OK, first post.



Love the game. Great graphics, great sound, great fun.



I have a question.



After I get through the early phase, colonized my sector of space, buillt up a decent few fleets (dedicated space and siege), I then want to move out. However the 2 stars that link to neighbouring civs (this is a large spiral galaxy) are basically inundated with about 6 medium sized enemy fleets at each. I have two big fleets at each but this is not enogh, turn based, to clear the enemy out. So I have had around 20 turns of me killing them and them reinforcing.



Thoughts? (not really interested in multiplay) thank you

Well that's a similar issue to what I ran into that prompted the 'retreat' thread. It gets worse if you're near a wormhole because half of those fleets retreat and then just jump back to pin you. So you can't fight them yet somehow they prevent you from leaving....



If the current mechanics are intended then it's a very artificial and 'cheesy' tactic. Personally I think the limitation of one 'attack' by a fleet/turn is ridiculous if the enemy retreats. It should be that if the enemy retreats as it's first card, the attacking fleet is not counted as having used it's 'attack' for the turn. So you can't hold someone in place by cycling retreating fleets.



In your case, if they are standing and fighting, you can at least eventually overwhelm them by whittling them down each battle. It'll take some time, but it's possible. If they start the retreat nonsense, prepare for a grueling few hours of picking cards for pointless battles and executing said battles each and every turn....

I haven't played much with the latest patch, but what I've been able to do a couple times is create single ship glass cannon fleets. If you can make a cheap ship that is able to kill at least one of their ships each fight, you can whittle them down by attacking with one ship at a time. Even if you lose the ship, as long as the enemy lost a ship that cost more, it was worth it. Yes, it can take a long time to wipe out a stack of attackers this way, but it does (or did at least) work. The key is cheap ships you can make a lot of quickly. I think I got lucky that they didn't have enough missile defense. I found that having more than one ship in the fleets didn't help. I could always kill one ship with one of mine, but using two shipped usually just meant I'd lose two ships for every one I killed. Although now I wonder what battle orders I was using... And I think that was a couple patches back.



I have had times where it didn't work. I was too far back on tech and they had too much missile defense. I was gonna lose anyways. It's pretty useless to have a pile of single fleets ships in orbit defending a planet, but having them a turn away from where you need them so them can move them in (one at a time) and attack in the same turn can really turn an invasion around. It feels extremely cheesy to take out a fleet of 2 and 4 CP ships this way, but that's never stopped me from trying.

fizbin wrote:
I haven't played much with the latest patch, but what I've been able to do a couple times is create single ship glass cannon fleets. If you can make a cheap ship that is able to kill at least one of their ships each fight, you can whittle them down by attacking with one ship at a time. Even if you lose the ship, as long as the enemy lost a ship that cost more, it was worth it. Yes, it can take a long time to wipe out a stack of attackers this way, but it does (or did at least) work. The key is cheap ships you can make a lot of quickly. I think I got lucky that they didn't have enough missile defense. I found that having more than one ship in the fleets didn't help. I could always kill one ship with one of mine, but using two shipped usually just meant I'd lose two ships for every one I killed. Although now I wonder what battle orders I was using... And I think that was a couple patches back.



I have had times where it didn't work. I was too far back on tech and they had too much missile defense. I was gonna lose anyways. It's pretty useless to have a pile of single fleets ships in orbit defending a planet, but having them a turn away from where you need them so them can move them in (one at a time) and attack in the same turn can really turn an invasion around. It feels extremely cheesy to take out a fleet of 2 and 4 CP ships this way, but that's never stopped me from trying.

While that may or may not work, does it not seem utterly ridiculous that we have to resort to such 'gamey' tactics in order to play effectively?



I, for one, have no real desire to do that every turn. This is supposed to be a game about interstellar empires and more of a macro scale management (hence why combat is cards, not individual control). If I have to micro the ship engagements every turn, I'd say that is a HUGE failure in the game mechanics. If I'm going to manage at that level, I'd MUCH rather it be in battle itself, not in allocating and resolving single ship battles to prevent the AI from auto-retreating or simply piling hordes of useless fleets into my system.

