MOO1:Psilons attacked me with +20000 large ships

Hi!
I just wanted to ask, if anyone has ever met a ridiculous battlefleet controlled by AI.

I remember once a long time ago in MOO1,
Psilons having an outrageous number of ships in their control.
Among there were some 27000+ large battleships.

How the hell should I be able to fight such fleet?
I built a lot of (+30000) small/tiny ships with tachyon beams (for the extra damage to the big fleet), but their armour was too tough for my ships to do any real harm.

Sorry, no saves or anything available from that game.

Cheers!

Yes, I have seen them with a lot more than that. The game shows 32k, but the stack can be nearly twice that.

I thought I had a save around where 4 stacks arrived with each having at least 20k and 2 having more than 32k. A fifth stack was smaller number. Two stacks were large and they had a stack of huge ships, but I forget the number.

It took me a while to verify that they could support that many ships. I thought it was a game my friend sent me, but when I loaded that one, I did not see the fleets.

Maybe they show up a few turns into the game. I just cannot remember as it was a few years back. He was playing on a low level iirc. It was one of the first games he played.

I think I had him built a couple of missiels ship to run at them. The bases got in a couple of turn before the ships were eliminated and the fleet left. At least that is probably how it went.

The best thing is to not let them get that large of a fleet in the first place. Either whack some planets or trim the fleet early. In a tough game, I some times do not give peace, so they will keep sending ship piece meal and not get the chance to gather a massive fleet.

Usually a fleet like that is a result of the negative fleet bug. This sometimes occurs when an AI empire starts losing planets, such that it starts running into maintenance problems. Apparently there is a bug in the code for AI empires scrapping ships or maintaining ships somewhere that can result in that AI empire having a negative number of ships. Since that results in a wraparound, the AI winds up actually having over 65000 ships in that stack, though the display will only show up to 32000. What's more, they no longer have to pay maintenance on that stack of ships after that point.

This tends to show up a lot more in larger map games than in small to medium map games.

You could fight them using warp disipators to stop them and maybe black hole generators to kill em? Its been many years since i played the game so its all from memory, could be that its weapons from moo2...

These are in Moo1, but you may not have that tech either because it is not in your tree or you have not research to that point.

BLG will need to get next the stacks and fire first or get toasted. You likely will not have many ships with them.

I too have seen many games w/ these huge stacks. Now I don't know all this computer code hacking stuff to be able to verifiy that the AI isn't paying taxes on that large fleet, or that it's a negative amount of ships... ( if it's a negative amount of ships, and they shoot me; do I GAIN ships of my own? )

Of course they spank you hard when they first show up. But you gotta run and hide! Research out some streaming weapons, black holes, stasis fields, shield/armour strippers, etc. Be sure you have computers enough that you get to shoot first and then you'll do just fine.

(Better read my post re: favorite ships, this addresses just this problem)

-jack

Apparently there is a bug with respect to ranged attack specials like Ion Stream, Warp Dissipator, etc. and the wait button, when you have more than one stack equipped with such weapons and other ranged weapons like missiles that you can turn on and off, that lets you use the specials to attack as many times as you want. This can be used to neutralize really large buggy stacks like the ones described above.