Home » Primary Racial Traits » WM » The Barbarian Hoard
The Barbarian Hoard |
Thu, 27 February 2003 13:23 |
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BackBlast | | | Messages: 215
Registered: February 2003 Location: A Rock | |
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I can remember seeing many posts about barbarian hoards in some of the older posts on the newsgroup and such. But there doesn't seem to be much talk about the tactic these days. WM seems to be the best race to pull this off with. So anyone who has experimented with this type of strategy, feel free to comment. Even those who don't think it's viable (I'm sure you're out there ). I want to try this in a PBEM at some point, so I guess I'll see how it goes.
The Mongols
PRT - WM
LRT - IFE, RS, CE, ISB, NAS
about one in four hab with temp immune 19% growth
5/25/5 factories no G box (-F econ)
10/3/8 mines
Weapons, Prop, Construction cheap, rest expensive.
The idea being pretty much centered around the BC hull for probably most of the game. With 25% cheaper weapons, 50% cheaper engines and the cheaper scoops available. The idea being a very large quantity of fast, cheap range 2 beamers. The vast majority of your army (if not all) will be gate-able reducing the pain of CE. I've tried this with BET (in testbeds), but it seems to slow me down in getting what I need, especially with the gates and BCs. Though BET makes for a nice end game advantage. It only seems to be really nice after some significant research. Early attacks/kills are probably a good idea, I am a -F after all. Seems fairly effective against SD since you have lots of ships you can send into minefields at warp 9 The DD makes a nice early warship, though I tend to shy away from yaks in favor of range 2 beams. They don't become obsolete as fast and aren't as easily countered. FFs just have too weak of an armor to be considered by me as a serious warship. The possibility of losing hundreds of ships due to a single mine hit is just too much. I seem to pretty much be able to go through mine fields like paper, almost as if they don't exist. Except for speed bumps.
Against missile stacks I simply need a large enough stack to keep my shields up long enough to close the distance. Though this is where I might need some careful p
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Fri, 28 February 2003 14:06 |
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yucaf | | Master Chief Petty Officer | Messages: 100
Registered: December 2002 Location: India | |
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BackBlast wrote on Thu, 27 February 2003 13:23 |
The Mongols
PRT - WM
LRT - IFE, RS, CE, ISB, NAS
about one in four hab with temp immune 19% growth
5/25/5 factories no G box (-F econ)
10/3/8 mines
Weapons, Prop, Construction cheap, rest expensive.
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As always in race design, you should link your choices to the type of universe and number of players. You need to have close neighbours to do anything useful with this race.
There are always personal preferences, however you should remember that the 5th LRT is always more expensive (and the 6th even more and so forth), so always try to limit yourself to 4. I would dump ISB and CE personnally and pay IFE with NRSE, but that's my choice. ISB is way too expensive. I disagree that space docks are scary. Even the US is not tremendously hard to shot down.
As someone commented, if you take IFE, then use the FM all the way until you really get good engines. The w6 scoop is too slow and fuel hungry to go on long campains.
You should also find some points to improve those mines. With 10/3/8 you will not be able to get enough minerals to build a horde, we are talking of hundreds of ships here. Maybe this Prop Cheap is costing you too much?
The Energy Immune is expensive and I'm not sure to understand why you want this immunity, but with Weapon cheap I would not go Rad immune, since you will get all that terraforming technology quite fast. My point about Energy immune is that since you want to use the BC and the shielding (improved by RS, a good choice), you still need to invest in Energy at least to 10, therefore you will get quite good Temp terraforming technology. If you really want to go 1-immune, drop the Prop -50% and go Grav-immune. The FM is almost all you'll need for a long time.
Only very personal considerations you might want to think about, maybe you are looking for a different race or playstyle which is perfectly fine
FWIW,
YucaF
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Fri, 28 February 2003 16:03 |
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BackBlast | | | Messages: 215
Registered: February 2003 Location: A Rock | |
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yucaf wrote on Fri, 28 February 2003 14:06 |
As always in race design, you should link your choices to the type of universe and number of players. You need to have close neighbours to do anything useful with this race.
