As a suggestion, it might be good to move those icons to underneath the planet, rather than by the side. I generally zoom out all of the way to see the entire map at once, and the planet name labels obscure the anomaly icons.
I am taking a break from GSB, because of the ridiculous difficulty. I am playing on easy and getting this kind of attacks is very frustrating. Not only you have to flee, but building a fleet able to defeat this enemy takes ages. I understand, that the campaign was made to last for a week, but this is just making the opposite and I just had enough of it.
Wow, what a lot of ummm, negativity…
First: I bought the game to support Cliff. I enjoy GSB & will happily help fill his coffers if it means he can keep on having fun developing games I enjoy.
Second: What is wrong with hitting turn over 5 times. That is part of the learning curve and it takes around ohh, 30 seconds…
Third: Life is full of unexpected set-backs. I love the screen shot above. That adds drama and an element of “oh shit, this isn’t a complete walk-over, I actually have to think about how to win…”.
I’ve taken to sticking around in apparently impossible odds battles, a lot of the fleets you come across are very poorly designed (and these are all player fleets). I’d still run from that screenshot engagement though if all I had were two Frigates…
If your fleets are regularly loosing in close match ups, you have to consider the possibly that you are in the bottom 50% of Ship/Fleet designers in this game. Go back to standalone battles and refine your ship building skills.
And thats not to say the game is perfect, we are BETA testing, but so far all I’ve seen in this thread is stuff that warrants being put in the instruction manual. “Advice for the would be Galactic Overlord.” Build up your forces. Your neighbours are not freindly. Sometimes they have more toys than you. Be prepared to lose battles occasionally. Losing an occasional battle only leads to Galactic defeat if YOU give up…
After playing some more, I’m starting to think about this problem in different terms.
I’ve been playing Tribe mass fighter fleets and doing extremely well on easy mode. As most of us know, such fleets do well even against opposition fleets with extremely heavy anti-fighter. I’m thinking that part of what’s happening here is that it’s actually very very hard to make cruiser or frigate fleets that consistently do well. There are lots of ways to build capital ships and lots of ways to do so badly. And there are a fair number of fleet builds out there in GC that simply annihilate ‘balanced’ or ‘well-rounded’ fleets. That makes it much harder to do well with capital ships than with fighters.
I’m not sure how to change things around to make things easier on the players who don’t have the kind of strong command of cruiser and frigate use needed to make them work.
I am taking a forced break due to RSI. 
I’ll keep posting, but my right finger is all mouse clicked out.
Once I turned off all the extra graphics options, the campaign stopped crashing every time I retreated. Once retreating worked, the game got a lot less frustrating. The giant fleets are a nuisance, but when I attack again next turn, I often find they have vanished, which is strange but helpful.
For every large fleet my fighters take apart, there is a small fleet that attacks, appears immune to all attacks (due to armour), and drives me up the wall. The worst is the all-frigate Nomad group (huge fleet) that beats my cruisers - how the hell frigates can stand up to cruisers in a straight fight is beyond me, but it happens every campaign.
At this point, if I could fix one thing, it would be to filter out the edge cases - the huge fighter swarms, the maxed armour cruisers etc. I don’t mind losing to a well-designed fleet, but losing to a huge swarm or a a design that abuses armour stacking takes some fun out of the game.
I do believe the campaign is a great game (or rather, it will be soon), and it is interesting being part of the final development stage rather than waiting for the polished release. I still can’t believe it was $7 - I expected Cliffy to charge more, given how long he has spent on it.
As i’ve posted elsewhere, Cruiser are not capital ships.
And i quite agree with the sentiment, that building a good, strong cruiser fleet is quite hard. I have a rebel missile fleet that beats most other missile fleets, and a good enough rush will get enough CL through to kill me, or a … you get the point
technically,even a frigate is a capital ship… anything is when it doesnt handle like a fightercraft (-ish anyway) anymore but instead has turret emplacements
but then again i guess that depends on the terminology you were raised on… i was raised on FreeSpace and EVE Online 
(and a large amount of absolutely unrelated sci-fi books)
anyways,yes,that picture above really seems familiar,in various permutations that is… not uncommon for me to run my 4 cruisers into a inconceivably huge swarm of frigates,possibly backed up by something heavier
also i had the immense pleasure of aninhalating a incredibly huge swarm of imperial weapon platforms in a anti-fighter config,which attacked my system where those 4 cruisers of mine were stationed… was a massacre, illogical one ofcourse but atleast it was fun
i do realize that there is a huge number of variables in question when assembling/picking the opposing fleet, but it gets ridiculous at times… and the fleets changing every time you try makes it seem more awkward,especially when a huge Fed frig swarm morphs into a alliance cruiser group
I always said, there is no such thing as a balanced fleet. Every fleet has an easy counter when both side has the same credit count, and in the campaign there’s nothing you can do about it since enemy fleet randomly spawns.
