random encounters

[Gryphon]

why are random encounters so hard every time i colonize a planet its wiped out within 5 or so turns its getting ridicules 10 defense platforms 20 armor and 5 shield nope start over . iv colonized the same 4 planets about 3 time each before i finally just quit am i just missing something?

[HurtfulPlayer97]

You are just unlucky. And yes Obiwan, there is such a thing as luck.
In the game setup screen you can turn down the chances of getting them or turn them off completely.

[Gryphon]

Originally posted by HurtfulPlayer97:

You are just unlucky. And yes Obiwan, there is such a thing as luck.
In the game setup screen you can turn down the chances of getting them or turn them off completely.

iv turned it down to 1% and they are still extremely common turning them off seamed like to little is going on. also this problem has persisted over many games over several years so i cant relay blame luck and its a game stooping problem literally not being able to progress

[Fulano]

I always make sure to send 3-4 armors to defend a planet from raiders, slavers, and VN miners. I haven't needed more than that except very rare events.

How many ships do you send to colonize a planet? In this game I try to send enough ships to get the infrastructure to 100 (so like 50 DEs)

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

From your description, I'm guessing that you're getting hit with Von Neumann probes?

The counter is pretty simple. Goes like this -


Use 5 armor destroyers. Hammerhead command sections preferred for extra guns. Engine doesn't really matter, but it's good if they can move at the same speed as your colonization fleet. Put decent small turret guns on them. Your best lasers or sniper cannons or maybe armor piercing drivers or whatever. You definitely don't want small emitters here. Accurate weapons with decent range are what you need. Missiles are worthless against them.

In battle, you just want to hold the line between the probes and the planet. Set your stance to 'normal'. You don't want close, standoff, or pursue. Set fleet facing to either head on or broadside as appropriate for your particular ships. Whatever gives you the most guns facing the targets. Order your ships to target the mothership so they face appropriately but do not close with it. Maybe even back off just a bit. Then just wait for the small probes to close and blast them as they come at you.

You don't want to take out the motherships. Let them go. If you do take them out, VN will retaliate with berserkers.

The temptation for a noob is to try and build more ships to help defend against them. Doesn't really work though. If you build more ships, they bring more probes. You just need a handful.

When you get access to them, add a cnc destroyer to your garrison fleets to make sure that you get warships when attacked, instead of a bunch of tankers or something.

Once you hit fusion, you really want to add a police cruiser as well.

Once you get deepscanners and jammers (if you rolled them), add a simple electronic warfare ship to the garrison fleet.



If you have more problems, you should let us know.

[Gryphon]

Originally posted by Colonel Sanders Lite:

From your description, I'm guessing that you're getting hit with Von Neumann probes?

The counter is pretty simple. Goes like this -


Use 5 armor destroyers. Hammerhead command sections preferred for extra guns. Engine doesn't really matter, but it's good if they can move at the same speed as your colonization fleet. Put decent small turret guns on them. Your best lasers or sniper cannons or maybe armor piercing drivers or whatever. You definitely don't want small emitters here. Accurate weapons with decent range are what you need. Missiles are worthless against them.

In battle, you just want to hold the line between the probes and the planet. Set your stance to 'normal'. You don't want close, standoff, or pursue. Set fleet facing to either head on or broadside as appropriate for your particular ships. Whatever gives you the most guns facing the targets. Order your ships to target the mothership so they face appropriately but do not close with it. Maybe even back off just a bit. Then just wait for the small probes to close and blast them as they come at you.

You don't want to take out the motherships. Let them go. If you do take them out, VN will retaliate with berserkers.

The temptation for a noob is to try and build more ships to help defend against them. Doesn't really work though. If you build more ships, they bring more probes. You just need a handful.

When you get access to them, add a cnc destroyer to your garrison fleets to make sure that you get warships when attacked, instead of a bunch of tankers or something.

Once you hit fusion, you really want to add a police cruiser as well.

Once you get deepscanners and jammers (if you rolled them), add a simple electronic warfare ship to the garrison fleet.



If you have more problems, you should let us know.

im not very good with combat honestly iv bean letting the ai fight mostly but it doesn't rely change the outcome i think most the attackers are bug looking things mostly but i stopped eavin checking at this point

[Fulano]

Auto-battling the VN encounters will end up with severe losses, the auto battle is very differently balanced than manually battling and it assumes everybody is right next to each other and they fire volleys based on their range.

But if you build destroyers like Colonel Sanders said, you don't actually have to do anything in combat, just let the destroyers pick off the mining probes as they approach and wait until the time runs out.

