Scorching Isles

[guinevere]

I'm having no luck whatsoever in keeping new isles in O22 and O13. The pattern goes like this. I send a large fleet to an "easy" isle followed by a colo fleet. The large fleet finds and extra 5K+ stoners and that's no problem. The colonisation goes ahead or not. If it does, the Digg party immediately sends several colo fleets to take it back and inevitably does with very little loss because I've no way of defending it. The second attempt at colonisation finds 12K+ stoners which destroys most of the fleet. Again the island is taken back almost immediately. The fact is I'm too far away and have few stoners anyway.

So belatedly, I understand the reason for scorching isles. Now you're saying. "Is Guin stupid or what, attacking isles with 12k stoners, why didn't she spy first?" and I'm thinking, yes, she probably is. The only excuse I can make is that with the distance involved, it didn't seem relevant.

But doesn't it annoy you that Pantheon is taking isles and we're scorching them. There must be some better way. So I'm thinking how about sending stoners and resources to people who at least have a foot in the door like Fingal in O13 and let him colonise them while we remove the defenses. Or how about fake colonisations where we send out colo ships to islands already cleared and cancel them at the last minute so that they send all the stoners to an isle and they are just left stranded there. Or what about making a list of scorched isles and coming back in a month when they've been rebuilt and DIGG has run out of stoners and taking them then.

Just a few thoughts.

[Natmus]

I'm just in favour of scorcing isles. I don't need the hazzle of colonising, defending and rebuilding.

But the best idea is in my opinion:

Or what about making a list of scorched isles and coming back in a month when they've been rebuilt and DIGG has run out of stoners and taking them then.

Or put it another way: Don't get bogged down fighting for one isle! That was also a problem against Observer of E|S, and in the end we stopped colonising until we had burned all Observer's colony ships. At that time he gave up, because he had no chance of regaining lost isles.

Same thing should be done now. In a longer perspective it makes little difference if we take an isle now or two weeks from now. The important thing is to disable DIGG's ablity to wage war in a large area, not to take one isle in the middle of still-capable DIGG isles.