Sacrifice of Angels 2 - Tutorial

[The Hive Mind]

The Klingon Empire

Raiders, more suited to hit and run tactics than a sustained fight. Repair away from home is a relatively slow, and painful process. It will often be more productive to leave after a battle and return following repairs, rather than to try and hang onto your new conquest long enough to make them where you're at. Recharging the shields won't prove too difficult, but major hull damage is very slow to undo. To this benefit, many of your ships are ideal for this style of combat, fast and agile with heavily punishing forward firing weapons. Many of the smaller vessels are also significantly less problematic to replace.

B'rels are significantly more powerful than a Miranda, yet cost less both in logistics and resources. They lack much in the way of fleet support and are less likely to wage a sustained conflict, but can overwhelm their opponents at the outset through superior firepower.

Your Elites are built for damage, not fleet support. Carnage is the game, high casualty warfare in short, bloody campaigns that may often end in victory without taking territory.

Cloaking
There are ships (in this case, the Kron) with a fleet decloak ability for Romulans and Klingons. The cloak abilities are set to trigger when set to auto-cast for the frigates, select them all, flip it to autocast, wait for them to all switch over, then take it off autocast. Use the fleet decloak to pull them back out.

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The Romulan Star Empire

An entire fleet built around one ability, the cloak. Your ships are expensive, don't throw them away.
Whereas the B'rel is both more powerful and less expensive than a Miranda, your own counterpart to the B'rel is both more expensive and less powerful in contrast. Your advantage comes in being able to choose your battles. Logistical support is adequate, if less impressive than the Federation, but fleet support is relatively minor, much like the Klingons.

Ships are largely self contained, with only the Blackwind giving aid to the fleet. Ship abilities are largely geared towards rapid damage output over a short duration, combining with the cloak to make them an excellent ambush force.

Elites are likewise geared towards rapidly destroying things. Sustained combat against an even force is not advisable. Cloak, retreat, and come back for round two after everything is replenished. Most of the fleet has a mild self repair to get them back up to strength between conflicts, but it will do little to slow the casualties in combat.

Cloaking
There are ships (in this case, the starting elite ship) with a fleet decloak ability for Romulans and Klingons. The cloak abilities are set to trigger when set to auto-cast for the frigates, select them all, flip it to autocast, wait for them to all switch over, then take it off autocast. Use the fleet decloak to pull them back out.

[The Hive Mind]

The United Federation of Planets

High utility. The Federation specialize in keeping their army rolling. They have good logistical support, capable of rapidly returning damaged ships to the fray, good as new. They also have excellent survivability early on. The Excelsior is an unmatched ship, it possesses significantly higher shielding than it's counterparts do.

Late game, the tables can be turned on your opponents through advanced upgrades that greatly increase the effectiveness of already useful support vessels. Elites are durable and damaging, but relatively self contained. The only one with anything in the way of fleet support is the Galaxy class. Where they shine is in a large fleet of mixed ships, allowing that high durability and excellent firepower to excel. The fleet is highly synergistic in how the various frigates lend support to the overall capabilities, with the Elites simply serving as a powerful core force.

Shields
There are four different ways to restore the shields on Federation ships, the resupply ability on Starbases that restores multiple targets over time, engineer teams from the Excelsior and Galaxy classes that increase regeneration rates on damaged ships, and a full restore from the Saber class.

[The Hive Mind]

The Borg Collective

My research stations take up 12 slots?
Indeed, they do. At three labs of military tech, you should be significantly more powerful than a max research enemy of any other side. It's not that your labs take more slots, it's that your research tree goes oh so much further than any other side. One of your primary enhancements is antimatter, an indescribably helpful upgrade. You'll find that your abilities, for the most part, have absurdly short cooldowns you can't possibly utilize.

The tricky part to losing shows up when you actually can utilize them, because you have 300% extra antimatter to play with. An Assimilation Cube only has 250 antimatter at level 1, and only gains 20 per level. With max research, that's a thousand at base, and 80 per level. Continuous ability usage for brief periods of time leading to massive devastation of a 40 ship fleet. If it has a high level queen preventing it from being disabled and a few supporting cruisers, you should expect the AI to throw a thousand fleet points at it before much in the way of damage happens. Once you have multiple high level Borg Elites at anything near max research, the game should be over.

