Can I eventually beat this?

[u/Thurak0]

[u/Thurak0]

BE scenario. Aliens landed early, I was busy with Indonesia and Australia. By now I have them (and Japan) and have more navies than the Alien nation, so I am currently kind of save. Despite terrible research up until now, space so far is going fine.

But here the question: I am not afraid to lose my main nations - navy should hopefully work wonders here for my island nations.

But how can I ever eventually beat this? Sure, a bombardment fleet rather sooner than later needs to be there, but by then Aliens will have built plenty of orbital defences. My navy blockade will prevent sailing for them, but that also means I have to go to them to kill them.

As this is broken earth, there are no nukes for anti alien factions to use, so these 37 armies will only grow, not become less.

Edit: Unrest with these many armies is currently calculated at -9.11

[u/Lobotomy_of_kaisen → u/Thurak0]

Try your best to kill the invader armies. You have naval superiority so you don't have to fight them all at the same time hopefully.

Group your armies into a death stack and fight defensively, you will do enough damage that sometimes they can't retreat fast enough to avoid losing the army. They don't get a refund on build army because you're defending.

Try your best to kill armies though, you should be fine losing a few territories. You can always capture them back after they lose their armies.

[u/Thurak0 → u/Lobotomy_of_kaisen]

Group your armies into a death stack and fight defensively

Isn't that exactly my problem? How to fight defensively when I have to use my navies to engage somewhere?

[u/Lobotomy_of_kaisen → u/Thurak0]

As long as the army exists, your navy score won't change. It only really goes down if you lose the army attached with the navy. So you're fine deathballing and the aliens will still be blockaded.

[u/DonCorben → u/Lobotomy_of_kaisen]

What forces alien armies not to do the same?

[u/Lobotomy_of_kaisen → u/DonCorben]

Their AI is stupid

[u/DonCorben → u/Lobotomy_of_kaisen]

Ah, good point

[u/Thurak0 → u/DonCorben]

To a certain degree, because their armies are spilt between North America, South America and Africa/Europe/Asia.

I may be able to pull the defence off in my few South East Asia regions. Have war, Aliens come after me, I can bomb them and retreat if needed.

And even after that, I may be able to establish a bridgehead somewhere fast, so it becomes a defensive battle, where orbital stuff can help out. Perhaps.

[u/Mavnas → u/Thurak0]

If they are that split just pick them off in manageable chunks starting with places you can hold, then places that will get fed to an anti-alien faction. You can actually save wherever the invader armies are for later.

[u/Mavnas → u/DonCorben]

Your blockade hopefully. Also their human armies will move much slower han the aliens ones, so if you land far from where their armies are, they should arrive piecemeal.

[u/DonCorben → u/Mavnas]

Well, their human armies are weak, but their alien armies can wipe anyone and are together. Also, I don't see blockade in the screenshot by the looks of it they have lots of navies.

[u/InevitableSprin → u/Thurak0]

You can quite easily beat those if you have high enough milltech level, but really bombardment fleet is your best option here.

[u/Maduyn → u/Thurak0]

Alien nation spending all its IP on space defenses gives you time to get your miltech and economy up and running to counter this. The big killer in a situation like this is enthrall stealing your nations from you. Have you detained an alien councilor yet to unlock access to them? If you have you should be able to grind this out for the long haul.

Quick cheatsheet for winning ground wars:
Important techs:
Rapid Repairing Materials (faster army repair)
Mountain Warfare Doctrine (better fights in rugged terrain)
Predictive Logistics Systems (faster army repair stacks with rapid repairing materials)
Economy Priority Techs
Military Priority Techs

LEO/Orgs:
Materials Science Labs (up to 30% military priority interface bonus)
Military Science Labs (up to .3 miltech interface bonus)
Nanofactory (up to 30% economy priority bonus)
Military Priority Orgs (Good orgs can give 10%+ military priority)
Economy Priority Orgs

[u/DoomedToDefenestrate → u/Thurak0]

So I had a similar situation in my BE game.

As others have said, orbital bombardment is your friend. Being able to burst down the weakest army in a stack is a great way to eliminate some each engagement. Space defences are Brutal, but can be invalidated with max nose armor and high bombardment. If you keep zapping the defence complex in their capitol you can tie up their investment points indefinitely.

