Strengths

• Cheap, decent fighters. ("Decent" if you choose your ground carefully. Poor compared to some other races' fighters.)
• Hyperdrive (though these can be fuel hungry)
• Pod speed 35
• Very hard ships (but very expensive)
• "Dark Sense" permits them to see enemy ships' weaponry and crew in Data Pad. (Unique racial ability, do not overlook its military intelligence value!)
• Can see docked pods and wings, if they are able to see the ship.
• Very good at Ground Assault .
• High leadership aids in resistance to enemy spy attacks.
• PSI rating helps to attract Siliconoid natives. A high PSI rating helps your colonists gather items off of a planet's surface faster (such as contraband).
• Dark Powers and Psi rating increase the chance Amphibians will enter your base.
• Dark Powers increase the damage done by certain attacks - ie ground assault, Spy attacks and ship boarding.
• High Spy power improves the chances of Spy attacks working
• Empire ships have a +50% shield bonus in combat (Must be owned by the Evil Empire and be of Evil Empire Design). The Super Gorbi has a +100% shield bonus
• Ships of Evil Empire design in the hands of another race have a -75% shield weakness, have a 300% better chance of taking a critical hit from enemy fighter craft, and Heavy Laser weapons pass through both the shields and armor and can cause a critical hit. Who wants to steal your hull plans?
• The H Ross and RU25 class Ships (Evil Empire) are highly resistant to minefield damage. The ship only takes around 10% normal damage for a ship of its size when hitting a mine.
• Contraband lockdown (also called Contraband Blockade) device on the Moscow stops all contraband sales within 200 LY. Team up with a Privateer player and steal everyone else's contraband!
• The Super Star Cruiser's 500mm Guns and Antimatter Guns have a +100 attack bonus. The advantage is only for those two weapons.
• When enemies successfully sabotage your bases, you know who's done it! No one can Spy on you covertly and deny it.
• The Royal Shuttle "Omega" HYPs in on turn 8, with the Emperor (a free High Guard) and 10,000 mega credits.
• 400% income boost from Labour Camps

Weaknesses

• Slow ships (max speed 50, except Mig 'freighter')
• Low income / growth rate
• No alchemy ships (though if you can afford to build one, the Slayer can convert excess food to supplies, and these to fuel).
• Beware fuel crisis in late game? Hyperdrive ships gobble fuel for even a short hop.
• Expensive ships
• No barbitic mines or other defences vs. cloakers
• Empire ships are extra vulnerable to enemy fighters. Shots from enemy fighters ignore the Empire's shields completely, and 10% of the hits pass through the armor and have a chance of causing a critical hit. Fighter missiles have a much better chance of causing a critical hit.
• Sandcasters are extra weak on Empire ships. They MUST use fighters to guard vs. fighters.
• Dark Powers decrease the probability of Bovinoid natives entering your base, and amorphs will never enter your bases
• They have good shields and armour but once you're through this, the ships tend to have high vulnerability to weapons fire - ie they take extra damage. And they all seem to have nice big soft spots!
• Heavy Lasers can fire through Evil Empire shields and 10% of the damage passes through the ship's armor. If the target ship is owned by the evil empire there is no danger of a critical hit. But you might take out important systems that will render the ship helpless.
• Resource Point problems are severe in games with 12+ players: the EE is simply outnumbered by the fast breeders if it is not careful. This limits how many new things you can build in a turn.

Another  way of looking at the Empire

Don't get too focused on the portrayal of The Empire in Star Wars as a big target with ponderous ships and massive centralised resources. In reality it is perhaps more akin to nomadic warriors! Hyperships give massive, unmatched mobility and, unlike many races, it can extract profit from lightning raids - because unlike other highly mobile races it can easily capture prisoners, and (with Lockdown and Blockade ) it can easily capture contraband.

This struck me whilst reading about military history - the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan. The Mongols specialised in mobility, looting and taking vast numbers of prisoners for sale as slaves. There's no particular reason to consider the EE homeworld as fixed. Your growth rate is low so it is not unfeasible to pile everyone into pods and migrate with Migs if needed!

Ships

Throbbing Hulls

Mark MacWilliam writes:


• In simulations I've found that the RU25, properly armed, is the only way the EE can beat ships like the Deth Specula on a cost-per-cost basis, ie 10,000 MC of RU25s can beat 10,000 MC of Deth Specs, if properly equipped. I haven't found any other ship or ship & fighter combination that can do that.
• People tend to forget that the RU25, like the HRoss, is "resistant to mine hits" (according to Tim's Special Weapons and Hull Guide).  Who says the EE is helpless in the face of grav mines?  This ship, with a normal-space speed of 40, can be used to barrel through them and take out key points.  Its low cost (for EE ships) means you can use this tactic to attack several places at once.  Don't forget to equip the ship with Blaster Cannons, Anti-Matter Guns, and/or 500mm Guns for base killing.  I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising.
• Against the RU25, Jon Nunn points out: Very strictly an early to mid game ship. Even with the best weapons that are capable of being mounted on them, if the battle doesn't end very quickly they are all destroyed. And their Hyp ranges are very short compared to your other ships. And not to mention how many Resource Points a fleet with enough RU25s would consume... nevertheless I [PH] think RU25's are a brilliant tool in the EE's armoury.