Fighter spam aside, the only strategy left is preserve and outnumber. This simply means spam a bunch of long range with armored tank in front and some cruiser laser to deal with rush, and outnumber them enough so it also kills a pure long range fleet before your armor tank breaks.
And use the natural choke points/fortress worlds to give your fleets and advantage - giveing you more time to build larger numbers (augments the outnumber component of that strategy). And makes it easier to “preserve”, because the attacking fleets have a disadvantage.
I think you have hit it on the head. Dumbing the game down (as it should be in Cadet Mode) will help only so far. What is really needed is bite sized education and encouraging would be Galactic Overlords to read it. Catch is many want the “solutions” handed to them on a platter and get frustrated at the first hurdle.
Don’t make it sound so negative. Some people look for challenges in real life, and to gaming to temporarily escape from it. This is why games have difficulty settings. Ideally, you turn yours up, I’ll turn mine down, we will both be happy and Cliff gets a living out of it.
My apologies.
It’d be interesting to know how the difficulty levels actually alter the game. I’m wondering if Cliff is using a rating system for player Fleets. He’s obviously got the win/lose stats and from there it would be possible to allocate them to differant difficulty levels for a given size of fleet. Some of the oddball results in Cadet difficulty may be because its early days and the system hasn’t shaken out yet/tried enough Player Fleets. The same problems would be happening at the other end.
If cadet is beating your ass, I suspect you need to look at your ships. I played 2 campaigns through ~320 turns today, one intentionally going VERY slow and the other doing my normal “FT swarm of DOOM” tactic (50+ squads of fighters attacking? nothing survives THAT!). The quick, huge fighter fleet not at all suprisingly cleaned up big-time. By turn 70 i have 5 worlds comfortably held, 8 total. I sat until turn 100 just making more FT then powered through the rest of the map FT could reach by turn 200. Turn 200-250 was making my cruiser/frigate fleet (Fast Missile cruisers with ion Cannon frigates, fast little buggers that in big swarms are LETHAL. I’ll post my build tomorrow in the appropriate thread), and by turn 300-310 I had won the campaign. Yay and such! I captured no frigates or cruisers, just some fighters that were functionally identical to others i’d captured.
The second campaign, however, was a much slower, more ponderous affair. I was very aggressive early game, but only had at MOST 21 squads of fighters on my exposed worlds. This meant i was getting attacked, taking losses (only fighters) or if i HAD to retreat, being able to come back next turn with 3+ times the force. By turn 280 i had only 33% of the map. But if i choose I could have owned nearly 66-75%. Why? I wanted to capture designs. And man oh man did i ever! i ended up with something like 63 captured designs, of which 4-6 were cruisers. Why? Because i let things build long enough. Waiting early game so you can make an early, explosive growth, then consolodate, then grow more works only when you have the fleet levels to beat what you’ll find. if you turtle up and wait, you’ll have 30-40k HP nomad and Fed fleets attacking you (which, if you use my rebel dual laser fighter build, is killed easily!)
Or just turtle until you have 6 point fleets. Trust me when I say it is hard to kill a 150,000 point fleet with 20 missile spam cruisers. (don’t judge, I had like 30 regular crusiers, than associated fighters and frigates for support)
I get screwed the second I leave my home planet, I can’t seem to afford big enough fleets to have feasible defense in two planets at once, and I can’t just keep building because my maintenance gets way too high, and the repair bills start to be higher than my income.
Count me among those frustrated with the wildly varying difficulty. I wish I could get more information about my enemies, so that I could play with some strategy. But instead, for every battle, you have to simply build the biggest fleet you can, and hope that it’s enough - because you have no way of knowing what you’re attacking or what’s going to attack you.
