Playing Birdmen in VGAP4

23rd January 2001. | Suggestions welcome

Latest additions since (January 2001) in red, to help folk who've read this before

See also: Tim Wisseman's guide to the Birdmen, at http://www.vgaplanets.com/v4guide/birdmen.htm and Doug & Maries' guide at http://home.postnet.com/~dougnmarie/NuQonoS.html

Overview

The Birdmen are the cloaking, sneaking, backstabbing bastards of V4 (at least until the Privateers are out). They have reasonable ground assault attack capabilities, fairly capable ships; they are potentially VERY powerful when they can do what they do best, Spy and Board. To enable the boarding advantages of the Birdmen their nearly blind ships need a seeing eyed dog. To take full advantage of your spying you need to be a pretty good diplomat to negotiate with potential allies and blackmail known enemies (you can only spy on one race at a time).

Bad points:

• The Birdmen have very weak scanners.
• Their ships can't tow well and most repair holds are small.
• As mentioned elsewhere, the leader looks like Moe.

Good points:

• The best cloaking ships and bases in the game.
• Great spying ability plus Praetorian High Guard Masters.
• High training and growth rates.
• Plasmatron replaces mines and smelters, and kicks in major ground assault horsepower.
• Similar to Stormers, they have a very high conversion ratio of colonists--> Crew-->Troops-->Highguard.  Feds, Peeps, University Alliance, and Borg have good reason to fear ground assault from cloakers.
• Their cloaking ships can carry huge numbers of troops (and some can carry assault vehicles in pods too).

Using special racial abilities

See the section on how to capture ships in combat on the Combat Tips page. Bear in mind the Deth Spec has a Boarding Laser. Leave this switched on all the time, it costs nothing to run.

The Praetorian High Guard Masters do their thing without your intervention.  They become active once your population crosses the 10 million mark.  If they succeed in the capture of an enemy universal friendly code, advance with as many cloaked ships as you can muster as the mines and ships arrayed against you will pay no attention.  Refer to the strategy section for more spying ideas.

The Plasmatron Assault Vehicle decreases the effectiveness of enemy ground and air assault mechs.  They also work as low impact mines and smelters.  I build them in large units and move them from planet to planet mining each one out.

You have stealthy bases and ships.  Bases have a signature of 20 instead of 800.

You have a number of anti-Borg capabilities: recover a higher number of "killed" Borg in ground combat as colonists, nanovirus device turns Borg into natives, and Borg do not get goodies when they assimilate Birdmen.

Using special ship devices

• [See main guide for information on how Cloaking works]

Recommended colonization strategy

The various player guides out there present several colonization options.

1. Pods – slow, inefficient, colonists in pods don't breed. Despite your slightly higher pod speed, I don't think this is a good idea for you. Use your pods for positioning material that is primarily just stockpiled such as minerals, food, repair, and ord. Pods of people should be docked.  Your colonists, money and supplies are too valuable to send drifting along at 32 LYPT.
2. SDSF's – This is a better idea, but is slow with low tech engines. Use this as mop up of stars you passed up as lower priority.
3. Small Capitol Ships – You need to get your startup Skyfires out and about to scan. As long as there is only one transfer per turn, tow SDSF's with your Skyfires to seed a planet with the SDSF and Colonize with the Skyfire. In the early game establishing 6 new bases a turn will give you a great start. Have colonists loaded into a pod to restock the Skyfires. Use some of your startup equipment (FTL-5 engines) to build White Falcon's.  Since your Skyfires are fast, get them out a substantial distance and work back in a spiral. Establish some bases that will have concentrations of training centers. You will have more crew than you will need, so send them off to training center bases to become troops and highguard.

You should try to spread your people out throughout your territory to get a marginally improved overall growth rate. More importantly, you should consider tactics for positioning your troops like others consider ordinance. Try to push them towards the front lines where they are needed most. Also, by spreading out your resources you are not as vulnerable to an assault on one of your bases. Once you have a substantial empire, make use of autopilot ships to move your resources around so you don't have to deal with the tedium. The exotic tech Pod Kicker can be used to bump up pod speed. This is most cost effective if you build up the need for a lot of pod activity and do it all at once so you don't have the tech cost. Growth of your population compounds, so boosting your rate with exotic tech may make sense to push some planets over critical 1 million, 2 million, 5 million thresholds.

• Similar to the Stormers, your training centres are efficient, so do not build many training centres on your homeworld. Otherwise all your breeders (colonists) get converted to non tax paying, non breeding crew and troops too quickly. Instead, establish training centres along your primary lanes out from your homeworld. You will probably have excess tax exempt crew, so load some up with your colonization pods to train into troops and highguard where the training rates are the highest.