Jon Nunn points out: due to the change in the way HYPerjumps work inHost 114, you now need to successfuly guess where your target will be on movement tick 100 for a Hyp board. And unless you successfuly board all the ships, your Moscows will be attacked by the remainder of the enemy fleet. But at least your newly captured ship will be fighting on your side. I strongly suggest putting good weapons on the Moscow instead of crap ones.

Ship Devices and their uses

The best use of the Gorbi and Slayers' Super Laser using the "second wave" attack, etc is discussed in the Main Guide

The particle fountain generates +3 heat a turn and generates up to 20 HD stress a turn whereas the Laser mining drill heats a planet by only about 0.3 climate units a turn, with less predictable stress factor adding between 10 and 60 units of HD stress to the core of the planet when it is working properly. It might be possible to use the Slayer's Particle Fountain as a "global warmer", but keep H Rosses near with their scalar wave dampers On to keep the HD Stress down or you could blow up a planet.

Antimatter Maul can destroy jump gates (Set it as your ship's kill target) The ship gets loaded up with the molybdenum from the gate.

The Slayer's Clone Lab will clone 20% of the colonists and troops and HG in its guest quarters.  However there is a cap on HG (originally a maximum of 100 cloned HG per turn, later reduced to 10 HG) because people were abusing the Clone Lab! It will not clone crew. Example: A Slayer has 800,000 colonists and 10,000 troops and 10,000 HG in ts guest quarters. The Clone Lab device will boost this to 960,000 colonists (+20%), 12,000 troops and 10,100 HG next turn. The Slayer can hold 1 million guests.No crew are cloned.

The Clone Lab can clone Troops and HG as well as Colonists, though not crew. So the Slayer is hugely useful. I think there's a slight bug because the HG and Troops appear not on the Slayer, but on the base it is doing Transfers with.

Q. What is the Mobile Parts Plant on the H Ross? A. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's a repair parts creation plant that works on ships (i.e. is mobile). Works just like the repair plant back in your base. Suggestion from Jon Nunn: Have the H Ross carry some Duranium in addition to a full load of repair kits. Have the Mobile repair plant on along with all repair switches, including Replenish armour on for the H Ross. Now whenever it hits a mine in normal space at the reduced damage rate, it's instantly repaired at the end of turn and even in hostile territory, just beam up duranium lying around.

Suggestions from Andrew de Boer: "The Slayer is great for building fighters. It can be used to build 5K Type 1 fighters per turn, 100,000 prisoners will be enough to support this. Now with the clone lab, it can be used to make new colonists who will soon become new troops to capture more prisoners.

"Probably the most deadly ship in the game is the Super Gorbi load with TLAs [personally I'd use LTLA's -PH] and 10,000 Type 3 fighters. I ran a sim against 10 borg Annis all with PPCs and the gorbi killed them ALL and survived! I had 4 wings of 2500 fighters each and they chewed through the enemy cubes like butter. Now add 4-5 SSCs with the 10K T1 wings, toss in a Slayer or 2 loaded with T2 fighters and nobody can stop that fleet. Nobody. But that is your whole fleet.

"The Slayer is a great ship, but extremely expensive. It is great for getting the minerals the EE need and can also build any ship in the EE fleet. Build one of these and HYP into the heart of enemy space, build a few Moscows and load them with HG and have a party. Surprise fleet in the heart of your enemies empire."

Recent Host change: Ord costs 1/10 th mc (was: 1/100 th mc) and 1/100 supply per ord unit produced. But: Mobile ord factories produce ord at a cost of 1/10 a supply unit (no megacredits). Suddenly the H Ross and Slayer become even more important... but beware Crystal X Fields, which will detonate these Devices if they fall within an X Field range, and damage your ship!

The ore processing appears subject to cargo room, processes in order fuel, dur, tri, and finally moly. The Laser Mine Drill also appears to drill in order: Fuel, Dur, Tri, and finally Moly. (Until a total of 10000 ore are drilled.) It then auto refines them, so you only get half that metal.

Food to supply converter ... manual beam up is required to prevent it from not leaving enough food for your cities.It's extremely useful in enemy territory since you don't care if he starves.

Strategy suggestions

"Good allies are always the key no matter what race you play" - Andrew de Boer

"The best form of defence is attack". The key thing to remember is that you are the most powerful player in the galaxy up to turn 25, and you must use this opportunity to ruthlessly liquidate nearby potential rivals. By liquidate, I mean you should at least destroy or capture their home base. This is reputedly possible by turn 8, with a bit of luck in positions of homeworlds and stupidity on the part of victims, using ground assault with your free mechs. Even if they survive, they may always be behind in the population / economy race. This gives you a buffer zone between you and the more remote players, a breathing space to build up because you are relatively weak in mid game. By the end game however you are once again powerful assuming your economy is good enough to build some of those nice, but expensive ships. EE population grows very slowly, so you depend on prison camps and contraband - which you gather rapidly. The Empire gets a 400% income bonus from Labour Camps, so EE players should study ground assault strategies carefully in order to maximise their prisoner catch. Tim has also provided a Contraband Lockdown device to encourage Empire players to play aggressively and try to capture (contraband-rich) enemy worlds.

The Dust Off on the wimpy little Mig allows for lightening assaults on small bases. You can "leapfrog" a ground assault force from planet to planet, without having to build pod launchers etc. In fact the Empire is very, very effective at invading and capturing other peoples' territory - in most games where I've played [other races], the length of supply lines made capturing refuelling points in enemy space vital for effective assault; but capturing bases, as opposed to simply destroying them, is quite difficult for most races. Not the EE.