There are always personal preferences, however you should remember that the 5th LRT is always more expensive (and the 6th even more and so forth), so always try to limit yourself to 4. I would dump ISB and CE personnally and pay IFE with NRSE, but that's my choice. ISB is way too expensive. I disagree that space docks are scary. Even the US is not tremendously hard to shot down.
As someone commented, if you take IFE, then use the FM all the way until you really get good engines. The w6 scoop is too slow and fuel hungry to go on long campains.
You should also find some points to improve those mines. With 10/3/8 you will not be able to get enough minerals to build a horde, we are talking of hundreds of ships here. Maybe this Prop Cheap is costing you too much?
The Energy Immune is expensive and I'm not sure to understand why you want this immunity, but with Weapon cheap I would not go Rad immune, since you will get all that terraforming technology quite fast. My point about Energy immune is that since you want to use the BC and the shielding (improved by RS, a good choice), you still need to invest in Energy at least to 10, therefore you will get quite good Temp terraforming technology. If you really want to go 1-immune, drop the Prop -50% and go Grav-immune. The FM is almost all you'll need for a long time.
Only very personal considerations you might want to think about, maybe you are looking for a different race or playstyle which is perfectly fine
FWIW,
YucaF
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You just made my race look like every other race out there! heh. Remember I am talking numbers. If I take NRSE I don't get the cheaper and lighter scoop engines. And without CE I'm double the cost of engines of the more expensive engines! The advantage of this combo is how cheap good engines for my BCs become. I want a Barbarian Horde... and I want a big one. So lets look at some numbers with different engines..
BC
9x Bazooka
6x Wolverine
2x Manuvering Jet
Just a simple design.. Maybe 9x shields 6x weapons would be better, but we just want to look at the engine so we'll use the more expensive Bazookas to try and mitigate the engine price.
Item I /B /G /R
Base : 83/62/40/257
Alpha 8: 115/62/46/313
TGD : 123/82/58/357
TGFS : 93/70/64/293
TGFS+CE: 89/66/52/275
The TGFS is 2 tech levels higher than the Alpha 8. It gets the same movement as the Alpha 8. 2 1/4 with WM bonus. The ovious limiting costs for this design are iron and resources. As a -F the germ costs are insignificant. The TGFS+CE only adds 7% more iron to the base cost as the Alpha 8 adds 39% more iron. That's alot of Iron. Resources aren't so well pronouced. TGFS+CE only adds 7% more resources again, the Alpha 8 adds 22% more resources. So, at the least, with resources being the limiting factor - if I build 100 TGFS+CE you can only build 88 Alpha 8s. But if Iron is the limiting factor - 100 TGFS+CE for 77 Alpha 8s. Either way, the Alphas end up somewhere between 12%-23% behind in just engine costs on the final product. Besides, I need something to trade, and who researches that much prop? Not to mention early gates are part of the race design. To have the entire fleet able to go anywhere within my empire in a year or 2. I should have this capacity much sooner than any race taking prop normal or expensive, and I will have it much longer than any non-IT because my fleets rely on numbers of smaller gatable ships. This is the reasoning behind my prop choice. The Fuel Mizer is probably a requirement for this race just to get the pop flowing. So I'll stick by my LRTs The one that could be optional is NAS. I could easily shrink some hab to get back my pens.
As for mines... I think they are good enough... a -F doesn't have the same mineral demands as an HG. I only care about 'enough' minerals to support my production, not stripping the rock as fast as possible. For example... 275,000 pop will produce one BC a year. They can operate 220 mines, given that I need 89 iron a year to support that production I only need a mineral concentration of 40 (I think my math is right on this) to keep up with production. With an assumed average concentration of 50, I should be able to throw ships out for decades.
