How does this campagin work? why cant i play it offline?
i started a new campaign, took the lowest difficulty but after having conquered 6 planets i cant even conquer more… Enemy Ships with 45000 Fleetpoints? Common? How should i take them off? Even they attack me with maybe 10000 FP, and i start a counterattack on their planet, the still got even more… is this buggy or impossible? i mean, its the lowest difficulty 
You may want to take a look at the unofficial campaign guide: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=5572
Also, remember that the fleets you face are fleets that other players have used in the past (obtaining these is also why you can’t play offline). It’s going to be a much harder challenge than usual because people are generally much better than game AI, and the enemy fleets aren’t restricted by the same factors that yours are.
tl;dr - GC is hard. Very hard.
This topic has been approached a couple of times. The campaign thread mentioned by Kemp starts with some advice that isn’t necessarily correct, but at least gives you something to think about.
Here are a some additional points that have been mentioned in other places:
It is definitely possible to win the campaign, so don’t give up.
You know what…I think I wish to revise and extend my previous remarks. The campaign game may no longer be playable, at least on the Admiral setting.
I have played, and won, a number of games on that setting in the past. Recently, however, I began to experience a string of losses. At first I thought it was that I was playing with a new race and just hadn’t gotten the hang of the new designs. But today I had some free time, so I switched back to my original race (Federation) and have been taking notes, and the computer is definitely attacking more often, with larger fleets, and at more worlds simultaneously. In addition, the percentage of fleets designed almost exclusively to combat fighters has gone up dramatically.
While one would expect some increase in the number of anti-fighter fleets over time, the fact that fighters are only super-useful in the beginning stages of the game should mean that they would still remain a relatively limited percentage of the overall number of player-designed fleets available, because most fleets would still be more balanced setups designed to fight battles in the mid-to late game. But that does not seem to be the case. Furthermore, the anti-fighter fleets are now coming equipped with 20+ squadrons of fighters, when all I can afford to deploy are fighters and a few frigates.
In addition, when my only fleet has 5K hitpoints and is already up against maintenance limitations, the challenge of having to fight multiple fleets with 40K+ hitpoints, all attacking simultaneously or in quick succession, even though I have been trying to stay back from the border so as to avoid provoking buildups, is not enjoyable. Yeah, I generally destroy the first fleet with minimal losses (say 15-20%), but then the second fleet takes me down to 50% of my original strength and the third finishes me off.
Recently, with a fleet of 20K hitpoints, within a space of 9 turns I had to fight enemy fleets totaling 387K.
Also, I have done some experiments with replaying turns, and it also seems that the computer has knowledge of what I am doing and can adjust its attacks accordingly in the same turn. Maybe this is just paranoia, but when I tweak my deployments for a turn and the AI then suddenly decides to attack somewhere that it previously left alone, and this happens consistently, I begin to smell a rat.
I once won an Admiral setting game in 174 turns, although my average was more generally in the 250 to 300 turn range. Now I get regularly wiped out before I can even take and hold Argoshka. And by regularly I mean 100% of the time.
So maybe I’m becoming paranoid and/or senile, but I doubt it. Something else is going on here. And if the Admiral setting game has become impossible, it is also possible that the Cadet and Captain settings have gotten frustratingly hard as well. So ignore everything I said above, and good luck. Me, I think I’m going to take some time off from this game.
Just for the record, this problem seems to have popped up somewhere in the 1.54 to 1.55 update range. But since we don’t know what goes into the update packages, there is no way to tell exactly.
As it is impossible to beat everything with 1 type of fleet, I won’t be surprise that even the lower difficulties will become unplayable as time progress.
Well, there are situations from which one can recover, especially with some depth of position and ships that can beat a speedy retreat.
But when you are attacked at 3 of your 4 worlds simultaneously, with fleets outnumbering you by 6-8 to one, and you defeat them all and then 3 turns later it happens AGAIN, well, not so much.
Well, THAT’S interesting… So, I just did a an experiment on Admiral, and repeated it on Captain. I’m running v1.55.1 for the Mac. Our friend, Cliffski, appears to have definitely made an update of late.
I ran 6 squadrons, 4 missile, 1 painter, 1 dogfighter. In another run, I used a Frigate that stayed at extreme range. After a certain period of time (I didn’t measure), the battle was arbitrarily declared a loss. The progress of the battle was clearly irrelevant. In one case, vs. one cruiser & 3 frigates, I was ahead 98% to 68%. In another case, vs. 2 cruisers and 1 squadron, I was up 82% to 42%. But they still counted as losses.
So, a timer to act as a counter to fighter spam. I have to say, I like it. Even though it forces me to change up.
Against the kind of odds that I seem now to be regularly facing, fighters were in fact the only possible response. A squadron of fighters might contain more firepower than the equivalent expenditure on frigates, but what really used to make them work was their speed. A fleet of frigates, or even frigates and cruisers, will simply be ground down by inevitable attrition when facing a numerically superior enemy. Now that fighters no longer work, there is no way to survive the early game that I can discover. I may try a combined fighter/frigate strategy again, but I have already attempted that 3-4 times, with consistently disastrous results. Generally, the first thing that gets killed are the frigates, even if they try and stay at long range, and then the fighters get wiped out by the 40K fleet that comes along 2 days later.
Will be interested to hear if your results vary from this significantly.
OK, just tried again with a mixed frigate/fighter strategy. Actually made it as far as Argoshka, with relatively minimal losses, on around turn 48. The turn I took Argoshka, however, the computer attacked Keeshamun, my jump-off point, with a fleet larger than mine. When backtracking to take out this fleet, Sullogobah was attacked from the opposite direction with a fleet 20% larger than mine. After the Keeshamun battle, my fleet had no fighters left, and was down to about 5K HP. The fleet sitting at Sullogobah, comprised of 60 frigates, was about 9K HP. My frigates were slaughtered. Oh yeah, and while I was attacking Sullogobah, the AI hit Keeshamun AGAIN with an 8K fleet (that made 16K of HP within 3 turns). So, on turn 51, I had no fleet and two planets (Rana and Besustine) with no production capabilities. RIP me.
Additional points: at the time it was attacked, Sullogobah did not have a garrison fleet, so I didn’t provoke the AI.
As I said before, it doesn’t appear that the patch just made fighters more likely to surrender for no reason. It also seems to have increased the speed of the AI buildups and the frequency with which it attacks. If someone else has won on the Admiral setting after the 1.55 patch, I would love to hear the story, however. I am willing to learn.