[frumple]

I think he's getting hit by Sillicoid Queen infestations.

Research CNC and point defence if you can. Whatever you do, you need a lot of destroyers and a lot of guns to deal with the swarm.

There is one or more queens in the area. They will spawn a new queen every so many turns and these will head out to new planets to make new nests, and spawn more queens.

Kill the hell out of them as quick as you can or you will be swarmed.

Queens are an early game challenge. They're quite difficult when you have crap hulls and no point defence. But it is one enemy the game throws at you so you can fight something that isn't an enemy empire.
They also release a lot of resources when destroyed, so yoy get something for your trouble. Also, they are slow so you have time to react.

If you are human then you may not be able to destroy the planet they are coming from.

[fox5s]

Originally posted by frumple:

I think he's getting hit by Sillicoid Queen infestations.

Given that he said colony destroyed, it's probably VN Berserkers. Silicoid Queens don't usually destroy colonies. Though, having one sitting in the planet's asteroid field while not actually hurting the planet is kind of funny.

What @Fulano said is mostly correct. Just kill the smaller probes and not the motherships when the Von Neuman show up. If you don't kill the motherships, the Berserkers won't show up to scrub your colony.

If you are building to defend against VN, don't bother with missiles. They have the best Point Defenses possible against missiles. Dumb Fire Racks can work but normal missiles are nearly worthless against them. If you have any ships at all to fight them, don't autoresolve. Their harvesting beams are OP vs the autoresolve. And even if they eat most of your fleet in the fight, they probably won't have time to eat too many resources from your planet.

If you don't have ships or just have Light Defense Platforms, autoresolving is fine. They won't take more than 500 resources from the planet in an autoresolve (but can take more if you don't autoresolve) and sometimes the Light Defense Platforms getting eaten might reduce the resources lost. In either case, your colony will live. Unless your planet is particularly large, you probably won't kill the motherships and thus won't incur the Berserker's wrath. If you do accidentally kill an VN Probe mothership. Well, expect an attack there in a few turns and be ready to recolonize quickly. They don't ALWAYS retaliate but it's best to be prepared in case they do. Killing the Berserkers will take mid to late game tech to achieve and it's just easier to not trigger them

Supposedly, if they get enough resources AND you manage to fend off enough Berserker attacks, they will build a Planet Killer that is nearly identical to the Planet Killer Grand Menace. But, I've never seen this actually happen in a game. Probably because I usually either don't trigger or don't defeat the Berserkers.

If I'm wrong and you hare having issues with Silicoids, they can usually be defeated in an autoresolve by a fleet of about 20 Armor DEs and 3 CnC DEs. The exact number may vary depending on your race and what weapon tech they are equipped with.

If you are having trouble exploring systems due to unknown menaces, it depends on the exact menace. You always want to fight an unknown menace the first time because there are various tactics depending on the specific one that can minimize your losses.

Silicoids will probably rip up your scouts. Eventually come back and blow them up with a fleet as I detailed a moment ago. Note that after about 10 turns, they will send out a new Queen to a nearby system with an asteroid belt. They can kind of plague you for a while but at least you get some decent resources for blowing them up.

An Asteroid Monitor will probably kill one or two DEs (which can easily be your whole scouting force if you are just sending Tankers around) but you can run out of range and switch to peace stance ending the battle. In any case, you'll get the Special Project to take it over yourself. Come back when that is complete. This is such a non-spoiler that I'm not even gonna mark it.

You can almost always run from the Alien Derelict and just switch to Peace stance easy. Come back with a feet to either destroy it for a small bonus. Or specifically target the turrets and once they are all destroyed, you get a bigger bonus.

The... I don't remember it's name... the Flock ships? They are actually guarding a grave site. They are guarding a specific system and will attack anything within a specific short radius (probably something like any system within 10 light years). But if you show up with a fleet big enough (a certain number of fleet points that I can't remember), they won't attack and you will just get money if you make it to the system they are specifically guarding. Or by getting enough Morrigi Xenotech.

To end the Von Neuman threat completely is more complicated than any of the others. You need to build a ship with a Deep Scan section with enough range (I think the CR Deep Scan will do it) and scout around the edges of your galaxy to reveal their home system. Then just send a fleet and blow them up. This is easier said than done and you probably won't be able to actually pull it off until VERY late game. But their planet is usually pretty big with a TON of resources. You can't usually colonize it but mining it can be lucrative.

Unknown Menaces that show up on already colonized planets are either Asteroids, Specters, or the Herald. There used to be Slaver and Flock attacks but those turned into their own factions.

