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| Part 2b: The dance begins |
Wed, 07 June 2017 16:57   |
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Fleet Leo: The dance begins
However optimized our HG-designs were once meant to be to fight those HE monsters, the vast and fast development of the Zoids instilled us rather with awe. Additionally to the dark blue Zoid territory, we assumed also all those planets already colonized by the Zoids with red circles and a 6 next to it. And colonized meant usually filled up to the optimal 125k pop for HEs.
The arrows show the planned route for Fleet Leo starting at its namegiving planet Leopold. Prime targets were, of course, the Arelu planets Morgan and Gordon due to their ability to build gates. It was a mixed blessing when in 2427 a large comet crashed into Gordon, it reduced the Arelu pop considerably but unfortunately (from our perspective) some survived and it also provided the Arelu/Zoids with vast mountains of minerals and a planet with mineral concentration of 107-171%.
Mine sweeping worked swift and smoothly, the Zoids had nothing what could kill my DDs when set to disengage.
Fleet Leo, under the command of the Humanoids, attacked and razed one planet after another... but it took longer than hoped for. As surprised and unprepared the Zoids were, soon they applied a very effective tactic of evacuating most of the minerals and excess pop but leaving enough to build heavy defenses. That slowed down Fleet Leo and it took time to reinforce the bombers (from 42 to 66 mm70 in 2434). Humanoids used additional pop drops to speed up the conquest process, but in 2435 we were already lagging behind a year and not at Mallard as hoped for.
2nd Fleet: Where to deploy?
For the Bizarres it would had been the smart thing to get their feeble economy developed and completly crazy to build another fleet. For one year I developed my economy, then I build another fleet. It wasn't completly decided against whom this fleet should be deployed. It was a kind of backup fleet if our Zoid campaign got into troubles. On the other hand I had done something rather stupid and had repeatedly poked and angered the snth, just couldn't resist using chances when I saw them and now it seemed more and more as if I had poked into a hornet's nest: my eastern neighbour was clearly stirred up and moving closer towards my core planets while busily building an own bazooka DD design and preparing for an attack.
In 2432 I had finished building another 77 DD Baz, the Humanoids providing the bombers again and a decision needed to be made:
a) I wasn't really sure wether an attack on the snth HW would be successful. They were already building warships, would see my fleet in advance which would give them at least 2 years of preparations (if they hadn't seen it already). So chances weren't too bright.
b) If my fleet would succeed, I noticed that I wouldn't really feel happy about this, either. The snth hadn't many developed planets, loosing their HW would more or less finish their game in the mid 30ies... definetly not in the spirit of a beginner game and the snth were beginners.
c) As successfully as the Humanoids commanded Fleet Leo thru all obstacles from conquest to conquest, the Zoids' space was big and their growth rate seemed impressive enough to at least settle one new planet for each lost one. We were still horribly outgunning Zoids/Arelu and with better tech. But my scouts showed an eery production silence on the major Zoid planets nor much from the Arelu, indicating that they were heavily researching to answere our attack with a proper warship soon.
Then I also remembered, a bit late, that the most basic strategy includes that you should NOT put yourself into several wars at once if you can somehow avoid it. So I asked the Humanoids what they thought about a bit support against the Zoids/Arelu with a 2nd fleet which was answered with a big sigh and "Yes!". Obviously they had made those conclusions a bit faster than me but were much too polite to tell an "experienced" player what would be the obvious better strategic decision.
Fleet Andro: Attacking the Zoid HW
Planet Andromeda, namegiver to this 2nd fleet, was an excellent staging point from which to strike directly against the core of the Zoids and to attack their HW. Fleet Andro left planet Andromeda in 2433, it took 2 years to reach Replica, Zoid HW, which was smoothly conquered in 2435, the loot was a rocking 2900kt minerals and propulsion tech 6.
