Early Military Game - is it viable?

Early military rushes are difficult to execute, but not impossible. Some things to keep in mind:

- Hunt down asteroids and space junk anomalies with your survey ship and ignore the rest. These grant you free ships or ship ugprades respectively.
- If you're lucky enough to pickup some free Star Fighters or Corvettes, you can simply shoot down all your opponent's colony ships and settle the free planets later yourself.
- If you didn't pick up a free Battle Axe, rush for Shields instead of Corvettes in preparation of planetary raids. Battle Axes will flush out garrisoned Defenders easily.
- Attackers have a huge advantage in planetary assaults. A 1:5 invasion force to defender ratio will often suffice in a clutch. If you wish to avoid losses however, just load up as many troops as you can. At a 1:1 ratio you won't suffer a single casualty as you clear out all the defenders. Set your newly conquered planet to produce another transport and you can recycle your population for more attacks.
- Don't forget to account for population growth while your transports are en route to their targets.
- Going for an early military rush often excludes you from the trade goods and wonder race for a while, so you should be prepared to accept some losses in those areas.

Za H - - Don't forget to account for population growth while your transports are en route to their targets.

Not sure what you're saying here - are you saying the pop will grow en route to the target?

Za H - nevermind.. figured out what you meant right after I posted.. don't forget to account for the pop growth of your target while trying to get there.. got it.

I always conquer a bit in early game, tech up to star fighter and transport, load up a few of these bad boys and 10 star fighters blast any planet in the cluster then send em to another cluster. Sure it takes ages but that force will still beat down even after 30 turns. Well this is on Begginner so your comp might not fall for it.

~SDC~

I believe it all depends on your military bonuses. You get them from different sources, including free goodies your survey ship find, the starting race abilities you pick in game settings when you start a new game, starbase upgrades on military bonus resources, shipyards and whatever structures that helps your starship bonuses on your planets. I had situations with my beefed up corvettes, with 100% hitpoint bonus plus other bonuses (bonuses from war party and starting race abilities) wiping out defenders. I also had situations with my beefed up battlecruisers wiping out battleaxes fairly easy. And I had situations with my 500 million troops taking over 2 billion people planets. Think about what you can pick from your starting race abilities, you have choices of speed, range, attack, defense, hitpoints, and solidering bonuses. Your transports can travel 2 spaces per move early enough if you go straight for hyper warp tech in your research or you have speed bonuses from starting race abilities pick. If you want early military game of planet-conquering then be a warmonger all the way in your strategy. If you don't go all the way then just limit your early military game to defending your weak starbases and planets and taking out weak enemy starbases. Go after unescorted enemy transports, colony ships, or trade ships. (with fast and long ranged starfighters and corvettes) and protect yours. Better sensors and strategic ship placing for patrol purposes are must in this kind of warfare in which you focus on ruining your foe's expansion and economy and guarding yours. And you wait until you get battleships and combat transports plus some speed and range techs and then you can go serious planet-conquering.

~SDC~

It seems obvious they tried to discourage early rushes as much as possible. They only way you are going to mount a serious early game offensive is through swift asteroid grabbing. You can take your time getting to the tech for transports as long as you can destroy any ship the enemy has before it has a chance to leave the system.

There are an obscene amount of obstacles in the way of any sort of early game rush. Imo its not worth trying unless you get lucky and find both an enemy AI in its infancy and a bunch of free ships that you can use to blow up his colony ships.

Starting military rush is a perfectly viable approach. It tends to only work well on medium or smaller galaxies, as larger galaxies often have far too much expansion before you meet the enemy. But you must plan for it. As mentioned above, choose useful bonuses. I suggest speed (lets you transports move faster which is very very important) and attack (lets you take out defensive ships). Population growth can also be very useful.

The beauty with early attack is that other races have not yet built up trade and don't depend on each other, so you can usually attack a single race at a time. Trade with the others. Try to ensure you get gravity accelerators and Tri-stronium steel. Buy them if you can and trade out of debt.

Paul.

~SDC~

While some starting bonuses are nice, they aren't necessary. I wage wars on gigantic maps without any ship bonuses all the time, although I often have to spy on my neighbors through influence reports (see other thread). Just plan ahead and keep your objectives clear. I generally set the primary mission of early wars as denial of expansion for the AI, so I will often accept peace when I have acquired all the systems within the AIs' ship ranges. You can quickly restore friendly relationships with the AIs if you establish trade routes as soon as possible. Sometimes I'll let the war drag on a little longer if I can manage to muster a few constructor for a resource rush however.

I think our definition of "early" is different lol.

My definition of early is anything before Dreadnoughts. I'm not a rusher, no instinct to go for the jugular unless it's self defense.

So far I've found early wars (ie Starfighters, Corvettes, Transports) useful with three distinct types of campaigns:

- Elimination. A minor civ or major in a bad start spot is cornered but has good worlds. Because of size disparity I just muster an overwhelming force, destroy their fleet and invade. Note that this is only against OpFor which is much smaller than my own empire.

- Resource denial. If another race has a string of constructors on the way to a critical resource you can inflict very heavy losses on them and deny them the resource. Also target their transports and colony ships.