Prioritise killing Borg and Privateers if they are near you, because these are the races which will give you most trouble later. Everyone will thank you for it, and you may gain some favours from other players (hull trades to help your public spirited war effort etc). You should be able to at least force the scum to relocate into someone else's area. All Emperors I have spoken to who let the Borg get a foothold, were eventually overwhelmed, because Borg have grav mines and grav well generators which make EE ships near-useless.

David Ouimet advises: The only two races that I can think of that give me pause in the early game are the UEA and the Crystals. Though the Birdmen are quite annoying too, mainly as it takes longer to find their homeworld before you can kill it.

In general, apart fromthe light and speedy Mig, you'll be using a lot of Tylium Thrusters or Turbo Thrusters to power the big weapons on the top ships. A nice side effect of this is that these engines types are very hard , which is just as well since, as Darkmoor points out, the bigger EE ships tend to have a soft spot for engines (200% damage modifier). Since EE ships are slow, the speed of these engines doesn't matter. The cost does though, so try to round up some Ghipsoids for free engines.

David Bandy: As the EE you should concentrate upon building Training centers and getting thousands of HG as quickly as possible.

Lordfire: A key strategy seems to be to wait and look what weapon configuration the enemy has got and then jumping there with a cloaked slayer and building the ships then ... not before.

Weisguy: The thing about the EE is that if you rely only on ships to provide your offense, your strategy will be exposed, and you will be pecked to death by ships with heavy lasers and with cheap fighters, especially cheap fighters with good armour. By no means would I attempt to say that a player can't use the EE without fighters and win, I've seen the likes of ADB be pretty effective this way, but it is not the staple way of utilizing the EE advantages. No-one can match and deliver the sheer numbers of fighters the EE can produce.

Mark MacWilliam: 

• In general, use 2nd Wave so that your ships will be briefly concentrated while the enemy's will have scattered.
•  I like to put at least 2 Sandcasters on every ship than can carry them.  Your enemies know you're vulnerable to fighters, and you have to conserve your own fighter strength.  Sandcasters on EE ships seem to be about half as effective as those on other empire's ships, but they're still worth it.
• The only reason the EE can be considered "THE Nightmare fighter race" is because your carriers can bring so many more fighters such great distances to a fight.  The Robot (at least) has a fighter that can take out any number of any type of fighter you have cost effectively - as long as he can get that many fighters to the battle.  Never ever ever give SSCV plans away unless you trust the recipient implicitly, and Never ever EVER ever let SSCV plans fall into Robot hands.  Or you're toast.  (Also note that the SSCV is a wonderful long-range freighter.  In one way or another, this ship alone answers almost all of the Robot's deficiencies.
• A while ago I did a number of sims involving the EE, and I came to the conclusion that they are not cost-effective in combat (tested against Annis and Deth Specs, at least) until you have Sand Shield exotic tech.  Then their fighters make them more cost-effective than the races I put them up against.
  