ISB is nessisary for increasing my number of 'active shipyards'. On a poor germ world, getting a starbase up is costly and time consuming. Heck, on any world, putting up a real starbase is costly, 500 resources is the cost of 2 BCs! ISB aliviates that, it is espeically nice attacking that first neibor with a swarm of DDs . My homeworld will serve mostly as a breeder and for freighter construction rather than a military shipyard. I will have many planets and I need all of them capable of throwing out ships as soon as possible. Also, most to all ships will come out of the scale under 200kt making the Dock work well for much of the game. UltraStations are against my whole concept here.
Universe size... ummmm... Anything but a huge? Large I don't think would be that fun either, though doable I'd say. The race wasn't built for anything specific in mind, of course there is room for changes to suit a particular universe a bit better. I lack the experience to comment on that. I do think it's just fine even if races aren't 'close'. When I do make contact I should have a producing machine up and running. By no means am I dead in the water. Any -F that doesn't expand into one of his neibors (by force or not) is not going to be competative later on... Nothing like good troops to speed that right along.
BackBlast
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Fri, 28 February 2003 18:46 |
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Marduk | | Ensign | Messages: 345
Registered: January 2003 Location: Dayton, OH | |
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The point of the space dock is that they can build the kinds of ships BackBlast is talking about, and they obviate the need for a full space station. That saves building time and cuts costs. You can also put up a space dock as a forward base with a lot fewer colonists, and the refueling is a nice bonus. Orbital forts could be used as a quick base, but they are more expensive than space docks - and since they can't build anything, it takes a lot longer for a world to become productive in a meaningful way.
Radiation immunity is demonstrably superior to the other two varieties - I started a thread on the newsgroup about it a year or so ago, and some fine fellow did extensive testing. Rad immunity gives you around 10% more initial greens than the other two. It is true that your terraforming generally suffers a delay since weapon tech is more urgent, but even given that rad immune ends up about the same in the midgame and gives you more benefit once you do get to max terraforming.
The best argument for grav immunity is that it allows you to end your prop research sooner with no ill effects. Since this race is already going to go for higher levels of prop tech, that's not a valid argument here.
One more thing - the Rad-Ram is close to comparable to the Fuel Mizer, and CE makes it a better match. Less fuel at warps five, six and seven than the Mizer, and it is half the mass of the next scoop up. It costs about the same as the Mizer, with less iron and more germ. Free travel at your maximum reliable speed is convenient. Not an engine for every ship, but it does have a use.
[Updated on: Fri, 28 February 2003 19:05] Report message to a moderator
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Sat, 01 March 2003 17:19 |
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BackBlast | | | Messages: 215
Registered: February 2003 Location: A Rock | |
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Marduk wrote on Fri, 28 February 2003 18:46 |
Radiation immunity is demonstrably superior to the other two varieties - I started a thread on the newsgroup about it a year or so ago, and some fine fellow did extensive testing. Rad immunity gives you around 10% more initial greens than the other two. It is true that your terraforming generally suffers a delay since weapon tech is more urgent, but even given that rad immune ends up about the same in the midgame and gives you more benefit once you do get to max terraforming.
The best argument for grav immunity is that it allows you to end your prop research sooner with no ill effects. Since this race is already going to go for higher levels of prop tech, that's not a valid argument here.
One more thing - the Rad-Ram is close to comparable to the Fuel Mizer, and CE makes it a better match. Less fuel at warps five, six and seven than the Mizer, and it is half the mass of the next scoop up. It costs about the same as the Mizer, with less iron and more germ. Free travel at your maximum reliable speed is convenient. Not an engine for every ship, but it does have a use.
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I would make a big case against the Rad-Ram for freighters. It uses around double the fuel a fuel mizer does at warp 8 and 9. Double the fuel is unacceptable... I need to be able to maintain warps 8-9 when colonizing planets. It's still _much_ faster than going warp 6 if you get a stall or 2 on a long journey. On bombers I'd consider it, free travel at warp 6 with bombers is probably acceptable. Those early bombers won't need any fuel exports. But then it doesn't matter what my habs are.
