Okay, not quite.  Hello, everyone.  Long time player, first time poster.  Played vanilla GalCiv2: DL for a long time before getting the expansions.  I have some concerns about the easy Dread Lords who show up in the Sandbox games.

This is the second time I've seen them and have to say, I'm rather disappointed.  They're not a threat at all.  Maybe if they show up really early on then yeah, but if they show up late any of the races can hold their own against them and wipe them out.

So I'm looking for some reassurance that maybe these Dread Lords will become tougher with time.  So here's some questions for the learned players out there:

1.)  Logistics.  Do the Dread Lords have their own Tech Tree they research up, or am I stuck seeing fleets no larger than 2 ships because of 10/10 logistics limitations?

2.)  Do they get better at conquering planets?  Because the whole 2 Troops they send in one transport couldn't conquer France. (I know they're tough, but that's not enough).

3.)  If there are open worlds nearby, do they build colony ships?

4.)  Do their planets ever hold more than 20 million people?  Again, I know they're tougher than usual, but if they don't colonize and don't expand well, the wave after wave of transports the AI civilizations will send in will wipe their one home planet out easily.

5.)  Cause I'm still getting used to all the new features, this current game is on "Normal" difficulty setting.  Is that the reason for the Dread Lord's weakness?   

I love that the Dread Lords showed up in a sandbox game.  I prefer playing those to the campaigns.  I would play Dread Lord Domination, but that scenario limits you to playing as the Terrans (it also crashes the game whenever I try to play it, but that's another topic).  So if anyone out there can help out with my questions, I'd appreciate it.

Seriously.  They're not scaring me.  At all.  They are the least "mega" of the Mega Events.