Early game

• Technologies:
• Hyperdrive tech is essential or you will quickly run out of fuel. It costs only 7100 mC to max out,whereas normal engine tech can be put on the back burner for a while, because your ships have pathetic maximum warp speeds. Eventually though you'll want to increase engine tech to Tylium Thrusters for their hardness / power generating capacity, which is needed for your serious mid-game warships, so consider increasing Engine Tech say, every other turn.
• Buy some Generator Tech with spare cash. In general, you can build ships cheaper using Generators to power their weapons rather than Engines. (Later, you'll want FTL-1's for you Migs though.)
• Your ships tend to have reasonable armour and shields and several have very few PD weapons, so maybe PD tech is not a priority. However you'll want it up to level 7 (Turbolasers) by mid-game to counter the fighters enemies will throw at your Achilles' Heel.
• You need to get planet tech up to 6 reasonably quickly for terraformers, but this tech is no longer as vital as was with early Masters, because everyone now gets a fighter plant (tech 4) on their home world. You also have an Airbase so you don't need to rush up to tech 7. (Thanks to Sparrow for pointing out  that we now get a free fighter plant.)
• You want hull tech up to level 2 quickly, because your tech 2 hull has lots of scouting devices and can attack as an effective carrier very early in the game. Get to tech 4, 6 if possible, as quickly as you can. This lets you go on the offensive against ANY race.
• On Turn 8 the Omega Shuttle arrives. Look for a new Mig called Omega somewhere in your empire. It carries a free High Guard ("the Emperor") and 10,000mc! Sparrow wrote in to warn that - since it can arrive over any one of your bases  - there is a risk you will lose it by encountering enemy forces. Sparrow was engaged in attacking an enemy homeworld by ground assault on turn 8 (!) and it arrived there, before he'd eliminated all enemy ships from the area...
• The starting fighters at your homeworld make good raiders. Form the type 3 Tripods into two wings of 20 fighters each and use them to hop from planet to planet, raiding. They have a ange of 200 LY and will need ships or bases present at their end-points to keep moving.
• Structures: Build a government centre on turn 1, of course. Build say 4 Cities, but be careful not to build too many on your homeworld because your growth rate is already low and Cities reduce it by 0.1% each.  Terraformers turn out to be quite useful  for the EE colony worlds because your farming range is very restricted. And because your  income and breeding rates are so low, every scrap of cash is useful. Farming income is actually worth getting, particularly in early to mid game. And of course Food is more important with recent Hosts.
• Build 10  Crawlers on turn 1, to start churning out free Bots and Tanks
• Colonisation: Send the Migs out to scout. Watch out for fuel use: if your nearby worlds have less than say 2500kT of each type of ore, you're going to run into fuel problems quite early on. That's one reason to get hyperdrive tech high. Drop pods of 50,000 to 400,000 colonists on high contraband worlds. (Opinions vary depending on starting population, etc but the basic idea is that you don't start collecting contraband at the full possible rate if you have less than 400,000 colonists on a planet so you want a lot of people on high contraband planets.) The colonists will rapidly gather the contra . You should use it for seed capital to play the contraband market. Buy low, sell high a few turns later.
• Don't colonise Amorph worlds, they will never join your bases, they'll just eat your colonists. They are afraid of the EE's high Dark Force.The EE must just pick up the spice from the planet and send more colonists to feed the worms. . . I.e, you're going to have to get an ally to colonise that world for you, or lose lots of colonists Gathering. However a third possibility occurred to me. What happens if you use ground assault to capture an enemy base which has amorph natives in it? Tim confirmed that even an EE player will keep the amorphs. Hurrah! Also, if you can get hold of amorphs somehow, you can put them in a base with a Public Spaceport near the amorph world and they will rapidly suck the wild amorphs off the original planet safely into the base. Mark MacWilliam reports that he once got 5,000 amorphs appear at a public spaceport (he was very lucky!) and managed to use these as a seed population to draw in others. Having a Spice source is especially useful to the EE as we like Spice (rating 110), so by cycling happiness down with Complex tax rates and up with Enslavement, we can manipulate the Spice price.
• You don't need many folk to gather natives. Just one will do. However you do need 100 colonists per mine, and your planetary factories only produce supplies proportional to the square root of the number of colonists. So ship 1000-2000 colonists to non-contraband planets you wish to build up as mining or farming colonies.
• Set up a training world near your homeworld. A training world has lots of training centres and turns colonists --> crew --> troops --> High Guard. Training centres slow breeding and convert breeders to less prolific crew, so you don't want this on your home world. It will need lots of food, thousands of kT, to maximise HG training rates.
• Don't forget about the Spy Scanner and Probe Launcher on the Star Destroyer - both excellent base-finding devices. Build a bare-bones SD as soon as possible just to take advantage of those.
• Don't forget to colonise farmable planets. These are not enormously common for the EE. In a low-contraband game you may consider investing in terraformers so you have at least some reliable income in the long term.
• Spying (Base Sabotage) is most effective in the early game, when the enemy has few bases and you have a good chance of destroying a key high tech structure on his homeworld! With Light Powers of zero, the EE's spies are better at destructive attacks (where high Dark Force helps) rather than info gathering. However their Spy rating is 70, which is very high, so spy attacks are successful more often than not.
• Mark Macwilliam points out: The new contraband rules make contraband gathering *vitally* important, both because of the high starting prices (typically ~ 10MC on average) and
  the effect of stockpiling on driving contraband prices up.  Nobody collects contraband as fast as the EE.  Use this advantage! Do your contraband collection it with pods of 300,000 or so colonists (so you can still get them all in one pod when you move to the next planet, despite growth).
• Refit your starting Migs and build new ones with good engines and hyperdrives as this can save enormous amounts of fuel.
  