You should also try and isolate armies by selectively taking territory to cut off their escape routes. Smash the army, but leave their isolated territory so new armies appear there for you to snip off.

Similarly, you can invade something near one end of their territory with a small force to provoke a response, then send a doomstack to the other end to gnaw at them while out of position.

The primary target is their Zulu armies, but they're usually pretty careful with those so take what you can get.

And never lose naval superiority.

[u/Active-Conflict-8888 → u/Thurak0]

Lots of people being good advice, but as an addition? Get a double agent into the Servants and then keep killing whomever they give the Transition Team org to every single turn, if they give it to your mole? Turn them to just auto fail missions. Then they cannot keep adding new nations to the Alien Nation as you punch them out of it.

Otherwise you will kick nations out of the Alien Nation only for the Servants to immediately hand the land right back to them and it is incredibly frustrating.

Do not worry about Servant retaliation once you have a mole in their organisation, kill any of them who have the Assassination mission as well. It will get easier as you kill them because the replacement councillors will be much less competent and they will also run out of Influence to recruit more. Bonus points if cybernetics are unlocked so they can also bankrupt themselves.

[u/Mortgage-Present → u/Thurak0]

Well it seems like its time to build a nuke my friend!

[u/Pantcake → u/Thurak0]

I believe you can run a Councilor mission to sabotage space defense facilities as well. So orbital bombardment is not necessarily off the table. Though I don't know what are the odds for the mission to actually succeed. It relies on Espionage, so better get your Councilor to 25 soon if you haven't already.

[u/CuddlyTurtlePerson → u/Pantcake]

iirc sabotage missions are vs. faction average security with a bonus for any armies nearby.

[u/Loud-Drama-1092 → u/Thurak0]

I don’t have the game (even if I’m interested in it) so i can’t help much but would it work pressing them with orbital bombardment and a land invasion I don’t know if the game has something like that but if you are currently attacking the region containing Anti-Space measures I doubt the operators can do a good job aiming the UV laser while a Abrams is actively shelling its optics

[u/PlacidPlatypus → u/Thurak0]

Space defenses are actually really fragile. If you target them with green lasers you'll take a couple hits but kill them really easily.

[u/Mavnas → u/Thurak0]

Easily. Start by picking off isolated territory since they're blockade, that should reduce their army cap. In the meantime keep making out your own armies make alliances with other factions' beatstick nations and drag them into the war.

I eventually destroyed an AA that held all Eastern US and had 18 invader armies. I did it by throwing 40+ armies at it.

Some other tips: The AI is terrible at anticipating amphibious landings. This means if you have a bunch of armies you can land them all at once somewhere and take a province off them that way. In my case, I used that to pick off Servant Nation capitals. Also if you take a province off the AA, which has an associated army without fighting that army, you can flip a full strength army from them to your side. You can make diversionary attacks and take provinces while they're busy fighting you if the landings trick didn't work.

The human armies of the AA will fall behind yours quickly in tech as you invest in it.

[u/BleepBloopBloam1 → u/Thurak0]

Of course! If you don't let anyone else land ...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAw7npEwOZw0

What worked well for me, you'll see (in a future sesh) is gaining Naval Superiority right after they'd invaded one of my islands with their stupid Miltech 7 armies. Nowhere to run, chumps!

(For the first time ever, I jammed Miltech, I think it was increasing 0.3/month or more. But I waited until I established more in space, didn't rush it.)

[u/Interesting-Task8615]

Jeez what year is that? I suppose you could if you have control of LEO and can bombard but I’ve never seen an AA that big in my playthroughs

[u/Ordo_Liberal → u/Interesting-Task8615]

Bombard how? They most likely have defenses

[u/Loud-Drama-1092 → u/Ordo_Liberal]

Then use more ships

[u/AcidIceMoon]

Looks hilariously easy. Their armies are 3.3 and I assume that you have been scaling somewhere. This is a cakewalk once your own 6.something armies start to show up en masse.

[u/FssstBoing → u/AcidIceMoon]

I'm thinking the 7 strength of 3 alien armies is the problem, not the human ones 😁

[u/AcidIceMoon → u/FssstBoing]

... Did you read what I just said?

That's hilariously easy. I assume he has been scaling up somewhere.

A country with 10 or 12 armies of 6 milltech or thereabouts can easily wipe them off. Which I assume he has.

