Imperium Galactica II: Fleet Battle: Solarian vs Kra'Hen

[@Wayne31529]

This is one of my all time favorite games, I still play it often. I personally adore the antimatter ray and often rely on nothing else for my damage dealing. A battleship equipped with computer jammers and antimatter rays is the workhorse of all of my end-game fleets. The trick to the ray, is to use it as a melee range weapon. It is likely the only weapon in the game that works like this, but it does. It is usually terrible because the red clouds waft so slowly towards the enemy that it will never hit. Force your ships to nearly ram the enemy's, and the ray will hit within a second of being launched and they'll not be able to dodge it. Another neat thing, the enemy ship will continue taking the full damage of the ray for as long as it sits in it. When fired at melee range, this usually means a 1-shot kill, and since the game groups ships together, it often means one ray, 5-10 kills. Of course your computer jammers will prevent the enemy from using any high-powered weapons. I've used 100 of such battleships to wipe the floor with 500 Kra'hen capital ships fully loaded with destructor rays and everything else, and I only lost 20ish from heavily concentrated laser damage. For me, the antimatter ray is the executioner axe of the galaxy.

[@machaiping]

Thanks for the tip, I'll try it next time I play Solarian. But wasn't Computer Jammer shut off Anti Matter Ray as well? Computer that wasn't Kra' Hen will always equip it on thier end-game ship, unlike the Kra' Hen who'll equip Enh. Cargo Pod due to artifical stupidity of Auto Design button. In my experience, the Ship Manipulator is the most broken item to equip on any fleet, more so than Anti-Matter Ray or Destructor Ray, because it'll make your ships kill each other and it'll hit before your Anti-Matter / Destructor Ray. The only solution I found so far is to choose the formation during formation phase before battle to get your fleet partially in jamming range from the start and don't stop your fleet to shoot until you're sure that enemy entire fleet already hit with your jammer, else prepare to lose one or two stacks of your ships if you're lucky, your whole fleet if you're not. PS, at least you can steal it and lame them right back, but if you're Kra' Hen, good luck...

[@TheLambdaTeam]

machaiping Computer jammer will shut down paralyser, ship manipulator, anti-matter beam, and the destructor beam, yet it leaves the lazorz and cannonz intact. Therefore, fighting against the Shinari is trickier as they use Computer jammer too.Be careful tho as sometimes if u manipulate a ship, the Computer jammer will stop jamming it, even after it reverted to its original owner. Thankfully I lost only one battleship, but still it wuz nasty!

[@machaiping]

TheLambdaTeam Indeed, but the Shinari rarely last that long into late game when AI be the one controlling it. I think it because fleet battle between AI use the "Auto Battle" function, and thus when you have comparable number of ships, Shinari whose ships can equip less cannons and lasers always lose because it has less Attack strength. Auto Battle didn't take effect of Paralyser, Ship Manipulator and Jammer, etc. into account when doing the calculation. Oh, and speaking about Campaign; Solarian, Kra'Hen and Shinari always started out in four different corner of the map, no matter who you play with, thus if AI Shinari expand into AI Kra'Hen or AI Kra'Hen into AI Shinari (the latter was more likely)... well... AI Shinari is 99% toasted...

[@machaiping]

If you want to be cheap; load up skirmish battle (need 1.14 patch, but I think you should have it anyway if you want to play it on Windows 7 onward), pick a race you wanted to know A.I. design set up, set the game at full tech and start, then look into the design of all ships. A.I. of that respective race will equip their ship exactly like what you see if they get to end-game, save special gun like death ray or paralyzer or something like that. Shinari, if they can actually get to the end game, are a pain to fight because the Manipulator and battle cloaking as you said. But I rarely encounter a game where they lasted to end game when the AI is behind the wheel. And all that comes the downside of trying to get to end game without getting rushed by torpedo destroyers kiting your early game fleet to dust first. Oh, and Trade Center's double income is really inferior as it depend on random number god as the game went by - same as spies that can fail even when you get 90% chance of success.

[@TheLambdaTeam]

Peter S *The mission "Payback" can be complited alright, but don't get me wrong: it'z gonna be EXTREMELY hard. One mistake, and y're a goner.* *To finish it, first y'must conquer the closest Krahen planet, then manufacture as many colonization shipz as u can (and beat the Krahen fleet once). Then colonize those faraway planetz down in da corner, sell everythin' from da Krahen planet, make it uninhabited and retreat to yer new planetz. The Krahens won't see ya, but they'll slowly colonize their way there, so be on alert, and keep researchin' ships. Use new engines on yer existing shipz, try to attack an' destroy the newly colonized Krahen planetz without they discoverin' ya. Once y'got to Heavy Cruiser, y'get Destructor Ray, then build up about 30 Mega tankz an' start attacking them Krahen planetz, forcin' da Krahens to recapture them. Keep this in a triangle pattern maybe, avoidin' them Krahen fleetz an' constalty buildin' new shipz on yer homeplanetz. When y'have enough shipz wit' Destructor Ray, stand yer ground, defeat the Krahens (use Computer Jammer too!!!!!) an' the rest iz up on ya. Good luck...y'gonna NEED it!!!!!!!!!*