So, you blindly send your very expensive, and carefully constructed and balanced fleet into battle - but as the battle starts, you realize you stand no chance. Try retreating and even with double Cruiser III engines, you lose all of your cruisers because they can’t retreat fast enough and get “left behind” (spontaneously explode).
It’s so frustrating. I love this game, but I don’t have much fun playing this campaign. Every battle is simply a roll of the dice. It doesn’t matter what you do. And “Easy” difficulty is sure as hell not easy. Not even a bit.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a fantastic game, but these are some serious issues that interfere with the fun.
Welcome Dubious. Nice to have another newish player like myself.
Actually there are a few strategies that you can use.
- Build a very generic ship/fleet that has no real weaknesses. It won’t do outstanding against anything, but won’t really suck either. 123 has a few suggestions, but start out like so:
Go Tribe, Utopia hull. Take 4 Plasma Launchers, 2 pulse lasers, 1 tractor beam, 1 beam laser. Then get a tribe Repair pod doodad and 1 anti-missile guidance hozer. Get 1 reflective shield and about 13 armor. This simple ship is cost effective and can be massed… the more the merrier.
There is no anti-missile vs Plasma so it provides reliable long range firepower vs any shielded or medium armored foe.
The beam laser is there to kill “armor tanks”… anything under 70 armor will take damage from the Beam.
2 pulse lasers provide solid anti-fighter capability, and provide short range firepower especially against frigates.
1 tractor really hoses enemy fighters.
The shield is at half strength but it works to ensure frigate weapons and beam lasers bounce off for a while anyways.
The 13 armor is to ensure laser fighters can’t get thru your armor immediately (8 penetration), and rocket fighters (12 pen) bounce for a while.
-
Go to the MODS section and install Unity, Unity Viral, and Union custom races. That gives you the advantage needed to do well in campaign even against tough odds.
-
Before attacking, send 1 fighter squad (or even 1 fighter) to that world. Immediately retreat after slowing things down a lot. This will “lock their fleet” such that it will not change. At the least, this will give you a general idea what you are up against.
I played the demo for quite a while and unlocked everything in there (though boy am I sick of those first three scenarios…) but I find myself being trashed in the campaign… on easy mode. Granted I don’t have nearly the level of experience as some of the players here… but it’s a little disheartening. A challenge is one thing, but being constantly curb stomped is another.
I know this is what I tried at first, but as soon as I run into a specialized enemy I get ripped apart. I thought I was doing well one campaign having conquered my fourth planet, when suddenly a bunch of tribe missile cruisers just takes my empire apart planet by planet, with my homeworld and only source of income, second to fall (nor did I have enough time to pump out any counters to that fleet). I really don’t want to have to go with giant lumps of metal with a single weapon on the vanguard of my fleets all the time, or just relying on whoever has more missiles wins, etc. I like the more balanced fleets without having to rely on some… well ‘cheesy’ tactic or I can’t win.
I don’t think you should have to go download a (relatively) powerful mod to be able to beat the campaign; it should be possible with any of the races that come with it. Possible doesn’t mean easy though.
I really liked this suggestion; intelligence is very useful, and this definitely makes it easier. I’ll sacrifice a mostly empty frigate and a single fighter just to see what kind of weapons the enemy is using.
I would’ve rather liked the campaign fleets to be taken from a premade pool rather than challenges (or leave that to the hardcore mode). It also would have been nice if the different factions held different regions of space (eg I know around here I’m just going to fight Alliance, but over there is Order territory). And hotkeys. And at least general information on what’s in adjacent sectors; something as simple as “3 cruiser 4 frigates 32 fighters” would be something at least.
I like the idea of the campaign, but actually playing it I’m finding it was a waste of time and money so far… maybe with more experience I’ll change my mind but the way it is right now my friends and I are just going to use challenges to simulate a campaign. I otherwise love the game though.
Unity isnt a (relatively) “powerful” mod - it just presents the player with a range of counters for the various spams found in the galactic conquest - but we are not here to talk about the comparison between the Vanilla races and Mods.
I agree that it should be possible to beat the Galactic map with any vanilla race. I really like the suggestion that there should be premade fleets for the easy levels increasing the mix to online versions as you hit the hardcore levels. This also gives the modders something else to play with 
I thought as it stands currently Unity is still “unbeatable”.
Granted it’s nowhere near as bad as some other mods, but I am just saying.
As for campaign, I don’t like it much. Too much buildup/repetition, too little design/innovation.