Does anyone else think they ruin any maps they appear in? Simply due to their sheer, profane OP stats?
In the 8th (and last?) scenario of the "Twighlight of the Arnor" campaign I've had a Dread Lord Battleship with a missile attack rating of 875! Even combining all the Arnor ships you get on this scenario did not add up to that! My own ships most powerful attack ratings were barely into double figures! 1/80th of this Dread Lord! Tell me this is fair someone!
I had no option but to cheat teleport my Arnor Dreadnought to the right spot, and make at least 12 cheat copies of it to get rid of this Dread Lord ship!

I must admit, and this may not be a popular opinion, some of GalCiv2's campaign scenarios are the worst, most unfair, least enjoyable scenarios in any game of GC2's type I've yet witnessed! I believe these campaigns were extra pay for DLCs at one time? Well I'd have been fuming if I'd bought them separately!

I love the skirmish games though, so I stick to those. But even then, random events can introduce Dread Lord ships, or hostile Arnor ships, if that happens then again it's cheat time, or else your entire civ will be wiped out in a few turns!

PS/ Anyone else finding GOG.com running at 1% normal speed this past few weeks? Even when typing this post the individual letters have a lag of 0.5 second before showing on screen! No other website seems to be a problem!

I'm a little confused about why you even saw Dreadlord ships in the very last mission of the Twilight of the Arnor (the second expansion) campaign. You are taking about the one where the Krynn are allied with you, and you're supposed to use a Terror Star to destroy a particular star? I never so much as saw a hostile ship in that one. I gather that at least a few of them are designed to be lost (such as your first encounter with the Dread Lords in the first campaign); the map demonstrates the power of the Dread Lords, but the campaign continues with you attempting to recruit allies. You CAN beat it, but it is rough.

Also, I've read that they are designed to be played within their given expansion pack, not under Twilight of the Arnor rules. So play the original campaign after starting the original game, etc., and they'll be a little easier. Just reload the auto-save as soon as their event occurs (assuming you don't save at the end of every turn). A few other events, like the one that hard caps ship speed at a very low value, can likewise be avoided with a quick reload. I have not had this problem.

Nope, I'm fine with them. Considering who the Precursor are, I would be rather surprised (and disappointed), if they weren't super powerful. Their ships are tough, but I never had much trouble with the DL in this mission. The Krynn kept the DL busy while I researched and built the Terror Star. In my opinion, it's probably one of the easiest missions in the Twilight of the Arnor campaign.

But then, I wouldn't be surprised, if the Community Update made the campaigns harder. It's not particularly well balanced and introduced a couple new issues to the game. Which was quite the disappointment when I found that out. I was a member of the CU-team, but had to drop out due to RL issues. A fair assesment. I like the campaigns for the lore and challenge they provide and have played them multiple times, but they are not well made. They seem to be meant as a tutorial (Dread Lords) or a introduction to new mechanics (Dark Avatar and Twilight of the Arnor), but require you to already know how to play in the first place. Starting with the campaigns is probably one of the worst things you can do in this game. Wich is counter-intuitive, if you consider other games where the campaign usually is the tutorial. No, they were part of the base game/expansion packs. If you have that much trouble dealing with those ships, then I can only agree with Bookwyrm627s advice to reload once they appear.

It also might be for the best, if you disable Mega Events. They are intended to destabilise the game, and got added, because the more advanced players wanted a bigger challenge. The Dread Lords returning is a Mega Event, while the Precursor ships are caused by regular random events. I haven't noticed anything on my end.

The Krynn used to have the Terror Star techs. The Community Update fixed this, because it wasn't intended.

Still, I did the same when I played this mission the first time. :)

I wondered about that, since it seemed far too easy a solution. I looked for some trap and didn't see any, so I shrugged and made the deals and won.

I think one of my runs on that mission involved me trading my starting planet for a different planent, and then blowing up the planet (and starting a war) for the win. :D

I always kind of wondered where the Krynn came from for that mission. Maybe I missed some maps in the branching(?) campaign, but they just sorted of appeared and agreed to shield me.

How devious! Sounds like something I would do when playing Evil. Which is almost always. }:) Yeah, I've been wondering about this too.

The only branching campaign is the Dread Lord one. The other two are linear.

I'm suprised you could even get to give away a planet! I've had empires refuse three planets as a swap even for one mid-level tech! There seems to be some very strange "value ratings" given to items on the trading screens! And they are the very same identical oddities that GalCiv 1's trading had issues with if I recall right!