I'm not sure about rad immunity... it seems like a good idea, yet that terriforming will bite me fairly quickly. I could move prop to normal and change energy to norm as well, that would allow me to more easily get the temp terriform tech and better shields to serve along with RS. That is something I will definatly consider..
I looked through the newsgroup and found some discussions but nothi
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Mon, 03 March 2003 18:06 |
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yucaf | | Master Chief Petty Officer | Messages: 100
Registered: December 2002 Location: India | |
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BackBlast wrote on Fri, 28 February 2003 16:03 |
You just made my race look like every other race out there! heh.
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Sure. As I said, if you are trying a special concept or a non "classical" race it is perfectly your right to do. I just thought that your excess in LRTs is not optimal.
As per your estimate of universe size, I think this race would not survive against competent players in a universe bigger than medium. You can kill your neighbour very early, but you cannot negate the progress of faraway races with lots of space (and luck) and WM sucks in the late game... Not to mention that the horde strategy only works for some time. Once capital missiles and ships are in play, they are fried, especially being that attractive to them, with all that boranium. And CE in a large/huge... major pain in the *** when you have all those fleets scattered around.
Of course I'm no mega-expert, so if your race does well "as is" in a real game, I would be pleased to read your comments on how you managed the development of economy, technology and military to achieve that. What is sure, is that you should have a lot of fun with that race, even if don't eventually win
Just my
YucaF
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Tue, 04 March 2003 11:26 |
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yucaf | | Master Chief Petty Officer | Messages: 100
Registered: December 2002 Location: India | |
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Mosser wrote on Tue, 04 March 2003 10:44 | Why would you dumb ISB? I realize that it is somewhat expensive, however, it works out for the best in mid to end game play.
Mosser
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ISB gives you 20% cost reduction and 20% cloaking in all your starbases, plus the space dock and the ultra station. It cost about 60-70 race points (if you don't have already 4 LRT's, if it's the 6th it cost you about 90 points). The only real goodie here is the space dock, IMHO. If the space dock is essential to your strategy or really boost your economy, then it can be worth it. I have used it myself and even found it essential to AR races. It's very good in the early game for your expansion (unless you are IT). In this thread, it also seems essential to be able to build light warships to be used in a horde, which is a valid point, since I have never tried this strategy. I have used hordes but not as the core weapon for the full game, so I'm quite non-competent to discuss this, but I cannot restrain myself
However I disagree with you that it makes a difference in the mid to end game. The apparently stronger Ultra Station (compared to Space Station) only kills more chaff (96 instead of 64) before being shot down. And generally you don't want to immobilize so much mineral in your starbases (building fully armored and armed stations), you want to put them in mobile warships that can kill your enemy.
As always, in the end it's a matter of playstyle. If you like it, just take it. But we are discussing race optimization here. Getting most "bang for the bucks"
FWIW,
YucaF
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Fri, 07 March 2003 15:41 |
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Micha | | | Messages: 2342
Registered: November 2002 Location: Belgium GMT +1 | |
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Mosser wrote on Thu, 06 March 2003 17:50 | True, to fully outfit a Deathstar, is not very economical, yet, The spacedocks are what you really need.
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Nitpick: ultra station, not death star
Quote: | Although, I have been known for using deathstars quite frequently, they may not do enough damage to enemy fleets for their costs, But they do look menacing, and with a fleet of Dreadnoughts they work much better than space stations.
Mosser
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Euh, "work much better"? Like Yuca Frita said, they will simply kill a bit more chaff (96 instead of 64).
