Well, today i earn the campaing, created a little nomad fleet, played the tutorial and started the campaing and… omg, i attacked a enemy planet in the 2nd turn, yeah ik, really bad idea, i retreated with many loses xD
Then i played like 40 turns, reinforcing my fleet, and conquered one planet, then i tryed with the next, and well, it was like “OMFG!”:
As you see, my long-ranged but well defended fleet, was destroyed without problems by a aliance fighter swarm very well armed, and with some frigates as support…
My first thought was: -Oh shit, Im sooo F*****…
So, someone of you guys, crushed my fleet like a falling asteroid crushing a bug in the impact.
Now i want to know the the author of this mass murder… xD
So what you are saying is…you need more anti-fighter support, or more fighters for yourself. Also, depending on how expensive your race is, you may not be able to create enough small to mid size ships to defend against the frigates and fighters. one massive ship will almost always lose to a dozen small ships.
Keep trying, i’m sure you’ll figure out how to succeed
BTW, what mod are you playing? those are some cool looking ships…
There is essentially no way to play the campaign, since there is no way to know what crap the enemy fields. And since each enemy is more or less random, there is no way to plot out long term construction. It’s pretty gimpy stuff right now.
The 3 fleets I know for playing campaign are
- Fighter Spam
- Missile Spam with Armored Wall
- Nomad Armored Frigate @ 0.89 speed
What?! are you serious?
That is The Nomads Expansion, i love their designs 
(im thinking on make my expensive Praetorian Industries on a really expensive race with ships based on nomad designs, oh yesss i will need help xD)
It is very gimpy right now for the above reasons. You have to abuse the AI and bottlenecks to build up and go. I start to do this and get very bored, very quickly. Instead of a game that we can play for dozens or hundreds of hours, we have a game that bores or irritates most of us after a couple hours. No thanks. We have /epic_fail after the /epic_win of the original game.
I have to argue with the ‘boring’ part. It is frustrating and boring at first, but I got the hang of it and you will too. The strategy is to make some effective, cheap frigates because they are not too expensive and don’t use too many pilots or crew. I kept building up, eventually creating mass fighter spams (sorry for any who encounter my fleets :P) and conquered 63% of the planets. The trick is to find a strategy that works and get the heck outa your little corner of the galaxy ASAP. I agree with the part about bottlenecks, I always try to get to planets where there is only one enemy planet connected and build up there. But the crashes, man… In the game that I got 63% of the map, it crashed and completely erased my entire saved game 
PS we need a good game.campaign strategy guide, with what to do and how to counter it. Or is there already one?
Meh. I just uninstalled the local content in steam and removed my recomendation on the game (not that many people read my review). I won’t be buying anymore GSB content. I think this proves that more than one developer is needed. Cliffski is awesome, but … I will come back with he gets some venture capital and makes a game where he is the grand poohbah, but not the only person on the team.
There is so much unrealized potential here.
This is a game that you can play against other people where you don’t have to be online at the same time. Facebook game that doesn’t suck. Think about it.
Why remove it? Did an update make the game less desirable for you? Or are you blaming the shortcomings of the GC expansion on the whole game?
I’d like to jump into this conversation, because I think I may have an interesting POV. I’m a Sr. IT Software Consultant. I bought the Campaign as soon as it was available for the Mac, but just tried it for the first time last week.
Wow, it spanked me like a redheaded stepchild. Arakis, while I disagree with his actions, makes a solid point. The campaign can be inappropriately hard at first, even on the “easy” Cadet setting. It’s so bad that I nearly quit altogether. Then I found Ramcat’s incomplete guide. Arakis is also correct that the game has incredible potential. Not just for Facebook-style casual play, as he suggests, but also for mobile devices.
That said, here are a few key issues holding it back:* We need to remind ourselves that the Campaign is Beta! It’s not supposed to be perfectly (boringly) polished. And even in full release, this an Indy game. Sux it up! If you want polished schlock, Blizzard will be glad to take your money and will give you even less game.
- The key reason that the campaign seems so hard at first is that we have to play each other, not pre-defined scenarios like we did in the offline “Battle” single-player mode. [list][*]Not that this an entirely bad thing; this unique off-line matchup system is what sets GSB apart in the marketplace. And this is why GSB kicks Starcraft II’s butt all day long. We players have organically gotten to a level of sophistication that Cliffski never imagined when he initially released GSB. The campaign sets us against one another, not some lame kiddie-mode that EA came up with in order to rush a deadline. We are now victims of our very success.
