Best Wonders overall?

I admit, whenever I start a game, I play Supremacy (and mostly a hybrid Supremacy and Purity because I'm sick of the Supremacy look and voices for all my games) and I don't start the game until I get a wonder I want. Some are OK, others just are not my style of play and I restart.

Regardless of that, here's what I think about certain wonders:

1) Cloaking - AWESOME! So long as you maintain your distance and launch fighters, they'll never spot your ships and you can attack the enemy without problem. Good in all stages of the game.

2) Battle Academy - Three Cards per battle is pretty nifty. Could be a Doppelgänger or increase speed for an entire mission. Useful even in early stages. Especially then.

3) Redundant Systems - If the AI has this, take it from them or else battles will be harder, because if you don't destroy the enemy in one turn, they'll be essentially back at full health by the time your turn rolls around.

4) Reactive Armour - Useful in conjunction with torpedoes and a planet. Hug the world, watch the enemies approach, then fire! No damage to you, and there's dead ships raining down on billions of people.

5) Damage Control - Critical hits are no longer a worry! Up close and personal time no need to worry about my shields going down.

6) Naval Tradition - Ummm... unless this gives me an extra bit of morale, worthless. My cannon ships do great damage regardless of fatigue.

7) Jump Start - Situational. I prefer my enemies to go first. But if they go first, they launch stuff, so it depends.

8) Hyperlaunch - Nifty. Launch a fighter, send it out far away from my carrier and send carrier behind a field.

9) Tight Squeeze - Nifty. Fighters can use asteroids for cover and retreat vectors.

10) Repulsors - Not great but I don't mind it. Asteroid gaps are not my biggest worry unless it's a maze.

11) Torpedo Boosters - Found some good use in this: Hang near the enemy planet and fire from a longer distance. Useful if you don't have reactive armour and you're using one ship.

12) Stealth Torpedoes - This is a case of a wonder only being beneficial to the AI. What's the point of having invisible torpedoes if the AI will run into the visible ones easily enough?

13) Jump Control - I hate jump gates when they get in my way, but other times I love them. So this one is situational, if I have nothing else better to spend.

14) Dual Command - AWESOME! Best wonder ever! Launch two fighters... fire cannons, launch a fighter, boost fighter, hit enemy ship from behind! Once I have this wonder (or Cloaking) tough battles start becoming major victories.

15) Intelli-Shields - Haven't seen much use of this one. Most battles I play end up like a game of Rocket Tag. Having 360 degrees of coverage doesn't seem to help if the enemy's cannons chip off large chunks of your hull. Also, once shields become powerful from science and levels, the damage sustained, even at close range is like 9HP on the front, 12HP at the back. A drop in the bucket if you've got 960HP.

16) Convergent Light - Used to think this sounded cool but my cannon/fighter style of play makes this one worthless. Sniper lasers? Aww please.

17) Glide Path - This tends to be discovered at a time where I don't need it. Sounds useful I guess.

18) Great Shipyard - Like Glide Path, this comes when I don't need it. In some smaller games this becomes more useful to save repair costs (especially if combined with Harmony and Redundant Systems. Zombie ships anyone?)

Any other wonders I missed? My top three are Dual Command, Cloaking and Damage Control (in that order)

Any wonder that improves fighters is the best. More targets for the enemy=better. Plus with some tech and one or two wonders fighters basically become low level ships.

Stylesrj said:

15) Intelli-Shields - Haven't seen much use of this one. Most battles I play end up like a game of Rocket Tag. Having 360 degrees of coverage doesn't seem to help if the enemy's cannons chip off large chunks of your hull.

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then

Intelli Shields & Dual Command for the win!
Naval Tradition is awesome early to get the snowball rolling.
Damage Control is nice have.
all else is meh or personal preference.

Well after playing a few games on a Small Map with 6 opponents where not even Barter Planets are guaranteed, let alone the Cloaking Wonder, I've decided that Cloaking isn't the best thing since sliced bread.

The real winner for me was Dual Command for the Impulse/Firepower Fighter/Firepower attack and the Naval Academy for those 3 cards per battle. Damage Control is still there though on my top 3.

I've also learned to respect armour and go for Xeno Materials so I can waltz into combat with 250HP ships early in the game. That might give Intelli-Shields greater use, right? Because even without them, ships either do 15HP of damage from their long-range lasers or they do 80HP of damage with their cannons it seems, even on Hard (I should try Impossible at some point and see if it's really true to its name).

in MP, Intelli-Shields should be seriously OP. shileds can cut damage five-fold. more than anything, the wonder buffs fighters. may I say that fighters are OP to begin with.

Dual control and glide together is very powerful. Ships move insanely fast, I can go from safe distance to an enemy's rear in one go.

While there are certainly a lot of strong wonders (Hyperlaunch and Redundant Systems come to mind, and Reactive Armor would be a strong competitor if the AI could use torpedoes effectively), what really occurs to me is just how powerful Dual Command is. Other posters have spoken highly of it, but I'm not sure their comments do justice to just how powerful and how versatile it is.