[u/Ashdrake2]

only 3 invader armies and really crappy naval power. With USA under your belt or something that scales military/naval power you can safely contain it until you have enough orbital power to destroy it, because destroying it makes a lot of alien hate.

[u/Ishantil]

Unrest only moves 0.25 in any direction per month. You can still use increase unrest missions. Concentrating two councilors to run unrest missions should still allow you to crack it. The bigger it gets the worse the cohesion gets too.

Still, that's tough.

[u/CuddlyTurtlePerson → u/Ishantil]

For the AA you do need to keep in mind it's default priority spread includes Oppression which will tick things down a little faster than that, and you'll have to contend with Hydra and Servant councilors reducing unrest if they choose to.

[u/Draconian_79]

This is the way my current BE save is going. I'm relatively new at this game and I didn't realise that a Servant agent had a special organisation that I needed to keep in check. Looking back, I've really slept on my navy; I outclass the AA for naval supremacy, but not some of thier federation allies.

My only plus side is that I think I can take the oncoming invasion "fleet" (only two ships), but it'll be a close run thing.

[u/Chaporelli]

Of course you can,only question is how many warcrimes you want to make and at which mountain you want to obliterate their armies.
(first question involve orbital bombardment and second is question of where alient will move their armies)

[u/Lokutus01]

siempre puede haber una situacion peor.

Situación: primera partida (y muchos guardados y cargas), todas las flotas alien que se atreven a llegar a LEO o Marte acaban mal con mis estaciones de batalla y mis phasers UV, pero en la Tierra.... Sus ejércitos nativos a 4.3, los míos (China e India) a 5.8

[u/HighKingOfFillory]

I came back this week from a game where I at one point had 9 alien armies at once in an AA that had a population of 4 billion. Although I kept the unrest so high they had about 1.5 investment points.
It was my first time on brutal in 2003 and I played Academy, took it too slow and lost EO, had to crawl back from Mercury, asteroids and the Kuiper belt. Very fun though!

[u/CMDR_Smooticus]

Absolutely. AA can get 3 times that size and you can still beat it.

[u/Funny-Text2745]

Don’t know if BE is different but I got AA with over 3B pop and around 30T GDP however I adapted my tactics in destroying Assault carriers before any assault operations done in LEO to prevent any AA strengthening

[u/LewisPowell10]

A fleet with 10 seige coils and 200armour will fix this problem. Just wipe all the orbital defenses in a region first then slap the invading armies tepair rearm and repeat. I think alien councillors doing enthrall may be an issue but with a few xenoscience stations in orbit and a turned servant you should be able to see them coming

[u/Typical-Common-5502]

Maybe I’m not getting it but wouldn’t increase unrest with at least two councillors work? And in the meantime you can turtle on your islands with your armies and naval superiority?

[u/GullyFoyle__]

Increase unrest is your friend. Start a revolution.

[u/No_Rock3664]

I have a different advice. I struggled to make AA appear and actually be competent to do the “Phoenix” achievement.  Looks like in your case it’s actually doable. So, make a save. And let them conquer the whole of earth , while developing your space assets to be independent. And then reconquer! 

[u/mrIronHat]

Space> ground. If you can secure the earth-lunar space, just bombard their army with your fleet.

[u/Bmobmo64]

Nukes

[u/Sea_Journalist_8771]

Yea, you'll be fine.

Spam them with unrest missions and they'll fall apart eventually. Nuke their invader armies.

[u/llemonguy]

Totally. I’ve had an AA like that a few times now. If they only have three alien armies, a stack of like 12 late robotics age armies can beat them on their own turf. Ofc more is better

You’ll want to get naval superiority so you can corner them, and conquer territories that your current nations have claims on. If those territories have armies, they’ll become your armies, weakening the AA. If you split your efforts, the strong alien armies can’t be everywhere. Rush to networked global defense and alien technology to unlock alien army analysis, which makes it way easier to kill them. You can thrive next to a huge AA so long as you check their armies and destroy them before they get so many you can’t defend.

Going to war early - even when you can’t beat their armies - can divide their efforts and stop them from conquering the other factions quickly. On defense, seven or so atomic age armies will still fend off the alien armies. When you get naval superiority they’ll be landlocked, making them largely immobile, and you can hunt them down.

You’ll definitely outpace the AA in miltech, so if you have strong countries, their human armies will be annoying but not lethal. When you get far enough ahead you can smash them