heavy Armored missiles, even refusing to use MIRV due to the PD bug, will wipe out swarms in every volley. Toss in the Achilles Targetting System and you can even make it just absurd numbers of Nuclear missiles, and play the law of probability.

[Furluge]

Yeah unfortunately late game there are just so many of them you can't really deal with them. Also the real-time combat starts to stop functioning with that many ships.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=819100162

[fmalfeas]

That's what Dauntless Guidance Systems, and putting just the maximum number of Fast missiles you can on titans and battleships is for. I had 5 titans built like that (they were meant as artillery support for their brawler cousins that were next in production) that I desperately pitted against an antaran fleet because if it won that fight, I was hosed. Was the last world I had that was capable of anything significant after a grueling war with the Darlok (who had apparently robbed the Psilon blind). The 5 titans wiped out 205 antaran ships. All 5 lived (though two were at less than 5% hull remaining.)

Dauntless Guidance System is the bane of Antares. Black Hole Generators and Plasma Webs may work as well. Also, they seem to desperately avoid Artimis System Net mines, which can let you get in some extra volleys.

[dudeworthington]

Nah, they're not OP. Number 1 it is possible sometimes to beat their attack fleet, even in the later stages of the game. Number 2 if you have to lose a planet that is hardly the game, especially since they only attack infrequently. If you antipate a loss, it is just better to conserve your fleet and let them bomb the planet, they return to their portal after bombing a single planet. Number 3 their attacks are entirely biological, leaving the infrastructure intact and you can repopulate the planet fairly easy at the point in the game where the antarans really start to become a problem. A setback certainly but not nearly enough to stop an empire with forward momentum. Number 4 the antarans ships are AFAIK locked at a particular tech level so pound for pound they should actually be getting weaker over time compared to your own fleet. My endgame fleet destroyed an antaran fleet of over 800 ships while only losing a couple of battleships.

[masotime]

Originally posted by Twitchtv/Furluge:

Yeah unfortunately late game there are just so many of them you can't really deal with them. Also the real-time combat starts to stop functioning with that many ships.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=819100162

Turn 627 is really really late in the game....

[Nekomancer]

Yeah, ive had instances where ive beaten up their huge attack fleets late game though usually it involves no small amount of spamming purchasing ships or rushing to get an orbital defense network running in 2-3 turns with buyout.

The problem with min/maxing custom fleets is that empires with pretty weak production industry will suffer from long que times and pretty expensive buyout costs.

Therefore an alternative strategy to avoiding conflict with the Anterrans is to just mantain a small local empire and fleet. In this instance a technological victory is still possible and conquest if you want to spam your way to the doom star tech and just send your small fleet to blow up empires though that comes with the risk of the Anterrans coming after you if your empire is strong enough to knock around larger empires late game.

[NE14PIE]

I found to get around this, just build Civ transports, get the population out of dodge, let them bio weapon the planet as it destroys no buildings. They then leave, put the population back. You only lose your starbase this way.

[Nekomancer]

True but thats always costs a buyout fee. Its not a terribly high one but the cost can add up quickly for weak economy empires.