- Tech harvesting. If you destroy their fleet and they feel the war is hopeless they will give you all their tech, influence and cash in return for peace. This usually pays for whatever your fleet may have cost and gives you a win in the next UP election LOL

Im only on my third game. Just got my head handed to me on a plater two nights ago - put too much on the time payment plan and suffered with a weak econ.
In any case, I get the survay ship out early as possible and actually look for the "rocks" because they give ships. In the current game I had a Corvetts before anyone has gotten to research them. With it, I greatly hampered my cloest opponent's growth by attacking every colony ship I could. So far, I have expanded into "his" territory and have taken over two of his planets. (This is a tatic that worked very will in Sid Myers Alpha Centuari)So yes early war can help. Now since Im so new to this game I may find a new error to make for for now, early confilct is very helpful.

Cyzada:
Baerd is referring to military eras.. seems when he says early game, he means the first military era and i'm assuming that he means corvettes, defenders, transports, and up to battlecruisers and battleaxes.
So what I think is a good idea, for the purpose of this thread, let's use his definition of "early game" to less any confusion. When you starting getting frigates and warhammers that would be a different story and that would be when some speed and range techs are likely to be got too. And when battleships start to come out, it would be a completely different story because battleships simply just overclass everything before them and you should have got some speed and range techs by then too.

~SDC~

Yep, I was referring to the corvette/starfighter/defender era.

The different eras are my one sore point with the game - especially because the AI is sort of weak militarily speaking.

As DeafHawk said "when battleships start to come out, it would be a completely different story because battleships simply just overclass everything before them" - this is my gripe about the game.. even the second era ships -frigates and the entire battle line of ships - totally outclass first generation ships.

We humans can put those starfighters and corvettes - and later frigates- to good use hunting soft targets (transports, freighters, colony ships, etc) but the computer will throw them like cannon fodder against Battleships and Battlehammers, the only effect being an experience bonus for myself.

I also find in my own strategy I don't bother building a single military ship until I have battleaxes, then I build one on each of my worlds (before that it's a a couple defenders in my border sectors).. then build a handful of battlehammers or frigates. It's not until I have battleships available that I make a concerted effort to project military strength... let the other races go to war with me before this, they don't have ability to hurt my systems early game.

I'd like to see a couple changes to combat.

- Either a more gradual progression of ships
- or a lessening of the range of attack/defense factors with the ships that exist(like starfighters starting as 5/5 and the largest ships being 20/20, that would give smaller ships *some* chance of harming the bigger ones) and just increase the hit points as ships get larger.
- make a combat change that the minimum damage is always 1.. so a horde of corvettes would likely average 2pts of damage a piece when attacking a battleship. When doing this, reduce the hit points of some of the larger ships - they seem to jump from 15 right up to 50 with very few in between, add in the tech bonuses and the problem gets even larger (a 100% bonus makes it 30 vs 100).

Anything to make combat somewhat more of a challenge.

I just won a game on a tiny galaxy on Genius AI using an offense built around Battle Hammers. I had previously overlooked Hammers (as does the AI often, it seems) but they are really your best option for a strong offense before the capital ship era. As someone else pointed out, the range ability pick isn't too shabby with Hammers (otherwise your attack range is going to be limited...I was goofing around on a tiny galaxy so range wasn't an issue).

Early military action (star fighter/corvette/defender era) is completely viable to give you a leg up, with just a little luck. You have to use your strongest early-game ship, and I don't mean that free corvette from some floating rock (which is actually pretty awful - low hit points mean it's limping around with after taking out a couple of defenders). The key is your survey ship.

With a little luck, the USS Hero can gorge itself on space junk to something like 4/2 +HP bonuses. This allows it to take out practically any garrison with a good 20+ HP remaining. Take that system over, park the USS Hero in the system for a couple of turns to repair, then proceed to the next system, picking up any other junk along the way, rinse and repeat. The biggest problem with this strategy is having to build and move transports, but eventually you'll grind down that race and have it give you all its tech for peace.

~SDC~

With my luck on a tiny gal I usually get 0/5 for the stats on my hero... Most sad...

TFM

~SDC~

The other game I played I got a corvette like in my first turn, needless to say I flew around and rocked all the comps colonyships and constructors, it was pretty fun.

I like the idea of minimum damage per attack (AOK does this.) But I LIKE the definitive difference between the power of the units. It becomes a stategy of how many do you make of each and when. The problem I had with Civ III was obsolete units could still be somewhat effective when there was no logical reason for them to be so.

So, if you warrior tendancies, do you chose the Military party for the 50pt/ hp advantage?

I'm a battlehammer guy as well, an assault I consider mid-game. I'll also lease-buy the +2 speed gravity trade good as well as research the +speed bonuses so when I make my assault my hammers/transports usually have 5 or 6 speed. I try to get the two fairly early +soldier techs (anti-matter weapons and mind terror weapons) because it's just too costly to lose troops. Tir-Quan special rocks if you plan on doing a lot of transport work.

The big risk of a hammer push is waiting too long so you can pick up just -one- more combat-improving tech and the AI starts putting out dreads. Dreads don't obliterate hammers, but they definitely beat them, so you certainly don't want to have to face them in numbers.

I'm with a couple of the other posters above, the early game rush is just too risky, too clumsy, and too slow for me to get into. But if you pull it off well it will put you in a great position for the rest of the game. And of course, like any specific strategy, it works best if you take picks that support it. But I'd prefer to make longer-range picks and then let my in-game tech and production make up the difference.