But they indeed _look_ like if they mean something
regards,
mch
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Fri, 07 March 2003 18:53 |
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Marduk | | Ensign | Messages: 345
Registered: January 2003 Location: Dayton, OH | |
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I believe ISB can be a considerable bonus in the mid-game and beyond, simply by the boost it can provide early on. Your later development is greatly influenced by your early growth. When using an IT race, I pick ISB so that I can have refuelers on my border - the fuel ships are far too espensive and too limited for that.
I send scouts ahead, and follow one year behind with colonizers that change their destination as necessary to get to good worlds. When a dock goes up, nearby colonizers and scouts can swing over to the system to refuel and then continue on. A couple of years later there will be a gate (I've never done a 1/1000 IT, so no insta-gates), but my expansion doesn't have to wait for it.
With an orbital fort, not only does my expansion have to wait on a gate, I have to build enough fuel ships to be useful - several of them for each system I expect to provide fuel in any worthwhile quantity. That can add up to a hundred or more fuel ships... that's a lot of resources for a growing empire to come up with. Especially one with an HP economy.
In Ashes of Empire, I have more of a -f economy (and a non-IT race) - so I thought I could get away without ISB. Instead it has kept me so slow that now I think I won't have any chance at all. My expansion has been limited to the range my colonizers could reach without refueling. Now I have gates, but 80% of the galaxy has been colonized. With docks on my borders as I started expanding, I'd have had nearly half the galaxy by this time. Instead, I have a paltry 43 systems out of 360. I'm not likely to top 60 worlds at this rate - and considering I'm likely to be up against an alliance of everyone else in the game by the time fighting breaks out, that's just not enough.
I had fuel ships, but they had to travel to the outer edge of my space just like the rest, and to maximize my earliest growth spurt I built all colonizers so no fuel ships were available for several years after the colonizing began. Having fuel ships accompany my earliest colony missions would have allowed me to claim systems farther out, and made those farther gates more useful in colonizing the remaining systems now. But that would also have kept me from colonizing as much early on - as it is, I have every world within 260 light-years of my homeworld that wasn't already claimed by the Emperor.
With space docks, I would have had the best of both worlds - I'm already building orbital forts in every single system as soon as they're colonized. Putting up space docks instead wouldn't really have cost any more. I'd have had fuel at every world, and not had to waste effort building fuel ships that ended up being of only limited use.
Add to that the fact that I could have built new colonizers at these docks, and saved some travel time. That would have made my expansion even faster.
From now on, I'm going to think three times before I build a race without ISB. And even then I'm going to test and test and test again to make sure I can do without them.
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Sun, 04 May 2003 06:29 |
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Robert | | Lt. Junior Grade | Messages: 393
Registered: November 2002 Location: Dortmund, Germany | |
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some idea...
once you get the langston shell, you can build frigates that
have 175 armor, 350 shield (RS!) and move pretty fast.
with cheap weapons, reg. shields, maybe cheap engines and
the wm speed bonus, this is the cheapes horde design i can
imagine.
as wm, the blunderbuss may be very powerful, (it is soooo
cheap)
you have move 2++ and are lighter than any other ship,
you have brilliant
shield stacking, and as a bonus to other horde design...later
actually costs are below 50 resources and the ship makes
nearly 1800 points of damage... impressing
with that speed it also might catch all ships in round 2 of
any combat, and more important:
it is jammed by 10% by the langston shell...
thats not much, you will say, and you are right, but imagine
your enemy uses LOTS of sappers, then your fleet is targeted
by enemy missles and one jugger kills one frigate...
with 10% jamming your ships are still less attractive than
chaff, without jamming they migh not be...
i am not sure if this is smart, but i have the feeling that
if a WM catches the langston shell early in a game, he might
have a deadly weapon at hand...
never tried it, maybe its stupid, but its a nice idea
i think i will try around a bit in a testbed...
robert
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Sun, 04 May 2003 06:44 |
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Robert | | Lt. Junior Grade | Messages: 393
Registered: November 2002 Location: Dortmund, Germany | |
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ok, i did some tests...