Strategy suggestions

You have the best spying capability in the game.   Be sure to use it!

• The addition of spy mana each turn is proportional to the square root of your contribution. You get the most bang for the buck with your initial 100 MC with each additional point coming at a higher price. Until 1000MC is of little consequence do not max out your contribution.
• Choose ONE enemy to be your primary focus. As it is seldom smart to fight a war along multiple fronts, you will be most effective against a single target. Consider races that have desirable ship plans to steal or races that may pose a major threat later in the game. Factors that will reduce your spying effectiveness are the targets Leadership, Lawfulness and PSI. Peek at the training rates, since highguard help to protect against some forms of spy attacks.
• My favorite targets would be the Peeps, Feds or University. They can fill your holes (scanners, ship devices, towing) and are relatively easier targets. The Lizards with their hisser units can pump their happiness up if necessary. The Stormers are a hard target. The Cyborg is impossible.  You can't keep Crystal plans anyway, so what is the point.
• Your impact will be on the happiness of the target race and will have a cumulative impact over time since spying is more effective with lower happiness. With lower happiness the economy slows down and a weak economy slows down tech, structures, ships, EVERYTHING. Initially, set your spy mode to sabotage bases. If you hit in the first couple turns it can be very effective because you are likely to whack the target race's homeworld. The impact can be severe (e.g. blow up ord plant killing 15,000 colonists). If you destroy a higher tech initial structure (e.g. assault plant) it may be many turns before they have the planet tech to build a new one. Every couple of turns "Incite Disorder". If you get them heading down enough in happiness their income and growth rate will slow down.
• You want your mana to build up to 400 to 500 to try first attempt at stealing ship plans. If you try to steal plans right away you may get the target's good startup capital ship, but you are more likely to get a start-up freighter.  Fortunately their highguard cannot stop you from stealing plans.
• Once you start capturing and enslaving prisoners get more aggressive with your physical and spy attacks. Kicking someone around like this is no way to make a friend so do not let your initial target get on their feet. You will be their one and only target. Keep your boot on their throat and keep it there for the duration. One could reach "terms" but you will never sleep easy.
• So that you don't line up everyone against you, good diplomacy is necessary. You want to cultivate a "working" relationship with allies and neutrals. You want to be able to counter any offer your target will make to gain a protector/ally. Share information with the bullies of the game so they go along with you to pound on the weak instead of being their bodyguard. Maybe you can convince others to choose the same spy target. For the timid that will not join in, share your successful "hits" with other players trying to leave them with a sense of "better them than me" relief.
• Labour Camps and Mines now generate 10mc each, so are worth building. More to the point, if a camp / mine has enemy prisoners in it, the enemy's happiness goes down - I believe the rate is one point for EVERY full camp / mine. This has a direct result on their tax returns / susceptibility to Spying, so try to catch prisoners and imprison them!  The slave trade could work out to mutual benefit if an ally has a fortified base to set up labor camps nearby.
• You have lots of High Guard, compared to most races. Put one on each ship, making the ships almost immune to Spying. (It also improves their weapon accuracy.) Put at least one at each valuable Base: 40% of the time a high guard ranger can stop an enemy spy attack on a base that would have otherwise caused damage.
• You have the best cloakers and some of the best troop ships in the game.   Be sure to use them for what they were designed for!
• Boarding Your best offense in the game is to use your troops to board enemy vessels. The only ships with the guest quarters capable of withstanding yours are the Cyborg Quietus and Cubes and Peeps Offworld Colony. Even the Stormer's Victorious is vulnerable to boarding if you have the initiative, and yes, despite their toughness, none of the Lizard ships stand up to a full Fearless load of Troops. You have the Deth Spec at tech level 6. The boarding laser can come in handy in a number of circumstances. This very versatile ship should be liberally sprinkled throughout the universe. They can board small ships on their own. If you team them up with another one of your ships with large guest quarters, you can give yourself a head start by eliminating many of the target crew and passengers with the boarding laser. If you would rather just blast a ship (e.g. Borg Cubes with more than 1,000,000 passengers) four Deth Spec boarding laser hits will destroy ANY ship, potentially before any regular combat. If you can either steal or blast the heart out of an enemy fleet on the move before combat, the balance could swing in your favor. Don't be afraid of a fight, but make it on your terms. Cloak and scatter if a situation is not to your advantage. Try leaving a light ship vulnerable so you can identify boarding targets for the next turn.
• Tax rates: Liberal and Complex give you slightly more cash but you take a big hit on Happiness. Use Conservative or Ultra Conservative for max happiness. Max happiness is best strategy because it gives you more money in the long run (I believe colonist happiness figures in the tax formulae); it means your colonists and natives breed faster; it makes your empire resistant to spying; and happy natives attract more natives.