Mid game

• Depending on starting conditions, you should have a Slayer "sometime between turns 20 and 35". (Personally I didn't get one until turn 50 or so, mainly due to a low starting population of 500,000 I think.) Use its Clone Lab to boost population. Tip: it will clone troops and HG too. You want lots of those for Ground Assaults. The Slayer will solve your fuel crisis too.
• John Smith: You should have some ships on defense but you don't really need as many concentrations or frontline fleets say as the Klingons or other non-hyper drive races. You have the ability to out maneuvre most opponents. Long range fighter-bomber wings (Type 3's) operating in key clusters is also useful.
• Jon Nunn: Try adding some some of the EE's cheap ships that don't carry fighters but have numerous weapons. Think in terms of a well designed fleet instead of a single do-it-all ship. Especially as you need some ships to take out enemy ships with sandcasters, which would chew up your Wings.
• The Empire may have problems getting near Cubes and T Rex's. They have gravity well generators, which knock you out of hyperspace 50LY away. You will drop out of hyperspace approximately 50ly from the ship with the gravity well generator. You must travel the last 50ly using normal engines. Gorbies can take out several Annihilations... but have a max speed of about 20... email me directly for further advice on this sensitive subject.
• It would be good to have some Holo Decoys in your fleet point defenses. They detract from enemy fighters' chances of hitting you. Up to Host 93, they also detracted from your own fighters' chances to hit (!) but that bug has been fixed now, so if any experienced player is re-reading this and thinks Holo Decoys are no good, why not try them again. Incidentally, sandcasters can be used to counter holodecoys. A shot from a sandcaster will destroy 15 decoys. You have plenty of ord capacity on most ships to mount sandcasters, and it's important to destroy holodecoys as they make your fighters much less effective.
• Andrew de Boer: The EE have the biggest fuel crisis in the mid game until the first slayer is produced. Then they have no mineral worries until everything is mined. But they should easily be able to steal/trade for an alchemy ship and they have lots of supplies from their labour camps to fuel their mineral needs. Remember, the EE needs cash for fighters far more than it needs mineral for ships. Learn to play and win the contra market.
• Blockade: if you can park three or more ships in orbit round an enemy world, it is blockaded. This means you can stop enemy bases evacuating by firing pods away. It is a very useful tactic for ground assault races because it gives you time to bring up a suitable ground assault force to capture the population and enslave them. Ideally, one of the blockading ships should be a Moscow, so you can prevent the victim selling contraband. The ships should have Attack Ground turned off, of course. And the victim may build more ships / fighters / asault pods  in an effort to free himself whilst you bring up the troops. If the victim can end a turn with a single ship (or maybe even a Wing)  in orbit round the planet, the blockade is broken, so you must keep Attack Enemies switched on. 
• One thing to bear in mind is that the November 2001 Host changes seem designed to help and encourage EE players towards ground assaults. Bases are tougher to kill with ships. A 400% income bonus from labour camps is nice but only if you can fill them, and sending in personnel on Kill Kill Kill mode is the main way of capturing prisoners. Unfortunately that tended to get a lot of your own folk killed too if you were up against another hard ground assault race. But now that the Slayer has a Clone Lab, you can fill it with 1 million colonists, and get a free 200,000 expendable colonists to play with every turn. This makes the Slayer Clone Lab a key part of the Empire's strategy.
• The EE doesn't have a barbitic minelayer and may, at first, seem helpless against cloakers. Often forgotten fact: LASER mines can do REALLY heavy damage to ships below 60 kt. One (normal) laser hit destroys a Mig Shuttle. (Privateer MBR's are 90kT.) H Rosses and Slayers can lay laser mines. Interested? ShipCalc has a mine damage calculator.
•  I did some sims in a game where I was up against Borg Cubes. Neither side had lots of Exotic Tech at this stage. I couldn't afford Gorbies or Slayers yet, or a full  Super Star Carrier payload of 10,000 fighters, but I found I could trash a Cube fairly economically with a SSC with 20 wings composed of:
  100 + 10 + 10 - yes
  100 + 0 + 10 - no
  0 + 0 + 10 - no
  100 + 30 + 0 - no
  Note that a few type 3's seem necessary to alter the tactics of the Wing, otherwise the fighters don't press the attack. If they crowd right up to the Cube and keep shooting, they kill the Cube, but this only happens with a few expensive Type 3's present. If they attack in a hesitant manner, the target has a chance to recharge its point defense whilst they circle nervously. Also, the Cube was armed with 5 micromissile launchers and 5 turbolasers. The MML's have much better range than the EE fighters, and pick them off if the fighters don't close to attack.
  If you just have 10 Wings of 100 + 10 + 10, then the Cube loses all its shield and armour but plenty of Hull remains.
  Set these Wings to "Attack Deadly First" so they close in on the target properly and don't chicken out of the fighting. Also experiment with "Close to Point Blank" and "Quick Strike".
• Obviously such simulations shouldn't be taken as the definitive study. For one thing, the carrier-versus-Cube example above was in a low cash game with little Exotic Tech. Assume your enemies have read this guide too and will adapt their tactics to counteract the advice here as best they can. But you have one huge advantage over them. Because of the EE's special Dark Sense power, you can see what weapon choices they have fitted to their ships by simply scanning a ship and looking at its Data Pad.

Late game

• Build a stripped down Super Star Carrier, the hull is only 2400mc, use tech 1 engines but a good long range hyperdrive.
• Fill it with lots of little wings of type 3 fighters. 900mc per Wing. Type 3's have 200LY range (100LY if you are interested in them returning to the carrier)
• HYP it into an enemy area - deep space, not on a planet. Accompany it with a Star Destroyer (hull tech 2), which has a Probe Launcher to find nearby bases.
• Once it arrives, program the Wings to radiate out and attack all the small targets in the area. Obliterate all the little one man colonies, freighters etc in the vicinity. Maybe your carrier has a couple of BIG Wings to send after bigger targets.
• Obviously this won't work too well on an enemy core, but theoretically it can saturate and sterilise a lightly infected area 200LY in radius. Note: this strategy may have been torpedoed by the recent Host change (Host94) which made bases a lot tougher to kill.. Further Note: By the time I was ready to try this tactic for real, I noticed my enemy had built 5 AA guns on each of his most useful bases. Simulations showed these would completely destroy the Wings I was planning to send well before they destroyed the bases, even if I increased the Wings to 50 or 100 type 3 fighters each (which I couldn't afford anyway). So I've never really tried this out.

How else could this strategy be used? Well, Slayers could be used to covertly build raiding ships "from nowhere" behind enemy lines, though eventually the Slayer will run out of cash. But using the Slayer's Clone Lab, it can be used for cloaked ground assaults with masses of troops to seize enemy worlds, prisoners, and more cash for building further ships etc...

• Send a Gorbie in to a Cube fleet. They will be knocked out of  hyperspace 50LY from the Cubes. The main problem is that the Gorbie's  max speed is 20. But it can take out 5 Cubes - if they're not reinforced. What I'm hoping is that once I get within 10LY of the Borg, I can use fighters pre-set to 5LY range to start a fight. Then the Gorbie (5LY the other side of the fighters) will be drawn in too.  Combat range is 5LY (see diagram: Chain Effect.). No need for fancy maneuvres with intermediate ships.

Type 1 (Battlebots). Crap but cheap. 5mc (or free - see Crawler). Drop hordes from Dust Off Pods and laugh as they die in their thousands. Lots more where they came from! At first, the battledroids seem of questionable use; cheap, but low stats; but consider that it takes 10,000 colonists to kill a ground unit. This forces enemies to ship troops to each world. The battledroids can be used to take over lightly defended enemy colonies cheaper than using the tank. They can also be used to defend small empire colonies cheaply. Also, I have seen Tim's code and discovered that in ground combat,  it doesn't matter how good your mechs are, if they are outnumbered 10:1 they can always be defeated. So if you are up against Lizard Mobile Bunkers (defense bonus vs. other mech units: +240, ie apparently unkillable) just throw a few thousand free Bots at them. Remember to send a gloating message afterwards.

