How to avoid awakening a Fallen Empire and how to beat them – Stellaris

I struggled to find a good strategy for beating Fallen Empires ever since the patch that allowed them to awaken came out. All of my games ended in me rage-quitting once a Fallen Empire awoke. Once that happens, you’re basically dead. Your only real shot of defeating an Awakened Empire is declaring war straight away, crushing its fleet, and destroying its spaceports. For someone who isn’t the greatest at fleet design, I got crushed instantly every single time.

Now, you can beat an Awakened Empire, even during a War in Heaven, but that requires painful micro that makes playing the game not fun for me.

So after a few ironman games on normal difficulty with two Fallen Empires, here is what I’ve come up with to help avoid awakening them:

1. Keep your fleet power at or around 40k. If you become more powerful than a Fallen Empire the odds of them awakening sharply increase.
2. Do not conquer a Fallen Empire, or worse, only take a few planets from them. If a Fallen Empire loses any territory, the other Fallen Empire is sure to awaken.

Now that you’ve got that under your belt, here is what I found on how to beat an empire without waking the other one up:

1. If the end game crisis has not occurred, you have 40k fleet power, and neither of the empires have awoke, this is the time to strike.
2. Before declaring war make sure you can reach both empires.
3. Declare war on one of the empires. I prefer to go after the Fanatic Materialist empire first as their systems are fairly concentrated and easy to take out quickly.
4. Bait them into attacking your fleet at close range, don’t attack them straight on. What I like to do is head to a system adjacent to their capital system. After their fleet arrives, I jump to another system and they follow. Both fleets will land right on top of each other and your fleet will generally win. To ensure victory, make a ton of corvettes. Make two types, outfit one with plasma cannons and the other with mass drivers. Mass drivers will strip their shields and plasma cannons will destroy their armor. Your corvettes will be tough to hit as Fallen Empires only have cruiser and battleship equivalents.
5. Don’t panic if you lose your fleet several times in this process. Fallen Empire’s can’t rebuild their ships, if a fleet goes down, build a new one and try again.
6. Once you’ve crushed their fleet, the rest should be a walk in the park. However, do not peace them out just yet. Don’t even let the auto peace trigger by getting your war score too high. Rebuild your fleet to around 40k again and immediately declare war on the other Fallen Empire. After you do this, you can end your first war and take all of their land. Fallen Empires can’t awaken if their at war.
7. Rinse and repeat.

One final note about Awakened Empires:

The end game crisis is your friend. In a few of my games, a Fallen Empire awoke after the Unbidden arrived but then got completely destroyed fighting them. I used this as an opportunity to waltz into their territory and destroy their spaceports with relative ease.

Answer

Il try to help.

First of all, you need to understand that their fleet number is nothing but a fraud and false numbers designed to scare you into rage quitting.

You need to understand their strength and weakness:

In general:

Strong points:

• Un-matched Long range firepower
• Overwhelming fighter craft numbers
• Strong Shields and excellent armor
• Intimidating numbers (can easy go up to 1M on hard/insane)

Weak points:

• Absolutely worthless at close range engagement
• Low number of ships (means they have less means to engage multiple ships at once and have to focus fire)
• Reliance on mostly Large Weapons

The first thing you want to do is not to give up morally when you see a 500-600k AE fleet and your fleet is only ~200k.

AE will ALWAYS have bigger numbers than you, its how they designed, don’t try to match your fleet power to theirs.

A fleet half of their size is enough to defeat them with minimal losses.

In general prospect, the most important thing BY FAR is engaging AE fleets at point blank range (drop on top of them or lure them into war-trap fortress). The reason for this is because they cannot fire their biggest guns at you at point blank range, this means that around 60% of their firepower goes to the trash can.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to engage them at point blank, its literally means the difference between wiping out a fleet twice as big as yours with little loss, or losing a fight/wining with high casualties.

Focus on using more corvettes and destroyers other anything else. This is because the AE fleets have big problems hitting them with their large cannons. Cruisers are also very good and should be used.

Make sure you equip enough PD to stop their Fighter craft swarms. Flak batteries are just insane at this job, they are best equipped on cruisers or destroyers.

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