In fact, this could warrant a new thread of it's own!

To confirm something Bookwyrm asked earlier, yes that mission is the 8th one of the 3rd campaign, ie the one which you need build the terror star and have a very large Krynn and Iconian empire as your allies.
On your game they either did their job correctly providing you with a proper buffer zone from the DL's, but in my game they did not, the DLs ignored them and beelined for my system. I not only saw ONE DL ship, but at least 20, even as early as turn 5!

Most were Defenders, Hvy Fighters and Frigates, but all with "swollen" beyond normal (even for the DLs) stats, but when this Battleship appeared with a missile attack rating of 875 and at least 500HP. Christ on a bike! I had to cheat spawn about 50 battleships of my own to even dent it!

I think Guanathor is right about this Community Patch ramping up the difficulty to "mondo profundo stupido".
PS/ I've no knowledge of this game pre-CP times to compare the game today with!

500 HP!? It's possible for a player to reach that number (a combination of HP bonuses from techs, adding fortitude modules to the ship, and gaining a ton of levels), but for an AI!? That's ridiculous! The attack rating also seems quite off. In the CU, the Nightmare Torpedo has an AR of 20 (originally 25), while the Dread Lords still have a Weapons bonus of 50%. So where is the 5 from? Even more importantly, how did the total AR get that high in the first place? The CU reduced the values of the Miniaturisation bonuses quite dramatically, so the DL shouldn't be able to stack that many weapons. Maybe they started mining some Military resources? That would be a possibility, but I don't remember, if there are any resources close to the DL starting position. Never mind Military ones.

I'd really like to take a look at the save-file, just to figure out what the heck was going on. So, if you could upload the file somewhere (Dropbox, for example) and give me link, I would appreciate it. I made a mod, Autumn Twilight, that brings the whole game closer to how it was originially. Minus the bugs, of course. Currently, I'm working on a new version. In the process, I updated the spreadsheet I use to compare my mod with the original. You can take a look at it here. It should give you an overview on how things were before the CU. I tried to make the file as readable for laymen as possible. If anything is still unclear, feel free to ask.

Planets are a little goofy in the AI trading, and for good reason. It doesn't have much incentive to accept good planets in trade, under the assumption that you're only trading those planets because you're expecting to get them back soon (perhaps from culture flip). It doesn't want to give up ITS good planets for obvious reasons.

Generally, the population has to be quite low (a decent indicator that a colony is pretty new), and the population on that starting planet is indeed low during the first couple turns of the scenario.

I don't know if I still have that save game handy Guanathor, but it most definately was a DL Battleship or maybe a Dreadnought class, it must have had at least 16 Nightmare Torpedoes, and on this 8th map of the TotA campaign, this was swollen to add to up - by some profane weapon amplification stat (which must be hardcoded into this map), to a missle rating of 875. 500 HP was a bit of a postgame guesstimate, but I'm sure it was somehwere in the 300 - 500HP range.

Even the smaller DL Frigates had missile ratings of approx 200, DL Defenders and Hvy Fighter about 100.

In the previous map on that campaign the same DL ship classes has less than half those values. So a DL Dreadnought/Battleship was getting about 300-400 missle ratings.

I knew I should have tried for a screenshot of it at the time.

Campaigns are saved in their own sub-folders. I don't know how it is set up for Win 10, but under Win 7 it would be under User Name\My Documents\My Games\GC2TwilightArnor\Twilight of the Arnor. If you still have the saves, they would be there.

You can't hardcode bonuses into a map. They are made with the same tools we have access to. However, the DL get access to the tech Technology Victory in this mission (their access to it is restricted in the previous ones). The reason why that is important is, that I forgot the ability bonuses that got added to the Technology Victory-line of techs by the CU (one of my stupid ideas). Technology Victory grants the DL, among other things, a 100% bonus to Weapons. That means, that the bonus they start with is 150%, not 50% like I said earlier. Assuming they managed to add 16 Nightmare Torpedoes to the ship, that would give them a missile rating of 800. Close enough to your 875. If they got access to some Military resources, they could get way beyond even that.

A Huge hull has a base HP of 90. The DL get a 90% bonus to HP from techs. That means 171 HP. If the DL added a couple Fortitude modules, they could easily reach 200 HP. Even more, once the ships gain a few levels. However, that's going to be more difficult for the DL, because the more powerful a ship is, the more XP it requires to gain a level. Still, it is possible that the ship had somewhere around 300 HP.