[@InfernoNinja111]

Truly underrated game with tons of "replayability". Don't make 'em like they used to

[@73Dreamscape]

Stellaris buddy

[@rohitchaoji]

@@73Dreamscape It's decent but it lacks Imperium Galactica II's real time tactics gameplay during battles, which was one of the best things about this game imo.

[@thebel89]

Nothing is more beautiful than Anti-Matter Ray destroying Battleship in slowest speed :)

[@jonathanj.3695]

I freaking love how it zooms into a close up of the battle from the galaxy map.

[@machaiping]

I know. Even Star Wars Empire at War which has relatively similar gameplay but came out almost a decade after this game didn't have that. Such was the creativity and aesthetics appreciation of the developers during the rise of strategy games in 2000s. We never quite return to that time since then. For an example, one of the obscure RTS game in 2000 has a retreat mechanic similar to Company of Heroes / Dawn of War 2/3 but came out a decade earlier. And despite the game never succeed and fade away, said mechanic in that game is still league ahead of what every COH and DOW has to offer! You can manually set how much health an individual unit lost before they automatically retreat. (You may want to set a fragile unit to run at 50% hp, and a tough unit to run at 25% hp, for example.) And not only that, when they run back to base, they automatically go to the nearest heal/repair facility and heal themselves back up to full without players' input! Which save time and let players focus their attention elsewhere, making it more efficient.

[@Devilsolution]

Omg, I remember long time ago when I was young even in hungarian I didn't know exactly what to do and on Hard mode I had the fiercest battle ever against the Kra'hen with Solarians. My fleet was about over thousands of units including (luckily) a lot of Behemoths so I was able to withstand against their destructor ray. Nowadays I played out the full single player campaign in no time. Better understanding the taxes and the strategies of different races. Still, it's the best with the kra'hen as you only have to concentrate on increasing the military strength then annihilate the galaxy. When I played out the solarian campaign again it was ridiculously easy to jam the destructor rays and this is the joy of this game that you really have to use your brain on how to control your fleet. Best game of my childhood!

[@alexphenex8]

I remember being pissed about description's "easy mode is for elementary kids" while being an elementary kid Good memories, good video, amazing game

[@andrewrobins6703]

Good video :). You know you should make a video when you go on the market and buy all the ships you can before the openent finds you. That would be an AWSOME battle

[@grayfoxv]

I got obliterated the first time I ran in to a Kra'Hen fleet. All I changed next time was switching out one slot on all of my battleships with ship manipulator - made it an absolute cake walk after that.

[@machaiping]

That thing is stupidly overpowered and never get fixed in any patches at all. I'll give you a hint; in the battle map, each player can have a maximum number of 16 capital ship models and 50 fighter models regardless of how many ships/fighters they bring to the fight. The extra capital ships/fighters will stacked into those models instead of forming separate models. Hence, if you decided to cheese with Ship Manipulator, it's unnecessary to get more than 16 capital ships per fleet if your goal is to kill enemy fleets but leave invading their planets to other fleets. However, you have to turn off Battle Overrun feature in the Option Menu, because if the enemy fleet strength is too high it'll forced Auto Resolve, resulting in you losing the fight instead.

[@grayfoxv]

@@machaiping Aaah efficient cheesing indeed! Thanks for the tip :) We need an IG style kickstarter game pronto!

[@TCBYEAHCUZ]

I feel that Imperium Galactica II had the most sci fi battles where it really feels like a space battle. Now imagine if they included the explosions of Haegamonia!

[@Szgerle]

I always just used two fleets, a fast one to capture and recapture border planets and lead their main fleet around in a wild goose chase and a slow, tank transport one I used to go through their empire and raze their core planets, becasue the AI always kept forgetting to upgrade forts.

[@darkhunter777]

I think the film "Babylon 5" was made based on her

[@yllbardh]

this my friend is a phyrric victory.... do not underestimate the role of fighters....

[@11pasa11]

You can actually outnumber them on normal difficulty but you have to expand really fast.

