MoO 1- Earliest Guardian Win?

[Yuri2356]

Over the course of my vacation, I've spent a bit of time playing Master of Orion again, and for the first time took down the Guardian. After looting some amazing stuff from Orion, I started to wonder:

1) What is the Earliest Tech level that you've even defeated the Guardian with?

I was using a pretty late-game fleet, packing Fuision blasters, Graviton beams, and Some sort of missile, (Something that starts with a 'Z', IIRC) I'll give more details on it after digging up that save file.


2) What's the lowest tech with which you could realisticly destroy it?

Given the value of the loot you can score, how early could an ambitious player hope to tackle that weapon of mass destruction?

 

[vmxa]

I don't know what the earliest would be, but NPG's is plenty with a decent BC. It depends on the level of the game as the Guardian is 10,000 HP on Impossible and scales down 2K per level.

I suppose you could do it with anything that that can do at least 3500 in damge per round. That really means more like 6k the first round as you will be losing ships fast with the kind you could bring to an early fight.

The Guardian will repair 30% or 3K at impossible. So you may need to do even more than 6K, if you are going to lose so many ships the you cannot keep the damage over 3K per round.

Me I never go for it until I have researched all my tech, I want to get some additional stuff. If you play a blitz game, you will not even attack Orion.

 

[Zed-F]

What you need to take out the Guardian will depend on what difficulty you are playing when you face it. Bringing NPGs to face down the Guardian on Impossible would be a bad idea.

I find that the first gun that really qualifies as a potential Guardian-killer on Impossible is the Megabolt Cannon. Once it's miniaturized to the point where it will fit on a small hull, with a middle-high speed engine and a good computer, you will be able to do enough damage per shot to get through the Guardian's advanced damage control, without needing an absurdly large fleet to do it. Prior to that point, you probably won't have a good enough computer to really do the job againt the Guardian anyway, assuming your computer and weapons tech levels are not wildly different. You can do it with lesser weapons, in theory, but be prepared to field an absolutely massive fleet. And of course if you have better weapons than megabolt cannon available, that's gravy.

On lower difficulties where the Guardian lacks auto-repair, the requirements needed for killing it are much less stringent. You can afford to whittle away with low-damage fighters for a long time as the Guardian can't kill many of them at a time once its scatter-packs are exhausted.

 

[Catwalk]

How about a Guardian-oriented succession game?

 

[BirraImperial]

Send 10000 little ships with plasma cannons or whatever. It's been a while since I've played this game.

 

[vmxa]

Plasma Cannons are level 35 tech. I don't think that quailfies as an early guardian win. You can use so many things long before that, if that is your goal.