How to play as Zuul

[Eggplant]

I am all kinds of confused about where should I bore, should I move my explorator fleets in a large blob or spread them out, should I bother with capturing slaves, or how can I manually order the bores to bore out some particular route I want instead of just picking the fastest route.

[xjulep]

I'm not super good at Zuul but here is what I do:

- I make 2 bores per starting planet, put a tanker with each, and start boring to visit pretty much every nearby star with just 4 bores.

- I don't bother with escorts. If there is a problem I can send a raider fleet very quickly.

- I only capture slaves when using CR slave disks to wipe a planet. Then the slaves go right back to that planet. Other than that, no.

- Holding ctrl (or shift?) lets you be more precise when making a route for your fleet. You can also chain together movement orders to go to multiple stars with one order. That's what I do for bore ships when exploring.

[fmalfeas]

While planets are still viable (before you've mined them out), it's worth it to keep a boreship going back and forth, keeping the lines open so you can respond at extreme speed, and so that you can move fleets at full speed down the length of the bored path.

Capture slaves whenever you can get away with it, and dump them on your worlds that still have minerals. Use those worlds to crank out fleets. Mined out worlds just generate a bit of money, and slow production.

The little slave ships are better than you may expect, btw. They dive into the atmosphere and do their work, then come out. If you send a whole bunch of them, even at a defended world? Yeah, for the early to mid game, most of them will escape, and the damage to the world will be severe. They can then dump their cargo back in your worlds, giving you the advantage.

And never forget the advantages of Zuul ships. They're more manuverable than any except Liir. They accelerate faster than anything but Morrigi. They FTL at the same speed as humans (so long as they aren't escorting a boreship). They have the same number of guns as Hiver ships.

Issue is that they're fragile.

Exploit those advantages and the Zuul concept of them being disposable. Send a boreship and a tanker in first. They'll die. Who cares? Then a fleet covered in missiles shows up and wrecks the defenders before withdrawing. Then the slaver fleet cleans off the planet. Now you can colonize or just move on with the next bore+tanker fleet.

[unkn0wnx]

Zuul is very hard to play. In order to win, you have to expand faster than your neighbors.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by unkn0wnx:

Zuul is very hard to play. In order to win, you have to expand faster than your neighbors.

Out-expanding your neighbors is usually a winning strategy as any faction, but it bears mentioning that over-expansion and poor colonization prioritization is just about as bad for Zuul as it is for anyone else - possibly even worse, since they're probably the faction least able to recover from stalling out badly early on even if they managed to grab a big chunk of territory before they stumbled and held onto it afterwards.

What other factions can do but Zuul kind of can't is secure an early advantage and then rest on their laurels while teching up and developing their empire; Zuul kind of have to grab that early advantage and keep pushing it. If that means slowing their expansion or passing over unopposed expansion opportunities so that they can cripple or kill an opponent in an early war then so be it; Zuul tend to have a pretty strong early game and bleak long-term prospects - their research ratio is the lowest in the game, and between mandatory overharvest, lack of civilian population, and inability to trade they also have the worst mid- to late-game economic potential even if you're not overharvesting more than the minimum necessary - so going after someone early, even at the expense of your own expansion, is often a pretty good idea for them, especially if that someone is Liir or Morrigi since they tend to be pretty weak early on but have significant mid- to late-game potential and can really run away with the game if they're allowed to boom more or less unmolested.

It perhaps also bears mentioning that where Zuul really want to expand isn't so much into empty space as into their neighbors' territory; grabbing those (partially) developed and terraformed frontier worlds and enslaving their population gives you an early economic boost while simultaneously weakening one of your opponents, which is often a lot better for you than expanding into empty space faster than they can do the same.

[Eggplant]

I was also under the impression that the Zuul are the most capable of living on poor planets, i.e. even poor planets can be colonized.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by Eggplant:

I was also under the impression that the Zuul are the most capable of living on poor planets, i.e. even poor planets can be colonized.

Yes and no. Zuul have the highest base climate hazard tolerance (675; Hivers have 650, Tarka 625, Humans/Liir 600, and Morrigi 550), but they also have the worst chances at developing many of the industrial, terraforming, and colonization technologies that make colonizing high-hazard worlds more practical slightly later in the game, and the other factions can tolerate a wider range of climate hazards if they get Gravitational Adaptation and the Zuul don't.

On top of that, colonizing high-hazard worlds is not particularly more economically-feasible as Zuul than as other factions - Zuul might do it best, but they're hardly unique in being able to overharvest a new colony to hasten its development, and even before trade comes into the picture or resource exhaustion rears its ugly head on old or poor colonies the other factions usually have better economies due to having a stable or growing civilian population - and the Zuul really need to have a strong early game if they're going to remain viable into the mid- and especially the late-game. Stalling your early economy and expansion because you colonized an otherwise-appealing high-hazard world isn't good as any faction, but it can be particularly unforgiving as Zuul - they can't out-tech similarly-large (let alone larger) competitors like Liir or out-econ them like Morrigi or even hold ground like Hivers, so playing catch-up after an early stumble can pretty rapidly become an uphill battle, and colonization of relatively inhospitable worlds can be a pretty significant tripping hazard.

