Interesting independent world scenario

[Sebastian]

I just started a disk game as Sol Force and discovered a Hiver indie world a few nodes away. My goal is to see how much mileage I can get out of a DE only empire so I decided to try to conquer them pretty early in the game.

Since I only had PD and gauss I constructed a fleet of 9 assault shuttle carriers and 3 armor PD attack ships with 1 CnC and attacked them.

Anyway long story short I killed their whole military (imperials), 20% of orbital defenses, destroyed 9% of infrastructure and 26% of total population. They live underground and the planet is realistically uninhabitable so i thought "wtf am I supposed to do?"

So I ended up with 256 million hiver civilians on a 500 CH world that I couldn't really do anything with. Eventually I colonised it and abandoned it so they would fly off into space instead of reinventing earth-to-space nukes but it felt kind of weird. Basically like earth's situation in Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[ZedF]

Not sure what you were trying to do... in your position I would likely have left them alone until I had biomes, or maybe for the rest of the game if I wanted to trade with them and they weren't otherwise in the way.

[Sebastian]

If there's a nearby empire of the same species as the colony its too great a risk to allow them to stay independent and risk giving that empire a free colony (especially hivers) right next to your HW

[Sebastian]

Ps do you think its possible to have a DE empire fighting off CR empires?

[ZedF]

If there's a nearby empire of the same species as the colony its too great a risk to allow them to stay independent and risk giving that empire a free colony (especially hivers) right next to your HW

So, keep a scout at the Indy planet and make sure the Hivers have to fight a 3-way battle with your scout & the planet defenses whenever they arrive, rather than getting the planet for free. Not too tough, and you should have plenty of warning of the Hivers arriving.

Ps do you think its possible to have a DE empire fighting off CR empires?

Possible? Sure, but how easy it is depends on what you mean by 'DE empire'.

• Apart from regular combat DDs, do you allow Strikeforce CnC CA? Armada CnC DN? Command stations?
• How high tech are your DDs compared to the enemy CAs? Do you have powerful weapons for killing their CAs? Do they have accurate weapons for killing your DDs? How does your armour stack up?
• How fast are your DDs compared to the enemy CAs, can you outmaneuver them on the strat / tactical maps?
• How big is your economy compared to the CA empires? Can you afford to field several more fleets & hit more planets than they can defend? Can you reliably maintain a significant outnumbering bonus?

There are plenty of factors involved that, depending on circumstances, can ultimately outweigh a hull size disadvantage. But certainly it's a handicap that requires a plan to overcome.