Need advice on playing the cats

[haphazard1]

No problems on the thread necro, HegemonKhan. It is good to see some activity in the MOO forum.

The 'merchants of death' idea is interesting. You would need to get contact with multiple races fairly early, so you could get the most out of trading your weapons tech around. I am not sure you could avoid your clients turning the weapons tech against you, given the cats' typical poor diplomatic relations. You would also need some luck to keep the AIs mostly balanced, and not end up with one AI growing too powerful through conquest.

But it might be a fun alternative to attempting to play against the AIs' advantages with the cats' poor economic and development traits. I certainly have not had much success playing the cats in the standard manner.

[RefSteel]

I think the "Merchants of Death" idea would make a fun variant for a Succession Game: "You must trade or gift all your Weapon techs to every AI you can at the first opportunity!"

The main thing to understand about playing Mrrshans is that your combat fleets (all of them, from laser fighters denying a planet up through mainline assault fleets) can do more with less than you would expect when playing other races. The key when playing any race is to maximize your production base, which usually means rapid expansion to many worlds. For the Mrrshans, a few laser fighters can go a long way in securing a planet for you that an AI would colonize first. And you don't have to play 1v1 for a military tech edge to enable military expansion, gaining production base by taking it from a neighbor. For this purpose though, one key thing to remember is that lasers and nuclear bombs with Mrrshan targeting reflexes can already be a military tech edge, as long as you've got the propulsion to get your ships where they need to be!

[Bionic Commando]

I actually just finished a fun game as the Meklar. In a 5/medium/imp-kyrub, there was little separation from 1-4, including the Mrrshans. They wound up having comically advanced Weapons tech and turned out to be good Allies for me. I would trade some tech for the most advanced guns (I had Plasmas pretty early it felt like) and rode to one of my easiest victories at that difficulty level.

The other thing I have to say is 'boy, aren't NPGs really good?' I feel like my games as the Meklar often boil down to whether I have NPG in my tech tree or can acquire it.