Type 2 (Crawlers). At 250mc, does not appear to be a worthwhile investment - it could be beaten up by a boy scout with a tin opener. But it produces free Bots and occasional free Tanks every turn. Buy some Crawlers and leave them out of the combat itself.Building crawlers early pays off with quick ground assaults using bots and tanks against colony worlds. Most players invest in 3-10 of these on turn 1.They build 15 free Bots a turn per Crawler. On average, 20 Crawlers will produce about 3 tanks a turn.

Type 3 (Tanks). Decent, tough armour, almost as tough as a Lizard tank. Combined with excellent "attack" stats, except against aircraft, this is perhaps the best ground assault vehicle in the game. Too expensive to buy; let your Crawlers produce them for free for you.

Note that none of the ground assault vehicles have any "attack air" ability to speak of, so they're quite vulnerable to fighters defending a base you are attacking. If you're attacking a base which is defended with fighters, they need air cover, in the form of Type 3 fighters (Tripods).

Another point to note about ground assaults by EE players is the race's terrifically high Dark Force (410!). This means that each colonist or troop can kill, in effect, an extra man or two of the enemy (I need to check the maths on that but the Dark Force is a lot higher than Stormers' 20, who are meant to be good at ground assaults).

Andrew de Boer:

Try and immediately set up a proper training base and build tons of training centres. My main training base had 75 training centres on it for the longest time and I just bumped it up to 100. Use this base to provide the troops you need to ground assault. Try and buy 100 crawlers as soon as you can to provide 1500 mechs and 10 tanks per turn. Tank production maxes at 10 with 100 crawlers, so in the later game, spread them out to 100 per world.

[Mark MacWilliam points out: You might want to add a note about having lots of food on training worlds, since HG production tops off at 1,000 per base unless that base has > 1,000 food, in which case max HG production is equal to the amount of food you have on the base.]

Take the bots and the tanks and pod them to a staging world with lots of troops. A good ground assault force will have 100,000 troops and at least 10,000 bots. More is better. Use dust off and go raiding. By leaving dust off on, you can hop from world to world collecting prisoners. Pod them back and set up labour camp worlds. To protect from riots, put lots of troops on labour camp worlds to control the prisoners. Having PSPs and a gov centre seems to help as well.

As for ground assault, I bought 10 or so Crawlers the very first turn to start the free bot production. I think I managed to accumulate about 60 by turn 12, more than enough to produce enough tanks and bots to go GAing. The early contra gathering is great to build the initial crawlers. After that, income from camps produces the rest.

The best thing to take for ground assaults is lots of troops and no colonists or crew. EE cols and crew have horrible combat stats, only troops and HG work. The main role of the troops is to not die thus lose all the mechs to an abandoned base. I lost quite a few mech before I figured this one out. My initial raiding force had 50K troops and 12K bots plus some bots and tanks. I just lost a huge pod of 200K troops and 35K bots to a dust off pod in battle. But this could be because I think the pod started the turn undocked from my moscow. It was a huge battle with several Lizard rex's and big fighter wings. However, my 20K T1 fighters absolutely annihilated his wings, mostly in one shot. I used Diplomat (great prog there!!) to see how they would do. I have had most of my success against bird bases, easily taking out bases of 100-200K cols.

[John Smith advises:] When using ground assault to capture prisoners (for your labour camps), don't bother ground assaulting Dracs - their stats are too like your own. Scavengers however, are easily captured by ground assault. 100 000 Scavenger colonists versus 23500 imperial troops (also 2 HG) will capture about half, some 50 000 of them. That really helps to boost the EE's economy in labour camps.

[John Smith:] With the Borg it is much more tricky, in fact you don't want to capture them but butcher the lot so you can reclaim the colonists. Infact that is what I am aiming to do. I have a "academy base" which to train up some 200 000 troops (2 pods worth) meanwhile I am picking/looking for a 2million borg colony to which to raid with type 3 fighters and a few dummy targets just to keep him guessing where I will strike.

After a couple of turns the pop will drop to similar size(depends upon number of wings I use.) Then I will drop on a 1 to 1 basis, if I can get sufficent forces through and voila! Think you get 30% of what is there so 60 000 colonists sign up and your casualties are relatively low as the attacking forces is above 3times. Take those colonists back to the academy, then start attacking larger and larger bases with more and more "converted troops".

Ground assault the Borg with lots of troops and a few High Guard so the maximum number of Borg Drones are converted into EE colonists.

[Emil Agustin:] In various test games I made, I too find it very difficult to take prisoners. But I noticed that this was against homeworlds. Against colonies of population less than 10,000 capturing seems easy to do. I'm just curious, but there must be some mathematical formulas that to penalize the dark force rating of the EE. If you send ground forces that are, bloodbaths occur. If you send forces that are way too powerful, you see some captures. If you send less, again bloodbaths. I also suspect that the algorithm used to calculate force levels between two ground forces does not take into account the dark force/light force differential. A goody side is more prone to surrender? Tim? Apparently the only solution is to overwhelm. :)

A note on the use of EE fighters in ground assault:

Don't. Study their stats to see why. Your Bots are free and better at ground combat; who cares how many you lose.