For Asteroids, try to blow them up without letting them hit the planet or they'll hurt your pop and infrastructure. But you'll get resources added to the planet for any you miss. It can destroy a colony but it can be easily resettled. Can suck depending on the timing.

If it's at your home planet, it could be the Herald. He's annoying and tricky. If you autoresolve him, he will eat 50 happiness from civilians. You can also destroy the Herald but he's in a midtech CR and will reduce your system happiness the longer he's active in the system. If you think you can get him go for it otherwise autoresolve is better. This can lead to rebellions if the happiness drops too low but can be recovered. Easiest way to do so is to just have 1 million credits in the bank when you hit end turn and all your planets with enough civilians to care will get 1 happiness. this increases to 2 and 3 happiness if you can save up to 5 or 10 million. Having a police ship in orbit will also reduce any losses by 1.

Specter's just do damage and can only be hurt by energy weapons. But mostly only trouble you if you are messing with Node lines (Human and Zuul) and don't attack often enough to truly be a problem anyway.

Mining Traps and Colony Traps only go off once and won't go off a second time if you follow up. Also, you can prevent the Traps with Morrigi Xenotech.

The Peacekeeper is also a thing but he won't hurt your planets. Just your fleets.

Technically you will be troubled more by Unknown Menaces targeting your planets and the Grand Menace if your are ahead. It's kind of an interesting balancing mechanic to have the player doing the best have more Menaces to deal with. Or to have the Puppeteer or Planet Killer go directly through their empire.

I would have just pointed you to the Sword of the Stars wiki but it looks like it died in the last year or two. I think you can still get to it on archive.org but not everything works.

I hope all this helps! Please let me know if you have any questions.

[xjulep]

It’s definitely silicoids. And they aren’t random or light. They are a non random “alien menace” that systematically colonizes every star with and asteroid belt in geometric progression. The only cure is emitters or enough PD to take out the drones and enough heavy weaps to blow up the queen/hives/small queens.

Also queens and small queens have reflective armor so if you are using lasers don’t even bother.

[HurtfulPlayer97]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/42890/discussions/0/3273566073547535042/

Same principals apply.

[fox5s]

Originally posted by HurtfulPlayer97:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/42890/discussions/0/3273566073547535042/

Same principals apply.

They technically do, but if you have the CR tech to be throwing refineries at Silicoids, you already have the ability to deal with them. All you really need, I already laid out. About 20 Armor DEs and a few CnC DEs to go with them will autoresolve the situation. You'll lose some of them to the autoresolve but thems the breaks. And the cash reward for defeating them helps even it out.

If you want to fight it out, you probably want those Armor DEs equipped with a mix of Point Defence Lasers and your best available Laser tech and you should have upgraded your Missile tech at least once. Yeah, the Queen has a Reflective Coating but that's why the Missile tech needs to be upgraded so they can do the actual killing of the Queen. The base Missile tech will heavily damage her but not quite finish her off before the default battle timer runs out. With a full setup of DEs with a DE CNC like this, you might not even lose any unless the Queen gets some shots off at ya.

YMMV depending on what Faction you are playing as and your exact available technology.

[frumple]

Thanks fox5s! That's a neat trick with autoresolve. In normal combat, it can take a lot more DEs. The swarm is hard to deal with without point defence. They show up so early in the game, a lot of the combat techs are still unresearched, and building a fleet is still expensive.

[fox5s]

Originally posted by frumple:

Thanks fox5s! That's a neat trick with autoresolve. In normal combat, it can take a lot more DEs. The swarm is hard to deal with without point defence. They show up so early in the game, a lot of the combat techs are still unresearched, and building a fleet is still expensive.

Yeah, without Point Defenses, I wouldn't fight the swarm manually if you can help it. It can be done with enough laser tech and numbers but it sucks.

I'm glad that was able to help you! ^^

[easytarget]

I set random encounters to 0% and I'm guessing I've misunderstood what this setting affects.

I was under the impression this would mean the galaxy I spawned would only include the other alien races I'd be going up against and not random events of any kind since I set it to zero.

Such apparently is not the case because I've just had locust take out my home world. Are such "alien menaces" impossible to entirely remove?

[HurtfulPlayer97]

Originally posted by easytarget:

I set random encounters to 0% and I'm guessing I've misunderstood what this setting affects.

I was under the impression this would mean the galaxy I spawned would only include the other alien races I'd be going up against and not random events of any kind since I set it to zero.

Such apparently is not the case because I've just had locust take out my home world. Are such "alien menaces" impossible to entirely remove?

Try validating your game files. This should not happen. With it set to 0% you should get NO random encounters.