  Technologies: In general I have found upgrading ships to be a bit of a pain, so I plan out my overall tech strategy ahead of time. I don't move my hull tech up past 2 (White Falcon) until I can outfit ships with decent components. You shouldn't be worried about overt aggression until later anyway. Of course if the Ghipsoidals build you engines, get your hull tech up ASAP so you can fling tons of full speed ships out early. Don't bother with Small Weapon Tech past level 2 for a long time (or ever).  Raise shield and engine tech every turn. The point defense systems below tech 5 (micro-sand) are poor, so get that tech up and then take your time. Raise your Large Weapon Tech when you have the money, but not at the expense of items more on your critical path. I usually am not in much of a hurry to raise planet tech.

Ships

• Along the theme of doing what you do well, decide what you are going to do with your ships before you build them. My best advice for arming your ships is to look over the tables and experiment with Diplomat. The weapons you use should be tailored to your opponent. Concentrate on Ord weapons against the Crystals, armor draining against the Lizards, shield drain against the Feds, arcing against the Stormers… you get the idea. When your cash flow allows, boost your scan range exotic tech to improve your whole fleet.

  I classify the roles for my fleet in the following way:

  • Battle – A fleet of ships for a thrust into enemy territory, or mustered against an opponent's fleet. Good ships for this are the Darkwing, DWG against Borg, with Resolute, Deth Spec and Bright Heart to go after opponent's light ships with evasive bonus. Support the fleet with additional Bright Hearts if enemy mines are a problem or you want to lay your own. Add the Red Wing to throw in some fighters if you have the money. Use the Skyfires to scan and haul cargo.
  • Patrol – You need to have a spread of ships scanning your borders. The Skyfire is your only ship with decent scanners. You will want to steal, barter, or spy your way into a ship with long range scanners. The Deth Spec has a fair amount of firepower, huge attack bonus and is light weight enough to sip fuel at 95LY/turn. For good information on this ship go to the Stormers Guide.
  • Colonize – The White Falcon is a good armed freighter. Of course your three startup Skyfires will be primarily freighters at first. I like to use SDSF's to seed lower priority targets. Once you have the engines, Neutronics can tow an SDSF out to a cluster of planets sped up from 50LYPT to 90 LYPT.
  • Board – The White Falcon, Fearless, and Resolute have large guest quarters to lurk around and board unsuspecting ships. The Darkwing has large quarters as well and will board, but that is not its primary mission. The boarding laser from the Deth Spec can be a big help, but since you have low repair holds on most of your ships, just stomp them with 30,000 troops and drive away a pristine ship.
  • Planet Defense - The Avalor Station packs some powerful heat and can do some major housekeeping while it is at it. You need to nick some ship plans to tow these around to realize their full benefit. If the Ghipsoidal's have left you a pile of engines, this is a good place to use them. The Swift may fend off very light ships and freighters. Mostly it is just an alarm system (I just blew up over planet X), but what do you expect for Tech 1. If you see them coming your 200 guests can board a lightly manned ship.

  You will want to round out the holes in this fleet. You need some terraforming ships. You can't tow, so look to an ally for this trade, since you won't have to give up a great ship plan to get a mediocre ship with decent tow power. How about the Stormer's Saber? It is not their best ship, but paired up to tow an Avalor station it looks a lot better. The Feds have good scanners on most of their ships. The Peeps Anthem Intelligence Probe would light things up quite nicely and would be efficient to tow around with a hull mass of 8 KT. You have the best cloakers in the game, so you could go after the "do everything" University Incident in trade. Since you will be trying to hijack ships instead of blowing them up, a hacker droid will be very valuable. There are only a few in the game, try to get one.

Anti - Birdmen Tactics

• Keep your happiness up
• Share information about their location with others because stealth is their critical strategic advantage.
• Try to be unpredictable about ship movements unless you want to see them coming back at you flying the Birdmen Flag.
• You need lots of plantary defenses to counter the Birds fairly high ground combat rates. (Watch out for them establishing a base on your planet as well since they are hard to see.)
• On offensive, blast their bases from the safety of orbit.
• Mines, mines, and more mines.
• Blind them by taking out any ship you see. The cloaking ships all have poor scanners.
• Use Lokis to decloak ships
• Ally with Crystals or Lizards.  The Birds are most vulnerable to these races.

 

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Mark