Dread Lords - bug or combat mechanic?

You have indeed found the tie rule. It works one of two ways:
1. If both fleets kill each other in the same round (in your case, the first round) - the fleet/ship with the highest attack total survives with 1 hp.
2. If both fleets survive 50 rounds, the fleet with the lower attack total is just deleted and destroyed. The fleet with the higher attack value may have taken no damage... but may have dealt no damage!

I have used #2 to really abuse the game because your ships aren't even reduced to 1 hp like #1. But you are having problems with element 1.

To destroy this ship you need to either: Build a fleet with a higher attack total OR build a fleet with enough hit points/defense to survive 1 round of attack.

For instance, if the Dread Lords ship "only" has 4-5 hp, a fleet of 5 mediums that each packed 2 guns, but all had say 150 defense, and you would probably win with just a few losses. If it only has 1 hp, build a fleet with 2-4 attack (thats for the whole fleet) and the rest defense, to try and get some hp to survive its first attack, to get around the tie rule.

Of course, better research, miniturization, logistics and hull sizes can be combined to try and get a fleet attack that is higher. You will notice that if the dread lords are in a fleet the first few ships are easy to kill. Its that last one with 1 hp that benefits from the tie rule... and so that is the only one which is hard to kill.

Like it or hate it, the tie rule has been complained about for well more than a year, and I think its safe to say its here to stay. Hopefully my advice can help you kill that ship.

~ Wyndstar

Alternatively, you can go for the "bigger hammer" approach. Get up to huge hulls, give one some engines and strap as many psyonic beams on there as physically possible. Screw defense, make the tie rule work for you. This ship will take quite a while to research and be ruinously expensive to buy (as you will most likely not have time to build it), but you can crush the Dread Lord fleet with just that one ship.

Hi!
Yet another alternative to the tie rule with 1-HP defending ship is you need to have in the attacking fleet at least one more ship than that 1-HP defending ship has guns. A fleet of several dozens of tiny hulls with one cheap gun, accompanied by a strong ship to erase DL's defenses (if DLs have more than those tinys can remove with their punny attacks) should be suficient to destroy just about anything the DLs can field. OFC you need to bring that DL's ship down to 1 HP first.

BR, Iztok

Brilliant! Yes, sorry I left this one out...


When I mentioned research, hull size and logistics this is what I was getting at. A fleet of 5 monsters will usually work... depending on his difficulty. I've seen DL with 5.5k attack huge hulls on suicidal; which was, until TA, just a little higher than I could get a fleet in a normal game.

~ Wyndstar

The Dread Lords are actually quite easy to beat.

First off, don't leave home without a 25% Luck bonus.

Then, if they use tiny hulls, you use small hulls(or larger) with 6-24 attack.

If they use small hulls, you use medium(or better) hulls with 11-44 attack.

If they use medium hulls, you use large(or better) hulls with 28-112 attack.

If they use large hulls, you use huge hulls with 58-232 attack.

If they use huge hulls, you use huge hulls with Xinathium Hull Plating, Reinforced & Hardened Hull Design, and 117-468 attack.

If they use defenses on their ships, use fleets to burn down their defenses and get inside that range of attack ratings you need to kill 'em.

The italicized numbers are the the minimum attack ratings you need for a 100% chance of killing a Dread Lords ship, once it's defenses are down(or if it had no defenses at all). The closer you get to this number, the better chance you have of killing the Dread ship.

Until you can get the required ratings, use ultra-fast small/medium hull sniper ships with 4 attack and lots of sensors and lots of engines and keep killing their troop transports. They never use fleets unless they somehow manage to steal your logistics tech.



One ship???! Wow. BTW, I thought you could get your huge fleets to >8k attack ratings?

My highest fleet attack rating was several games ago with 5 huge ships + 1 large ship together contributing to a rating just over 7.5k.

With a ton of number crunching and a severely huge amount of useless effort, it's possible to get an attack rating >9k on a fleet of 29 tiny hulls, but that'd require a whopping 24 maximized military starbases. Maybe with TA's special modules, one could get that to over 10k if they actually went and tried to build this system.



