Empire Severely Unbalanced against other factions Thread - Star Wars: Interregnum mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

I know it's an alpha, I know. I'm saying this to help make it better. I'm doing my part.

So here's the situation: I have MAX technology research. MAX fleet sizes, Max EVERYTHING. I got the empire titan, every captial ship and frigate I can hold, and even let them sit at their docks to auto upgrade even further. I went armed to the teeth without room for any sort of improvements or additions up against an equally armed fleet of orthodox advent. Almost all of my star destroyers (of various different kinds) even had the tag something like "Can not be disabled"

I jump towards their army

Barely put a dent into their titan after focusing all firepower and bombers on them

my whole fleet forgets how to shoot, ADVENT ABILITIES LOL (and becomes disabled)

all my ships die

Try again, rinse, repeat, same results.

I removed interregnum, and went back and set up all the same mods and addons with Expanded 4X versions only. Ouch.

Again, I know it's an alpha, but I'm just saying. Empire is severely underpowered even at max upgrades and fleet size levels. Just. Can. Not. Compete.

Just one question. Were the Advent fighting in their own culture? Ain't a fleet in the 'verse can compete with those bonuses.

The Empire Fleet sizes are a serious problem for both Warlords and the Empire. Remember that the strength of the Empire is in their Star Destroyers. You need to always have the max amount of capitals you can build. The Interdictor SD is especially important because of its damage reduction abilities. That being said, even with a maxed fleet, you will have a hard time in the late game. The Advent have always been OP in E4X which why I rarely play against them, loyalists especially so.

What I do to get around the problem is to use the Double Fleet suppy minimod and delete the files for the other factions except Rebels. The Rebel AI is a huge pushover without it. Doing this obviously makes the Empire pretty OP which is why I never max out fleet cap in games. However, if you are going up against the Advent with lvl 10 capitals, you will need all that supply to beat them.

Also, hang back, let 'em come to you. Present an unmoving wall of fire, and never engage their starbases directly. That's how they stun your ships... mass disorientation.

Did a little 1v1 with an orthodox on hard and me as vanilla empire (I'm more of an Ardus Kaine guy) to illustrate. A few screenies of the final battle here. Mind you, this was after a pretty long war of attrition. Repeated unmoving wall of fire tactics as I built up to this fleet.

Oh, something I forgot at first... their buildings (I think just the culture centers) will steal frigates if you get close. Blew up so many of my own strike cruisers because of that.

I've not really had a difficult time with the Advent at all when I am the Empire, or Warlords, especially if I go Thrawn. In fact, the only time I have trouble is if I'm facing off against the Empire. They are hard as hell!

When facing an enemy, no matter who I am, I jump into their system, make sure my ships are set to only engage in local area and not the entire gravity well, and my bombers and fighters destroy most large vessels right then and there... Especially if I'm rocking TIE Defenders or the Rebels fighters. My tactic is to always let my fighter craft engage first, and let the enemy come to me with their now bleeding and broken fleet; right into the arms of my Capitals, Titan, and cruisers/corvette hordes.

Edited by: Firstborne

I'm far too much of a control freak for local area, personally. Hold position and manual positioning from me.

Aside from that, same deal.

When faced with enemies like that, use your starfighters to take them out from range. Select them and focus fire specific enemy units and structures.

It's all about spamming Imperial-I Star Destroyers; they have a great combination of strike craft and turbolaser damage. Mix in a Tector and one or two Imperial-II's and you should be good as long as you can keep your caps alive long enough to level them. Don't forget you can do research to get your caps up to level 5 before even engaging anyone.

In general Empire plays like TEC that focuses on capital ships. So you should be leveraging your starbases and trying to build as strong of an economy as possible so you can just outnumber the enemy. The population bonuses from Empire tech really helps, although a lot of it comes very late in the game.

I think Empire is weak, but not to the extent which you are describing. I have beaten relatively equal fleets alongside starbases as Empire. It's just harder than any of the vanilla factions, no thanks to E4X of course. Lowering the supply cost of some of the ships would go a long way towards fixing this.

I agree that the Empire struggles, largely because its fleets fair poorly in extended engagements. To compound the issue, they have a built-in weak point (losing planets is a severe issue so they have to be careful about expanding) and they've got a couple of trap research options (trading culture or alignment for planetary bombardment or an increase in taxes is no choice at all). And of course their excellent ability to call in reinforcements in various ways are hamstrung by the fact that those ships never come with their fighter squadrons constructed - reducing their shock impact that the Empire is so reliant on.

I build fleets with this sort of thing in mind - massing Imperial-II Star Destroyers and Vindicator Cruisers. They continually refresh each other's shields, and disable enemy capital ships, and present a massive amount of hitpoints to chew through. A late game ISD-II has more than 8k of both hull and shield, and four TIE interceptor squadrons; that's a mid-level Titan in all but name. A Vindicator cruiser has more than 3k shield and 2k hull, and a TIE fighter squadron. They're both fairly hard to kill, and have powerful multi-bank weapons. The massive swarms of TIEs largely control or contest any fighter-based fleets. By reducing the number of AOE targets, you reduce the value of the area weapons that the Empire generally lacks, and push combat towards the kind of close-in fighting that the Empire favors. By the end of my current game I've amassed 18 ISD-IIs and more than 100 Vindicators, along with the various Empire heroes and some Tartan Patrol Cruisers to deal with mine fields. They make quick work of most fleets, and if I have a particularly tough nut to crack then I'll build some Broadside Cruisers to blow up the Titans and Starbases causing me trouble.

Edited by: Kaalel