You can begin to see its versatility in the ability to imitate the effects of other powerful wonders. Instead of building Cloaking, you can build Dual Command and use your extra action to activate stealth. And while Dual Command won't protect your ships from focus fire the turn the AI gets a critical hit on your shields, as Damage Control does, it will let you repair your cannons, fighter bay etc. and retain your ability to fire. But these utility effects pale in comparison to Dual Command's impact on torpedo and fighter strategies. With two actions per turn, even a small fleet can launch an unavoidable wall of torpedoes, and the ability to launch two fighters per turn or launch fighters or torpedoes and also fire lasers or cannons will in many cases double a ship or even an entire fleet's firepower.

Any one of these effects would be enough to justify building a wonder (even the simple speed boost from spamming impulse movement would be respectable, if unexciting), and a single wonder allowing access to all of them, as the battle situation or your fleet composition demands, is simply unmatched by anything else in the game.

Amrunril said:

You can begin to see its versatility in the ability to imitate the effects of other powerful wonders. Instead of building Cloaking, you can build Dual Command and use your extra action to activate stealth..

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I wouldn't disregard Cloaking as a pale comparison to Dual Command. Because if you have both Cloaking and Dual Command, well you can launch two fighters while remaining safely hidden. And you won't have to worry about activating it each turn. In fact if you have Cloaking, you can save energy on repairs as you don't have to worry about the AI seeing your two launched fighters, go "Yeah right like I'll fall for that!" and lob attacks on your ships behind them.

But I agree, Dual Command is quite overpowered and if the AI happens to have it, I recommend you find the planet it's built at and take it ASAP. Like Cloudbase Academy of SMAC (if you don't blow it up first)

Armor is expensive to repair. Shields are better except they're crap for mitigating close range damage and they're vulnerable to maneuver tactics. High shield module count and tech level makes them good for close range work, Intelli-Shields mitigates the rear vulnerability.

After playing several games of Impossible One-Ship Challenge, I've found Torpedo Boosters to be useful at sniping enemy ships without getting too close.

You either use Jump Start or hang around the planet until the bad guys are in range, then you commence orbital bombardment. Alternatively, Reactive Armour, followed by orbital bombardment.

The enemy is rather hesitant to attack ships with high HP values for some reason.

But yeah, Dual Command is still my favourite.

Torpedo Boosters don't just boost the range - by increasing the travel time, they also increase the effective area of coverage of the torpedo on each turn. Stealth Torpedo makes the AI very slightly worse at avoiding Torpedos, but given that they don't seem to bother anyway, I'm not sure whether they're of any benefit. Most AI ships are perfectly content to take the shortest route to an attack, especially if you leave a ship out for them to get to.

Dual Command is stupidly strong. I think we need to make House rules to make it interesting but not boringly strong.

The AI will path towards your cloaked ships even if they can't see them and have no way of detecting them (because you've got Cloaking and Quantum Suppression at ridiculously high levels).

Which means you don't even need to leave a ship out as bait. They'll surround you anyway and be ripe for a torpedo strike.

And if one or two of them have Sensors, chances are one of their ships will be cloaked and the Sensors will pick them up instead. Seriously, they'll reveal their own ships for you.

I came here to say cloaking as well. Stealth is without a doubt the most broken aspect of the game.

After cloaking I'd say dual command.

Stealth has saved my life many of a time. Especially with the latest update. You know how many times the enemy has preferred to cloak (even if they already have Cloaking) instead of attacking my highly vulnerable battleship (someone took out the shields!)

A lot.

IMHO, it really depends on your playstyle. Here are some of my favourites.

1. Cloaking + Convergent Light
Once you get this combination, get lots of lasers, lots of stealth modules, and spend all your tech on Quantum Supression. Once you find that the enemy can't see you even if you hug their ships with yours, switch to cannon. If an enemy fleet with Redundant Systems catches you in the early game, however, you'll be in hot water, so this is somewhat risky.

2. Redundant Systems + Intelli-Shields + Damage Control
Once you get this combination, spend everything on shields and nothing else until you get 8 shields on all your ships. You can easily whittle down any enemy fleet by attrition, as long as you're not too reckless with the way you charge the enemy.

3. Reactive Armour + Stealth Torpedo + Torpedo Boosters
Easily one of my favourites. Save a lot of real-world time by advancing your fleet behind a barrage of torpedoes. Make sure to cover every single area that enemy ships can retreat to with torpedo fire, and the AI shouldn't be able to make it past 4 turns. No shields or armour required. Again, watch out for Redundant Systems, since an opponent with this wonder can make life hard for you if your torpedoes fail to wipe the AI fleet out entirely in one go.
I disagree that Stealth Torpedo is useless. It seems to me that, without it, AIs never clump their ships together for an easy kill on impossible difficulty...

4. Hyperlaunch + Dual Command + Tight Squeeze + Glide Path
Optimal for a carrier squadron. Dual Command allows fighters to be launched at double rate, Hyperlaunch gives them a better initial punch, Tight Squeeze guarantees a terrain advantage, and Glide Path increases their flight speed by nearly 50%. Just don't forget to spend lots of tech on artificial intelligence.

5. Battle Academy
Better stacked with Elodie for an early game blitzkrieg, feels best at impossible difficulty. Declare war on an AI player as soon as you establish contact (preferably when they control only a home planet), invade its territory, retreat, repeat until you have only 2 action points left. Finally, invade and attack. You should have 18 battle cards. Use them to get your only ship up to 10 shields, doppleganger clone it twice, click off several minus 25HP battle cards, and deal with what remains of the enemy fleet.