Post patch, the fleets do seem to merge. The AI was not doing it to me, but the thought had occurred to me to pin and unbeatable fleet by sending in a stack of 20 single ship fleets. now the ships appear to merge into a single fleet.



I, have seen similar bottlenecks, but when that happens to me, I am either erasing fleets 8-16 ships a pop or I am rushing reinforcements to survive the 20 rounds of assault headed my way.



The last point I would add is the my siege ships do invest the left overs into kinetics so my stacks of siege ships can shoo away their stacks of siege ships if I want. (often I want not, as I prefer to leave them pinned till their turn for annihilation comes up)

ShuShu62 wrote:
Post patch, the fleets do seem to merge.

In all technicality, fleets have auto merged to prevent Scout Spam since early vanilla.

I commented in another thread that I only like to play my one custom race in Endless Space--no variety for me. That race is Sheredyn-based, so there is no cheesy retreating. I warn you: Once you play Sheredyn, you won't want to play anything else!

Uncle_Joe wrote:
Well that's a similar issue to what I ran into that prompted the 'retreat' thread. It gets worse if you're near a wormhole because half of those fleets retreat and then just jump back to pin you. So you can't fight them yet somehow they prevent you from leaving....



If the current mechanics are intended then it's a very artificial and 'cheesy' tactic. Personally I think the limitation of one 'attack' by a fleet/turn is ridiculous if the enemy retreats. It should be that if the enemy retreats as it's first card, the attacking fleet is not counted as having used it's 'attack' for the turn. So you can't hold someone in place by cycling retreating fleets.



In your case, if they are standing and fighting, you can at least eventually overwhelm them by whittling them down each battle. It'll take some time, but it's possible. If they start the retreat nonsense, prepare for a grueling few hours of picking cards for pointless battles and executing said battles each and every turn....

I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. I am currently in a war with three other civs over Aruigia and I have been stuck there for the past 9 turns fighting off wave after wave of inferior fleets...Needs to be addressed I think.

Maybe what's needed is a module borrowed from Eve Online: the warp scrambler. Make it a very large support module that would prevent enemy fleets from retreating combat. Make it large so you wouldn't want to automatically put it on every ship or even every fleet.



Another possibility is make fleets endure one entire (obviously the long-range) phase of combat before escaping.

coyote303 wrote:
Maybe what's needed is a module borrowed from Eve Online: the warp scrambler. Make it a very large support module that would prevent enemy fleets from retreating combat. Make it large so you wouldn't want to automatically put it on every ship or even every fleet.



Another possibility is make fleets endure one entire (obviously the long-range) phase of combat before escaping.

Point of order: that would be the Warp Dissipator module, which was both a ship module and a planetary improvement in MoO2.



As I noted in a post in another thread, this is the kind of thing ES' combat system needs: more tactical options which allow the player to take a different approach from just stacking weapons and defences in an unbalanced game of rock-paper-scissors.

If your two fleets are strong enough to either take out or force the AI fleets to retreat, you could always cheese the AI with the load/save "feature". That is, use your two attacks (1 per fleet), save the game then immediately load that save. Now you can attack again with those two fleets. However, don't immediately hit the attack button, because the AI will likely initiate the attacks if it has a lot of fleets there. Odds are it will attack your fleets with all but the last two of its fleets that have MP. Some of its fleets might only have invasion modules with no combat MP, so those fleets won't attack. If after a minute or so the AI doesn't initiate, then go ahead and do it yourself. Repeat this process until all the fleets are either dead or retreated.



Yes, this is a very cheesy thing to do in single player, but I figure if the AI is going to cheese me with retreating then sending that same fleet right back immediately (multiple times in a turn if it has enough moves and short enough distance between the systems), then it's perfectly fair for me to cheese right back.