[fmalfeas]

To emphasize how Zuul really work, I strongly suggest that you fly two fleets around stacked (with the second fleet not being allowed to fight).

First fleet is missile ships. Just bristling with them. Missiles are cheap and auto-upgrade with better warheads as you get them. And PD is pretty lame until Phaser, so that build will work very well for a long time.

Second fleet is salvage ships. Because you're not gonna tech for crap. So blow up anything you can, and steal the tech. Bonus points if you catch a biome colony ship.

Also, those disposable boreships? If you use their weapon that flings ships out of battle and into nodespace on things that aren't human or zuul and land the hit, it's an insta-kill. And it fires to the rear, if memory serves. So you 'run away' and blorp whoever chases you, taking at least one or two ships down with you.

Always be stealing tech, always keep any remotely useful nodeline fresh. And if you find something like a high population Liir world early, farm it for 'interns'. But not for too long, because you really don't want them teching up.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by fmalfeas:

Also, those disposable boreships? If you use their weapon that flings ships out of battle and into nodespace on things that aren't human or zuul and land the hit, it's an insta-kill. And it fires to the rear, if memory serves. So you 'run away' and blorp whoever chases you, taking at least one or two ships down with you.

Node Cannons can only be found on cruiser (Rending) or dreadnought (Radiant) bore ships, neither of which are things that I would consider particularly disposable - they're worth pretty significant escort fleets, which you ought to be able to afford by the time you're using them.

And, yes, they are rear-firing weapons and can be a rather nasty surprise for any would-be pursuers.

Originally posted by fmalfeas:

First fleet is missile ships. Just bristling with them. Missiles are cheap and auto-upgrade with better warheads as you get them. And PD is pretty lame until Phaser, so that build will work very well for a long time.

Second fleet is salvage ships. Because you're not gonna tech for crap. So blow up anything you can, and steal the tech. Bonus points if you catch a biome colony ship.

There's no real reason to keep these as separate fleets; as long as you have a command ship with an intact mission section on the field you can keep the noncombatants out of the way even if they're in the same fleet, and once you lose your last command ship they can start turning up despite being separated out into their own force.

Also, my experience with special projects from salvage is that it takes so long for them to complete that they won't usually end up being that worthwhile - SotS only lets you put 50k/turn into any given special project regardless of how strong your economy is, and even at mid-game tech costs it'll take a lot of time to get anything done at that rate, especially as Zuul. That's not to say it's not worth doing, just that it's not really something to rely on too heavily.

[fmalfeas]

I keep them separate because sometimes you get a really obnoxious engagement that whittles the battlefleet way down, and I'd rather not have the repair ships at risk.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by fmalfeas:

I keep them separate because sometimes you get a really obnoxious engagement that whittles the battlefleet way down, and I'd rather not have the repair ships at risk.

Splitting the repair ships out into a separate fleet doesn't keep them off the battlefield unless you don't keep the repair fleet in-system, and if you're not keeping the repair fleet in-system then you're not getting the value of either their repair or their salvage capability.

[fmalfeas]

I remember (it has been a while though) keeping multiple fleets on deck so that I could select one for the battle, and until it was wiped, the others wouldn't get drug in.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by fmalfeas:

I remember (it has been a while though) keeping multiple fleets on deck so that I could select one for the battle, and until it was wiped, the others wouldn't get drug in.

Ships in your other fleets in-system will start entering the fight as soon as you've lost or withdrawn enough ships to dig down to those other fleets in the reinforcement list. Splitting the repair ships out into their own fleet doesn't do anything that shifting them to the bottom of the reinforcement list in the fleet manager wouldn't do, and might actually be worse if you have more than two fleets in-system because you might end up with the ships of the support fleet coming into the fight between the primary fleet and any other combat fleet you have in the area.

[unkn0wnx]

There are some tactics that only Zuul can pull off. Such as in a Dreadnought fight you can just board one of enemies' Dread and attempt to take it over with your Dread CnC (more than 50% success unless your timing is off or they have phaser PD). Mid games you can send a cruiser fleets with all scavengers and one DE with Jammer. Place the cruisers around the jammer ships. Planetary defense missiles will never lock on you and the defenders won't know where you are. Release all scavengers when clock tick down to around 60-80 seconds (depend on situation). You get free slaves and maybe some techs. Also Zuuls are the best race to kill colonies. Send an advanced assault carriers cruiser fleet with one DE jammer. Launch all shuttles at same time. Even if they have a fleet defending it, you can still do a lot of damage to the planet.

[changtau2005]

Shatner's guide to the Zuul on the Kerberos forums directly answers your questions about node lines, slaving, and a lot of other important things. It's indepensible if you're new to the Zuul philosophy of playing. I haven't touched SOTS1/2 in years but I still have it bookmarked all this time.

It's a bit hard to find now since it's from all the way back in 2010: http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=18159

Hopefully you'll find it to be as useful as I did.

[Hirmikss™]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YBKL7gcghs

i think i gave a good run down in the comments here
enjoy zuul banger while reading