Changed to Order, built ships using species-specific weapons.
Went to first scenario (Sirius something or other). Whupped first level of difficulty. Whupped second level of difficulty.
Was skunked on hardest level. Scratched head. Redesigned vessels.
Skunked.
Redesigned.
Skunked. Skunked HARD.
Scratched head. Rinse. Repeat. What is it with these guys?
Gave up after an hour after cycling through all usual design strategeries–missile spam, beam spam, beam and missile, knick-knack, Paddy-Whack, give the dog a bone spam. Fast cruisers, slow cruisers, more armor, less armor, this old man came tumbling home armor. All skunked.
Am clearly missing something important about these lads.
Hints? Tips? Nudges? Wink-winks? A wink is as good as a nod.
Anyway, the key is to be looking at the performance of your little shunkers. If you’re just using racial weapons, are they not taking enemy shields down fast enough?
The rad cannon is weak when the target is protected and insanely powerful when it is not. The firefly rockets are only better than normal rockets against point defense and at longer ranges. (I estimate about 720+ meters)
Find a non-tribe ship that works well for you and see if you can recreate it as Order with the same weapons. Use that as a start.
I use a lot of lasers on my cruisers, combined with radiation guns. I back them up with missile spammers. I also use a guidance scrambler beam on every ship. I did beat every scenario on hard and most on extrem with those ships.
I just can’t make their fighters work.
I do this as well, except that I use a tractor beam instead of a scrambler on every ship, as I find the order’s fighters to be useless and designed the ships to fend for themselves.
I ended up using a line of close combat meat shields setup to drop shields and armor, backed up by a bunch of fast missile cruisers, and several squads of rocket fighters with targeting. All cruisers go about the same speed, which makes it so that the missile cruisers don’t rush past their heavily armored and shielded meat shields. It makes for a good all around fleet, certainly easy to beat by an attack engineered to beat it, but it can beat many fleets right out of the gate. Sometimes when I lose I can bring the exact same fleet to a win just by moving the ships around a bit. Give it a shot… Maybe it will help you. =D