- Things would make much more sense if we/Cliffski could create a true introductory map for the ‘Cadet’ Mode. Or maybe a lower-than-Cadet mode. One where the matchups were from the kind of pre-designed thing that we saw in “Battle” mode. This would also allow for more coherent story telling. But it does involve a lot more work than Cliffski may want to do on his own.
[/:m][]The interface doesn’t work the same or as well as it does in Battle or Match-ups. What the heck? I’ve glanced at the bug threads, and most of the issues are captured. As an IT Consultant, I fully understand the challenge. But as a consumer, jeez man, this is GUI 101.[/:m][]The AI, such as it is, lacks a meta-game. Meaning, each fleet at each system is functioning fully autonomously without any guiding strategic hand. No repairs or rebuilding, just semi-random match-ups. Again, as an IT guy, I understand. AI is one of the trickiest things that there is. And Cliffski’s brilliant insight is that a strategic AI could be bypassed in the early stages of development by focusing on the “Gratuitous-ness”. But addressing this in a final publish will enhance the game greatly by adding a sense of “menace” and competition. And it could be used to address the tactic of “castling” on your Homeworld for 70 turns.[/:m][]We, the community, need to write and sticki-fy a complete good guide/tutuorial, comparable to 123’s guide to the basic game. Ramcat made a good start, but life clearly intervened and it’s now buried under thread after thread of “FT spam suxx0rz”. Anyone care to step up?[/*:m][/list:u]I haven’t beaten the campaign yet, but I will when I can play this weekend. I’m not the greatest player, but I love the positive aspects of this game. And my hat is off to Cliffski for a phenomenal creation that deserves it’s industry recognition.
Oh, and if you think this indy game is rough at the edges, go play Minecraft. Again, a great Indy game that has a loooooong way to go.
The campaign does have sort of a learning cliff as opposed to a curve since it pits us against other players without seemingly any idea what we will be facing, but there are some ways to make it more manageable.
The best advice I can give is to use a fast unit to scout - attack a planet, see what you are up against, retreat. This gives you an idea how to form your attacking fleet. For defense it can get tricky. Personally 1 found that leaving 1 fast unit on border worlds with the main fleet in an adjacent, safe, system is the best way to gauge incoming fleets.
As far as fleet design there are two ways to go about it. The first and easiest is to go with one of the spam fleets listed earlier. You still might need to build a few variations, but not much is needed. The easiest among these is the fighter spam - pick a good fighter race and win the campaign without much effort.
The second method is to build a variety of ships, and then organize your fleets once you get scouting information. See a fighter spam? Put together an anti-fighter fleet. See a LR MWM spam? Send in your fighter spam or rush fleet. The second method offers a ton of variation and the gameplay is like playing tons of Online Challenges in a row. The downside is it takes quite some time to build up a diverse fleet.
I love the idea of fighting each other, but can the galaxy get progressively more difficult as you expand?
Ideally there should be a tech level calculater based on the what I’ve unlocked and / or built. Like Starcraft, you could start out playing the weaker players on the ladder and then it would increase in difficulty as you try to conquer the galaxy.
Throwing me into fire without the frying pan is frustrating.
Keep at it though, this game is awesome!
-Alien
That would require a tracker for each account, assigning it a “level.” However, especially in a game like GSB, making that level be meaningful is a challenge. For example; my Challenge level would be mid-high, certainly not up in the SAC/NEC level, but close. However, my campaign level would need to be MUCH higher then that. my FT swarms murder most everything, my frigate spams survive fighter spam… how do we define a good balance between challenges and campaign?
I shudder at the idea of centralized account tracking. And it could be squirreled (toyed with, for my non-American friends) by using Scout ship tactics in campaigns, which would count large numbers of false retreats. Nah, leave account tracking to Blizzard. 
I think that some type of handicapping/scoring algorithm is appropriate in the Campaign. Perhaps looking at the credit balance/disparity in match-ups, and weighting that based on the time to victory. So, fast battles where you were outnumbered matched would score much higher than slow ones where you had a large advantage in credits. This might have the effect of balancing the campaign over time.
One environment where I’ve seen this done well is in Wii Sports. Essentially your semi-random match-ups are initially handicapped based on your Mii’s rating in a particular “sport”. There’s a nice logarithmic function that quickly ramps the rating, based on performance.