The Borg have an ability for upgrading assimilated ships, "Borg Collective" is on the Borg's shipyards and the Advanced Sphere. When the Borg take over a ship, any loss of stats on its part means you have terrible research parity with your enemy. Borg research is massively better in hull and antimatter regeneration, but they have no parity with shields and weapons from the other races. Once you buff them, they will destroy, with great ease, their unassimilated counterparts.

[The Hive Mind]

The Dominion

The Dominion are designed for a slow, exceptionally well-defended expansion, building up fortifications and an economy to protect and restore your fleet as you go. You can build a powerful defensive position at the same time you're creating your economic infrastructure.

You have two opposing forces, the Cardassians, who fare very poorly left to their own devices, and the Jem'Hadar, who completely lack self sufficiency. The Breen are the odd man out, self reliant and effective enough to make a run for it on their own, but with little to gain from their allies. Cardassians are unreliable, actually able to turn on their masters under certain circumstances. They need insurance to be safely used. They are however the only option for a rapid, and viable response to an incursion.

Dominion Elites are slow. Hugely powerful, but slow. Jem'Hadar frigates are fast, but underperform in a terrible way. The cure for this is in the Elites, which have risky, but highly rewarding influence over the Jem'Hadar. A high level fleet can be a fearsome force , but the loss of a single ship can have catastrophic consequences as well. The Jem'Hadar have a bad habit of suiciding if they fail their leaders. They are also highly incapable when it comes to repairing on the go. Returning to their fortifications, or building them up as they go, is the only safe way to do battle. If a battle leaves you vulnerable to counter attacks, it's time to make as swift an exit as your lumbering behemoths will allow.

On the plus side, your fortifications are spectacularly effective. Your OWP's can be centrally powered to be greatly improved, and your trade station is both a battle station and a point for resupply. Unfortunately, if you choose to forgo the Cardassians because they are weak, you may find your defenses being the only thing you can defend with, as the Jem'Hadar will never perform without their masters.

Jem'Hadar frigates are weak, ineffective ships. They underperform everyone else, even when upgraded with Breen weapons, they're still not worth the cost on their own, but they garner a massive level of stat boosting from the elites.

A high level Leviathan will get you 12% weapon cool down, 10% chance to hit, 20% angular thrust, and 20% weapon range. Non Jem'Hadar ships only gain 7% weapon cool down and 10% weapon range. Most of this is from the level 6 ability, Enforced Loyalty is more for the secondary effect of preventing mutiny from Cardassian ships. These are both passives.

A Devastator with Glory To The Founders, also a passive, maxed out will get you 5% weapon cool down and damage, per nearby Jem'Hadar, to a maximum of 10. Effectively a 50% increase to both weapon cool down and damage in any decent sized fleet. This is only for Jem'Hadar frigates.

An Enslaver with Victory Is Life does even more, but this one is a a 30 second active. 100% weapon cool down and damage to Jem'Hadar frigates.

For thirty seconds, a swarm of Jem'Hadar will outperform the Borg. The risk in this is that the Leviathan and Enslaver ultimate's both come with a caveat, lose the ship and your Jem'Hadar will suicide.

The Keldon, likewise, is important for overall fleet power, with a 10% weapon cool down and shield mitigation boost for the fleet, and further Cardassian only improvements.

The trick to becoming a nightmare with the Dominion is getting those high level ships to support the swarm of frigates. To this end, you have a very strong defense.

Your trade ports take 8 logistics, restore shields and antimatter on nearby ships, and are otherwise a major defensive installation with durability and damage on par with a level 1 star base.

Your weapon platforms, while initially terrible, are easily upgraded by utilizing central powering. Two Will of the Founders, with Power Distribution Networking researched, will give your platforms an extra 2500 shield points, a 40 point restore rate, 1000% plasma torpedo cool down, 200% energy weapon cool down, and 40% weapon range. They require large fleets to drop, and are severely damaging.

Jem'Hadar Fighters Ability
How is the Jem'Hadar Fighters ability on the Leviathan supposed to work?

They have a 4 second construction time, for rapid replacement.
When they take damage twice in a short period of time(typically this means they're nearly dead) they go into kamikaze mode.
It works like the cruise missile setup on the Borg. They magnetize their target and ram it for a couple hundred damage, along with a short term disable.
They do less than 4 damage a second, so the 200 on impact is a significant jump in typical damage dealt. The leveled ability on the Leviathan increases to twice the disable time and damage.

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