[@llamaloka]

do you know of any youtube channel that has more video tutorials like this for IG2 ? do you also know if in new version of steam they remove the cntrl+4 etc etc for unit groups ? cause it dosnt seems to work anymore

[@machaiping]

Sorry for late reply; I saw a few in search, but most are in Hungarian so I don't really understand what they're saying. But this game isn't that good for Let's play thanks to randomness of event - players most likely not face the same event like the Let's player does. And another problem is that many modern recording program don't work on this game anymore. This's a problem for old game in general though. Oh, and Campaign Hard mode of this game is more like Trial and Error game than 4X RTS, because for any given quest/event, there's only one way to solve it, deviate from that and you're dead. It took away all the charm of randomness and the relatively free style to solve any given problem that this game is known for. Normal mode is the absolute maximum difficulty you can play and enjoy in my opinion.

[@TheLambdaTeam]

Ummm....the Hungarian version of da game has a distinct tutorial "level", in fact, 7 tutorial levelz. Doesn't the English version have them? What exactly y'need assistance wit'? BTW, if y're in cash trouble, there'z a legal cheat in da game: At the start of da month, set the "taxes" to the second highest (do NOT set it to highest or the denizens will revolt!!!!!), an' before the month endz, lower taxes to "none". There! Perfect morale, and huge amountz of cash!!!

[@thebel89]

RIP Digital Reality

[@FranciscoCostaRamos]

I want to see this in modern games dammit!!

[@FranciscoCostaRamos]

+Francisco Costa Ramos This game was freaking ahead of it's time

[@saracen2633]

+Francisco Costa Ramos Stellaris is about as close as we are ever going to come to Imperium Galactica 2 I think. They're still dramatically different. But I don't think any Grand Strategy 4X has the same level of polish and Atmosphere of IG2 until now. I know I'm going to recreate all the factions of IG2 in Stellaris as closely as possible. Beauty of Stellaris, we can finally give rise to a new Empire, the Kra'Hen will once again worship the God Emporer and they will subjugate new planets to his pleasing!

[@CP-jk3tc]

Yes, ground combat's fine, but they should fix the space combat though. 'Ship Manipulator' is the only way to go and it made the Shinari OP (Shinari was supposed to be the weakest faction militarily). So you fit ship manipulators and stealth on your cheap cruisers, activate stealth, deactivate weapon systems and thrust them into the front line. Ambush the enemy by activate the cruisers' ship manipulators against a big stack of enemy's battleship and turn their main weapons against their own. There, you can win against 2-3x bigger force this way with minimal loss or not at all.

[@rajajonconcon]

"sins of a solar empire" is the closest one nowadays but is just not the same. i will never find something similar to fill the void

[@llamaloka]

also do you know how to fix the mouse acceleration from this game is very terrible

[@machaiping]

I don't have any problem like the mouse in this game when playing on dual core PC and Windows 7. It's a vanilla version with fanmade patch V 1.14, but said patch was out since Windows XP, as this game couldn't run on Windows XP onward unless using this patch. Minor issues that doesn't affect gameplay much is that you cannot Alt+Tab during the game as it'll generate an error. And sometime Ion gun tanks can crash the game during ground battle if you have too many of them. But if you played against AI, most of the time Missile Hovercraft Tanks (tech 3 tank equipped with Missile turret) is more than enough to clear the game. But that's all the issues I have with my IG 2 though. So I'm sorry that I couldn't help about mouse acceleration problem you talk about.

[@llamaloka]

tnks for the quick awnser , but what about the steam version of the game that just came out have you try it out yet ? seems like it dosnt have the Cntrl+4,5,6,7 etc unitc group feature , is there any way to activate those in configuration files or something ?

[@machaiping]

I still have all original CD (all of them about 16 years old now) except the Solarian Disk which broke down years ago and have to find replacement from torrent. Patch 1.14 worked just fine except occasional errors mentioned above (it doesn't show up much, especially if you don't adjust game speed repeatedly during battle) And the multiplayer of this game allow players to rejoin the match if they dropped out for any reason. So I don't see any reason to buy it from steam as of now. So I can't really comment on those features. Perhaps when Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 7 a few years from now, and Windows 8 or above couldn't play this game, then maybe I'll consider buying the steam version, but for now I'll stick to the old CD I have.

[@johndthottam]

how to get the destructor ray ?

[@machaiping]

Kra'Hen, Iberon, and Toulen can research it naturally. For Solarian and everyone else, you'd need to either use spies to steal it, or try to buy it from the Iberon and Toulen, if they survived long enough to get it. But there's another way to get Destructor Ray in the Solarian campaign though. When you completed the first Tear Crystal quest where you send fighters into the asteroid field to retrieve it, there's a chance that you will get a design of a cruiser with Destructor Ray on it as a bonus reward. This one is pure RNG, and the aforementioned cruiser is just a giant sniper rifle because it's otherwise terrible due to bad equipment loadout except for Destructor Ray. So you still need your own ships to tank damage for it to be useable.

[@mcg599]

The easiest way of beating these guys is to simply equip your battleships with computer jammers and then concentrate all of your firepower on single ships at a time. Computer jammers render null their heavy firepower.