And now the Zoids made in our perspective a huge tactical mistake, instead of only evacuating minerals and excess pop, they started to evacuate whole planets which where in threat range of our fleets, from 2435 to 2436 alone 3 planets: Mallard, Waco and Hurl. A mistake due to several reasons:
# the production or research power was immediatly lost to the Zoids
# our bombing fleets weren't stopped or slowed down by defenses
# and worst: all three planets were habitable by the Bizarres and since they were evacuated all factories and mines were still intact
After colonisation this gave me instantly developed planets which could not only build docks and gates but with also quite some heavy armament. Minerals in the centre were less of a problem because as much as the Zoids tried to evacuate, there were still enough "leftovers". In 2436 more than half of my 33 privateers together with the first LFs were deployed in the Zoid campaign bringing in several hundret thousand colonists to the front lines and ferrying conquered minerals to newly acclaimed colonies and even more back to my always hungry northern planets.
Gordon: Standoff
The Zoid space was filled by all our auxiliary and supply ships that 2 operating fleets keep busy and I wonder what the snth and roaches thought of it. Nevertheless we ran into problems. Since several turns our main target what we tried to reach and conquere was the Arelu planet Gordon. With Gordon down the whole centre would be without gates and only a mopping up. Zoids and Arelu clearly saw that, too, and tried to defend Gordon at all costs. By now the Arelu/Zoids were massbuilding several designs. One very weird with blackjacks and I still wonder for what tactic they thought it useful:
The lower 3 designs, though, were quite deadly for our DD Baz.
While it would had been better to build a shared identical FF baz design, the Zoids had the problem that they hadn't en 6, so they couldn't. FFs have higher initiative and shoot before our DDs, double shields, more bazookas per ship while even a bit cheaper than our DDs. Perfect for defense and space fights vs our DD Baz and clearly superiour.
We hoped to be faster with our attack against Gordon than Arelu/Zoids could gather enough of their FFs. Now was the time to use every advantage and thus we merged our both fleets into my WM hands and by this giving them better battle speed and better shields (RS). As you can see on the map, the campaign against the Zoids had been running quite successfully. There was an unchecked snth/Roaches fleet to the north and lots of newly colonized planets by the Arelu, Zoids and even Roaches in the SW-corner.
# big dashed circles show our fleets (white) and enemy fleets (red), radius = threat area
In 2437 we had merged our fleets: 120 DD Baz, 22 FF with sappers, an overkill of 128 m70-minibombers. Quite impressive we thought.
Until we counted the enemy ships:
94 Security Z (FF baz)
41 Zif (FF baz)
19 Security Y (FF sapper)
24 old DD with xrays
21 old FF with xrays
and my scouts saw the Arelu trying to pass weap 10 to Zoids via tech scrappers which meant that the Arelu defending dock at Gordon would be surely outfitted with weap 10 tech.
They had been busy, indeed, we were clearly outgunned and suddenly we found ourselved in the position that the Zoid/Arelu had gained space supremacy and we might find ourselves the hunted or our fleet destroyed if not acting very carefully. To make things worse, at my eastern border snth/roaches had just swept the mines of my planet Whistler and although they had showed up with a weird mixup of ships they obviously planned to attack.
We didn't really know what to do.
The fleet was a bit short of fuel, so we moved it to Waco which by now had also a gate. If the Arelu/Zoids had attacked us there, it would had resulted in quite a big battle and losses on both sides high but probably with a victory for the Arelu/Zoids. But we assessed this "chance" as being very low because they in turn expected us to attack Gordon and couldn't risk moving away the forces to defend it.
In 2438 I had brought in also some FF yakis, looks weird but they were very cheap, with higher initiatve and with a big chance to move last due to their low weight. At this time we were VERY tempted to just throw everything against Gordon and to look what would be left after the battle dust clears.
After looking long and hard at our tactical map and 3 plans later (1st was the above, 2nd was worse), I came up with the following conclusions and suggestions:
(more later and perhaps a bit less epical *grin)
[Updated on: Thu, 08 June 2017 08:59] Report message to a moderator
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