That wouldn't quite work, as far as I see it. On Painful, a DL frigate had 394 attack. 28(57 logistics) x 7hp tiny fighters = 203 hp. They'll get killed. AFAIK, the tie rule cares about maximum hp for each individual ship, and not attack rating or current hp or total fleet hp. The tinys can be useful as a shield for medium/large/huge hulled 'tank' ships, however.

Oh well - was hoping to use an overwhelming numbers tactic to bring down the big boys.

This is actually the first game so far that's gone long enough to research into large hulls. I've been dragging my feet in this game just to see what the upper tech tree holds. I was getting a bit bored just researching and killing transports coming my way so I sent all my ships in just to get stuck on one stubborn DL ship that woudn't die.

Maybe I'll just go toy with the other races until my tech maxes out...

This tactic works due to weapon limitations. That 394 attack rating may come from only 10-12 weapon modules on the hull. Each weapon can only kill one ship per round, regardless of how much overkill the weapon has. So long as your fleet kills the DL ship in the first round, you will win while only losing as many ships as the enemy had weapons.

Ah, when I count fleet attack totals I'm not counting any military starbase bonuses at all. That is, the best I could do in DA without starbases was generally about a 5.2k attack in a fleet.

And yes, it was 5608 attack on ONE DL ship. One has to know how to manipulate the tie rule to beat that.

In TA, while in my own influence.. so combining a +20% fleet bonus and a +25% influence weapon bonus I've managed to get individual huge ships up to a 1268 attack without starbases... which led me to a little over 6k total. My previous high (in DA) were ships with 720 attack per huge hull, so its quite a jump with the new toys.

Somewhere on these boards I saw someone claim 10k to 20k attack values in fleets. Assuming they are not talking about DLs or Peacekeepers... or basically some mega event I don't know how that is possible. Perhaps they are including starbases.

Part of the problem is even with multiple Hyperion Shrinkers I can't seem to get more than 350 slots on a huge hull. With a top gun typically taking up a ratio of about 10 slots for ~ 15 damage its really hard for me, before bonuses, to get a ship over 500 base attack power. That is, a 500 on the Intelligence Report Screen... that counts no bonuses of any kind. I've had to remove weapons though for the +% weapon modules, and they are large, which is why my huge hull attacks still haven't jumped that much. Still, if I have an empire bonus of about +150% weapons I've gotten fleets up to 8k, but that was using medium fighters, not huge hulls.

~ Wyndstar

In my second DA 1.8 Maso game(with custom Super Annihilator evil-robots called the 'Qolventz Republic'), I've maxed out the missile tech tree, have 3 fully-extracted Military Resources, and have 2 Hyperion Shrinkers(one captured from the Iconians). This gives me huge ships with 1209 Missile Attack in reality and 545 in the Intel Report. The ships are a sub-standard design with a single HyperWarp Mk.2 engine and no life support. A pair of Quantum Torp 3s have mistakenly been used to fill in the left-over spaces(left behind by Blackhole Eruptors), losing 5 attack points. But once I get Black Hole Guns, I can scrap those old Quantum Torps and hopefuly will be able to get a slightly better rating.

The Yor would probably get the best Intel Reports since they have a 20% Miniaturization bonus, but otherwise, it just depends on stockpiling lots of Military Resources and Hyperion Shrinkers. But Medium hull fleets with 8k attack(I'm thinking 11 ships per fleet) is something impressive. Including 24 starbases and their bonuses, it can well go over 10k. But 20k is just ridiculous for anyone who is not a Dread Lord.

Thinking about Hyperion Shrinkers, it also brings to mind that you can create huge fleets with huge ratings by seizing Hyperion Logistics Systems! This would be really convenient since 1 Log System brings one more medium ship into battle. However, I've never seen an AI build a Hyperion Logistics System yet. I'm sure they do it up there on Suicidal, though.



With about 15 Black Hole Guns bolted onto the Dread ship, you would need Expert Logistics at least and would still be getting nearly your entire fleet slaughtered. Larger hulls would be more efficient in terms of research and production since they're reusable.

In GC2:DL, however, this would be an extremely useful tactic since one Dread would only be capable of taking down one fighter.