The races for player, challenging the status quo (A little)

[Waterd]

Agree one of the advantages player has over AI, is that the player can design ships specially for the ocassion, where AI just builds random stuff.

[Psillycyber]

It is horrifying when the AI figures out how to build missile boats. I am getting my butt kicked in a game as the silicoids right now because runaway Psilons have built an unbeatable ship. Size huge, armed with a 5-rack of 26 Pulson missiles. 7 of those bad boys are coming at my home world right now. They will destroy all of my missile bases with their 3000+ damager per turn in two turns. Oh, and they have a hundred stack of medium antimatter torpedo boats riding along! My strategy of counting on repulsor beam/warp dissipator doesn't work against this sort of stuff. But what could I have done? I guess build about 150+ missile bases, as opposed to the 40 or so I have, and blow their ships out of the sky before their missiles can get to me.

A big cloud of high-maneuverability fighters should shred ships like that unless they have repulsors or energy pulsars or something. You'll lose a bunch in the process if they target your ships instead of the planet, but it won't be nearly as bad as with the bases getting slagged. It's trickier if they've got the right specials to obviate basic fighters, but the AI rarely stumbles upon a truly unbeatable design; the trick is always to find the weakness of their fleets and exploit it. In this case, I might rely on missile boats of my own since they can be built all over the empire and all go to the same threatened world and force the enemy to split its fire instead of concentrating on the planet exclusively. I might even go with multiple identical designs to ensure as many as possible of mine get their payloads to strike home before they have to retreat.

Great tips! Yeah, if I had done better scouting, I might have built some Stinger missile boats of my own. I need to get in the habit of building some fast, lightly-armed (or unarmed) medium ships with battle scanners and reserve fuel tanks to keep an eye on the enemy. I built them for one recent game, and they were working out great, but I got sidetracked in this current game and let my scouting lapse.