Fighters

General information on fighters can be found on my combat page and in the "How to play VGAP4 " guide. (Those links will take you directly to the right spot.)

Key points about Empire fighter strategy

Different folk advise different ways of using fighters. The confusion arises because what's good at the end of a game is inappropriate when you have limited cash. Here's what to do!

• In the early game you want lots of little Wings, 10 to 100 fighters each. This gives enemies lots of targets to waste sandcaster shots, etc on.
• In the late game you only have a "limited" number of Wings (400!), so it is best to make them as big as possible. Anyhow, by this time you will have the Exotic Tech "Fighters Immune To Sandcasters", so the earlier reason for splitting them up has gone.
• Type 1 fighters are useful only versus other fighters, but they are necessary as a cheap defense screen for your other forces. Enemy fighters will kill your own ships and fighters quickly if not countered. Use Type 1's either as large anti-fighter wings (say 100 per wing, increasing to 10,000 in very late game); or use them to dilute other Wings so that point defenses have less chance of hitting the expensive fighters in those wings.
• David Ouimet: "The fighters work very well when supported by even a small fleet, though I almost always have the fleet coming in during the second wave."
• Type 2 fighters will be your most useful fighter in mid game. You can build almost 4 of them (25mc each) for every Type 3 (90mc), and they're not bad at all versus ships or other fighters.
• Type 3 fighters do more damage than the other types and are the only type to be any use against ground targets. In the early game you will want a handful of these for two purposes:
• A few minimum-size 10-fighter Wings of Type 3's cost only 900mc but are useful for patrolling your empire in normal space. They have a range of 200LY so are far faster than your ships! They will take out any early-game enemy ships they encounter.
• A few Type 3's are needed when attacking enemy homeworlds, because fighters can shoot through Base Shields. Since your Type 1's and 2's have no "attack Cities" (ie ground structures) ability, you will need some Type 3's. You don't need masses, because once the base shield structure itself has been destroyed, your ships can finish off the enemy homeworld.
• In the late game when money is no object and you begin hitting the limit of 600 Wings, you probably want to migrate your ship-killer Wings from Type 2 to the more dangerous Type 3's. Type 3's do more damage, but have a lower evasive bonus so don't assume this is good advice against all races.
• In the early-mid game I tend to use mixed Wings of 50/4010 Type 1/2/3 fighters; plus some Wings, about 100 strong, of pure Type 1's for anti-fighter defense. Others advocate 60/30/10. No-one really knows the best mix. Experiment!

When using huge numbers of Wings, Empire players may hit the limit of how many Wings a player can have at once...There is a limit to the number of fighter wings a race can have, it is based on the number of wing commanders a race has available. "The number of wing commanders = 20 + (total_crew / 1000). The number of wing commanders that you can have will never be more than 200 [or 600 for the Empire]" says Tim.

Carriers have a "Replenish Fighters" switch which means you can get by without an airbase on frontier colonies as long as you have a fighter plant. However, you can't control the mix of fighter types in a Wing using this method. Replenish Fighters happens before Hyperjump.

The key Empire fighter stats are as follows. It is obvious that type 1's are very weak versus ships:

Compared to other races' fighters, EE ones aren't particularly good at anything. Most enemy fighters have either lots of armour, evasive bonus or attack bonus.Lack of bonuses, combined with low accuracy, means they have difficulty hitting things when the enemy use Exotic Tech to boost evasive bonuses.Using Exotic Tech to increase your own race's attack bonus doesn't seem to affect fighters.

A reminder on how fighters work:

• If a fighter beam hits it will take the beam power amount of shield power out. If it hits armor it will take 1/2 the beam power of armor.
• So if a fighter has a beam power of 30, every hit will take out 30 shield points or 15 armor points.
• Missiles use the same set of math.

Having a few type 2 or 3 fighters in every attack is a cheap way of forcing enemies to invest in anti-fighter weapons thus leaving fewer PD mounts, etc available to counter incoming fire from your ships. I have seen a couple of small wings kill 2 T Rex's which simply lacked anti-fighter weapons.

Tripods can fly 200LY through free space without a carrier! Set some Tripod Wings to guard your empire's space by plonking some at bases and using "Intercept Enemy Stuff". Don't mix type 1 or 2 fighters into such Wings or the whole Wing's range will be limited to 10LY.