i let the langston horde fight some nubian with
4 stacks of BD
3 stacks of AMP
3 stacks of caps
1 stack of jammers
1 stack of shields
and warp10 engine
one normal nubian design
10 of these fought 100 of my langston shell frigates with
3 blunders.
in the end it was a question of who got the first shot.
when the stupid frigs move into range of the nub but not
close enough to come to range0, they die.
when both fleets moved at speed 2, (frigs WITH wm bonus),
the 100 frigs killed the nubians, and lost 10 of their 100
ships.
both fleets cost about 5000 resources, but the nubian requires
much more tech
weap 26 instead of 19
const 26 instead of 6
prop 12 against something around 10 i think
makes the frig a bit more attractive, but also this is not
a real game battle, and the comparison is on a ship vs ship
bases... but with beamers i think it makes sense...
i am not sure if my frig would try to catch the lighter chaff,
and end up one step apart each turn, who knows...
but the movement should not be the problem, as i like to fight
with lots of allies on both sides and then through battle board
starting positions you end up close to your enemy anyway...
and moving last and having higher init than nubians... well...
when the frig does 1800 points of damage, also the 12 beam
deflectors dont help much...
ah.... i dont know.... when i ever catch the MT with the langston
and am WM, i will try that...
just a thought...
cu
robert
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Tue, 06 May 2003 02:57 |
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175 armour isn't enough to take a sheilded hit from an Armaggedon missile.
Nubians can take many sheilded hits before they start to fall.
I suppose it's a personal preferance thing... it also depends on what your enemy is fielding.
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Fri, 17 October 2003 21:04 |
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Dark_Traveller wrote on Fri, 17 October 2003 16:43 | I have run a few WM races in mid to long games and finally found the best chaff is the destroyer. It is a bit more expensive across the board but the armor you recieve with a destroyer(200)is a large bonus compared to a frigate's (45). It will take a lot more Arm Missle hits than any stack of Frigates.
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Uh, a stack of frigates will stop just as many ARM missiles as an equally sized stack of destroyers when designed as chaff. One missile, one kill, and all that.
Once you're designing the DDs to multi-purpose beyond that, or at least to the point they require multiple ARMs to kill, then they're no longer chaff and also quite a bit more expensive to build.
Welcome to the forum.
- Kurt
[Updated on: Fri, 17 October 2003 21:21]
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Re: The Barbarian Hoard |
Sat, 18 October 2003 21:02 |
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Dark_Traveller wrote on Sat, 18 October 2003 18:17 | Thanks for the welcome. True the expense of multitask DD is step but a capital ship missile puts half its damage into Shields and Half into Armor only doubles when the shields are down. With a base of 200 armor,a light cheap armor(organic), and a Jammer this keeps the one ship one missile damage down, when stacked.
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Given the expense at this point I think that this is still an inefficient design for 'chaff' usage. (And I'll take this up elsewhere.)
Quote: |
Now the cheap build of a Frigate will allow a larger fleet which can cause the same effect when split. I have been experimenting on a chaff fleet with a Alpha missile(something cheap) since it appears Capital ship fleets sometimes will target larger ships first over the chaff until the chaff moves within close range.
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Targeting is based on a known formula. Bora cost + res cost of target divided by defense points (dp adjusted for such things as jamming, computers, shielding, etc.) If the chaff isn't in range yet, then the other ships will be shot at. And putting Alpha torps on a chaff fleet strikes me as being rather expensive in Iron - which is probably better spent on more combat hulls.
Quote: |
I do have a question though, do you use the frigate style ship for anything other than chaff?
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The answer to this varies greatly on period of the game and the race that I have. For WM designs I'd have to say the frigate hull is fairly under-utilized after the mid-game except as an expendable scout or for chaff. For non-WM and non-SD it's probably in use for most of the game as a minelayer hull. (And I'll carry this part of the discussion to another forum - probably the Academy since it's become a generic hull discussion and not WM-specific.
- Kurt
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Fruit flies like a banana.
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