I’m a little late to the Campaign party, so sorry if this is something that’s already been discussed to death, but can anyone explain how the matching up of fleets works in the Campaign mode? I seem to find my 2-5k fleets attacked by fleets 10 times their size, which doesn’t seem quite fair. I might get a cheesy victory anyway if I’ve got a fighter-spam fleet or something, but it’s still not quite right.
I was expecting to be matched up against fleets of broadly similar strengths - have I got the wrong idea?
Yes you pretty much got the wrong idea, but I agree with you on how it should be.
I cheat a little in the campaign mode. What I do is send in a single frigate or fighter to the enemy planet, so I can investigate what kind of fleet I’ll be up against. I can zoom in to see what kind of weapons their ships are using and then retreat. When the defeated window pops up I can still scroll around with the mouse if I need a longer look. Then I sort of know if I would be able to win against it.
Once you’ve scouted the enemy fleet at a planet it will not change anymore. But if you get attacked by a fleet from another planet and you win, don’t attack their planet back out of the assumption that it’ll be empty or that you’ll encounter the same fleet, because it’s not. A completely different enemy fleet will now be stationed there. The race might even be completely different. To make sense of it, you could say the other fleet beat you to it. Or that the second fleet chased away the first fleet, which attacked you out of desperation to find a new home world.
Hmm, did the new update change something about matchups or am I j ust unlucky? Since my old campaign save got frelled, I started a new Nomad campaign. I’m constantly facing fleets 3-5 times larger than my ~10k hitpoints bunch - and that’s not counting 80k HP Tribe fleets. This after conquering three systems. The fleets in those systems were, on the other hand, around 2-3k. It feels like the fleet generator-thingy jumped from one extreme to the other without anything in between.
yea. i wondered why I got spanked so bad when i took in my 5K empire fleet into a battle which didnt look so unbalanced… by the time I realized i was against a 26K fleet my cruisers were toast before they could turn around to retreat… sad day.
I would like some more info about the fleets im going up against. the fighter tactic seems reasonable (you’d do that in real life) but then again, if it’s that easy… could cliffski give us some metric of opposition strength ?
also, is there a way of seeing if any of your fleets are used in teh campaign? It would be fun to see how bad im getting spanked
That’s not cheating; it’s called scouting, and is a Good Thing.
Regarding the mis-matching between fleets. I had noticed the same thing, but have an hypothesis. When you take a planet, it triggers a response from the nearby empires, and they start building up. The slower your advance, the more time you give them to put together an overwhelming fleet and attack you. And let’s face it, early in the game they are all likely to be larger than you are. So the faster your advance, the less time they have to respond, and the more likely you are to be able to establish a defensible perimeter. I’m not going to name specific planets, because some things should be left to the imagination.
Also, however, I will note again that I almost never build cruisers, except as fast carriers. Fleet tactics should be based more on WWII in the Pacific, than on WWI in the North Sea. That’s not “spamming”, it’s actually a logical response to the way the game has been designed.
sad day.