Bug Infestation Issues

[Imperium]

What's the deal with the Thoraxians? These guys steamroll almost every game I observe, and pretty much force me to kill them in every game I play. Now that I'm trying to keep all eight races alive, this is gonna be a problem.

The poor Andors, they've died four times already and I've had to quickload each time since this is mostly just a trial run. I feel like the dude on Groundhog day constantly trying to change the horrible future, cept now it's the Andors getting murdered horribly over and over again.

Speaking of these guys move FAST. I mean they have taken planets pretty much instantly. They don't even seem to bother with armadas their ground power is simply INSANE. No other race can even hold a candle to these guys.

The current situation is that the Burlusts hate me and everyone else loves me. I've had to stop Thoraxian attacks against Skylaxians and Andors twice already, and sent the Acutians to contain their warlust through some controlled fighting. Even then they still are managing the resources to send an armada over to the Andors to completely destroy them, which pretty much forces me to Conflict Intervene which hurts my alright influence with them. Which I wanna avoid...

So basically I need a way to just calm these guys down and sort of neuter them somehow, so I have time to focus on creating the Fed. I'm sure this is a common topic already but I like to chat directly with people rather than just read ancient posts.

Also sorry if I misspell any race names, some of them are hard to remember.

[Tolc]

Hi and welcome

Well, yeah, that's an accurate description of the Thoraxians. On what difficulty are you playing? I don't have that many problems with them, but they are the only non-fed race in my current game as well (lost one race to them, though...) and getting them to join will be difficult.

Generally, if they are not severly weakened any ground combat engagement with them is mostly suicide (less so if not on one of their home planets.). The trick is to use other things to keep them in their place while you build the federation: Change the queen's mood to anything other than warlike, make their planet a living hell in various ways, quickly boost the space power of other races (my go-to races for that are Skylaxians and Andors), etc.

I'm not an expert so if anyone has better ideas, I'd be interested as well

[ptarth]

Andor = Pacifists with no ground forces
Thoraxian = Virtually indestructible ground forces

To keep the Thoraxians in check you need to destroy their fleets. To do that, either use your own ships, or get other races to attack them. In your Andor issue, you'll probably need to whittle down some of the Thoraxian ships by yourself, then help the Andors build up their fleet. Even if the Thoraxians love you, they don't really listen to you. More importantly, you don't need them to like you, you just need a way to get them into the Federation (eventually). So pick one of those methods and unless your actions are going to impact that, don't worry about their personal feelings about you. As previously noed, making their planet useless via RCS problems helps some as well.