Miscellaneous fighter tips

• Some people writing to the Mailing List have reported the Empire fighters are very weak; others that they are very successful using them. So don't despair if you seem to be getting chewed up, just experiment with alternative fleet mixes and attack settings.
• Jelmer Renema: You should IMO get as many wings as possible, and then make them as big as possible (not the other way around) to make as many targets as possible, for assault pod destruction, for sandcasters, and for other things) Also, there is still the matter of that bug that seems to influence fighter stats when mixed with others (not sure exately what's wrong here)
• What's this bug he refers to? - A sufficient number of each of useful fighter types appear to take on the best combat characterstics of all types used. (They perform well against both enemy wings and ships.)
• David Ouimet: Quick Strike is great for making passes against targets that use Turbo Lasers for defense. This lets the fighter group close in and fire then they are more likely to pull out of range. If the setting is not on they may dabble around and trade beam fire for heavy casualties from the TL's.
• Q. Why would one use "Quick Strike"? Surely fighters naturally withdraw to recharge batteries anyhow, then swoop in for another strike. Answer from jheleniu: I've used this particular option in a recent game. I am blockading an enemy base. But because the base has no planetary shields and I do not wish to destroy the base (want prisoners, NEED prisoners) just want to soften it up so my ground-forces can capture the base and structures relatively intact. The fighters seem to swoop past the base once, fire, and then disengage, end of battle. None of my ships in the area engaged the enemy base just sat there watching and waiting. A few hundred fighters can soften an enemy base of a 1M colonists suprisingly well.
• Q. What does the button labelled "Launch Fighters!" in a ship's CARGO screen, FIGHTER BAY sub screen, do? - A.Basically that forces a wing to undock. The only time I have ever used it is when capturing a carrier from an unplayed player. - Chris Olin - and the Wing goes to whatever destination you've set it to go to. As the EE, unless you are over a planet and want to reorganize the wings, this is probably a bad idea. (Except for type 3, all your fighters have small ranges. - Jon Nunn. ...Actually I think this may be quite useful if you end a fight with too many Wings for your carriers, say because some carriers were destroyed. You can undock (launch) Wings and use Replenish Fighters to merge them into fewer, larger ones. But Replenish works with free fighters on planets, not Wings, so you need a Base there first.
• Q. Are fighters affected by a ship's evasive bonus? A. Yes. Though Tim reserves the right to change his mind on that.
• Lordfire writes: My own discoveries about wings is: As Anti fighter the type 2 is superior. Reasons may be better  range, better batteries, better generator, more armor, double as accurate in this order ... problem of type one seems to be especially the range ... enemy fighter shoot at them and they cannot fire back :) .. additionally you usually have an interest in clearing the sky of enemey fighter before tick 300... then range is the key.. So I usually use type 2 for anti fighter. Of course type 2 has got missiles ... so they are much better aginst ships too. Exceptions are fighters like Stormer fighters .. fighters with extreme range. Sand casters are the only way to stop them... (as long as there is no SC immunity ).
  

Following Assertiveness Training (my last game playing the EE), I concluded once again that type 1 fighters are useless. A couple of folk on the newsgroup disagreed ("try eight wings of 10,000 T1's against big CoM wings!" "Use 20 500-strong T1 wings as distracting chaff in big battles!") but their tactics seemed as expensive (and higher loss) to me than just using a few big wings of  T2's and T3's. And mixing type 1's into wings of other types isn't worthwhile either. Please feel free to mail me if you find a killer tactic for type 1's.

Using Diplomat, you can see fighters' Soft Spot in the Wing pages. This is a little discussed statistic, because it's not mentioned in Tim's documentation; few people know it exists, though he has made occasional oblique references to it. A fighter will blow up immediately if a point defense or another fighter hits its soft spot. For the EE, type 1 fighters have a 40% soft spot (!!!), type 2's have 3%, type 3 fighters have 1%. Even most race designers don't know about this stat. Here is a comparison table:

Other tough races:
RCS and Mivorari: 0 2 1
Centaurs: 0 0 1
Solorian: 0 0 0
IMT: 20  2  1

Unconfirmed theory: I got the impression (many Hosts ago) that Empire fighters can probably fire about 10 shots before their batteries are flat, then their underpowered generators will take quite a while to recharge the batteries so rate of fire will fall dramatically. Therefore it would be a good idea to experiment with combat settings like Quick Strike to minimise the time they are near enemy point defense weapons but cannot fire back!

The simulations I've done so far suggest that Empire fighters are no match for other races' fighters, so you need to go really over the top with quantity. Key phrase: "The skies were black with fighters."

A Wing of 500 type 2's is much less effective than a Wing of 400 type 2's with 100 type 3's. It seems the Wing of pure type 2's hangs back a lot, it will zoom in a bit, fire and skip out again, perhaps this gives the targets time to recharge their PD's. Anyhow, the battles last a long time and end up with the Wing being cut down. Whereas the Wing's tactics seem to change when some type 3s are in it, perhaps because these have missiles too, or perhaps it is a range thing. The Wing will close in in a much more determined fahion, pumping much more damage into the target.

Lordfire wrote in with his discoveries about wings:
As Anti fighter the type 2 is superior.
reasons may be better  range, better batteries, better generator, more armor, double as accurate in this order ...
problem of type I seems to be in particular the range ... enemy fighters shoot at them and they cannot fire back :) .. additionally you usually have an interest in clearing the sky of enemy fighters before tick 300... then range is the key.. So I usually use type 2 for anti fighter.
Of course type 2 has got missiles ... so they are much better aginst ships too.
Exceptions are fighters like Stormer fighters .. fighters with extreme range. Sand casters are the only way to stop them... (as long as there is no SC immunity ). I'd try Micromissile Launcher PD and Type 3 EE fighters - PH

Mark Macwilliam wrote in with some comments on EE fighters:
The type 1 fighter is one of the most cost-effective anti-fighter fighters (space superiority fighters) in the game (only the Robot type 1 is better, as far as I can tell) - IF you have sufficient docking capacity or can use free-flying wings in the given combat.  If for some reason you're stuck with 1 Super Star Carrier but you can afford all the fighters for it you want, by all means, go with t2 or t3.  But if you're going up against someone with a lot of fighters and you have more capacity than you have fighters (this is much more common for me) be sure to include a few wings of type 1s.  A fighter can have the crappiest stats imaginable, but if you have enough of them, they will win.  They get even better with Sand Shields.

Weisguy bangs the Type II drum:

Miscellaneous notes