Backstabbing

From Astro Wars

In Astro Wars, you will notice that it is not always worth respecting Non Aggression Pacts (NAP) with other players, or even weak alliances, when their planets could be yours with little effort. There are very efficient ways of exploiting your neighbour's confidence in you:

Surprise Attacks

Wait until he tells you that his fleet is attacking someone else, then siege all of his planets at once. It takes a very high speed rating (see Race) to be successful, and knowledge of his sleep habits.

The bouncing Fleet Excuse

Ask your victim if you can bring your fleet onto one of his planets to attack someone else faster, then take his other planets instead. It can save you much time if you do it right, and you can siege six planets at once instead of five.

The Fleet Error Excuse

This one is useful to backstab someone you don't know (even I fell for it once), but it's a bit of a gamble. Just send your fleet to a random planet in your victim's home system, and quickly tell him you selected the wrong system when launching your fleet. If he buys it, you will take that planet no matter how bad your speed penalty is. If you have fast fleets, use that advantage to invade his home system.

The Friendly Siege Excuse

This is not very effective anymore because of the anti-friendly siege rules. Also, telling your victim you can friendly siege planets for him might reveal your plans. It is risky, but you can literally conquer huge empires without even fighting. 1 destroyer per planet, quite a nice investment indeed!

The false Friendly Fire Excuse

If your victim has a huge defense penalty and a low maths level, ask him to exchange destroyers to increase each other's player level until it's worth making a trade agreement. If you have 6 maths levels over his, your lone destroyers will deal extreme damage to his starbases, to the point of successfully taking the planet! I (Stakhanov) used this tactic against Odhalgar in Beta 5 when it was the most effective: A -54% defense race penalty combined with the -50% maths penalty would let you lose 75 destroyers when destroying a single one! So his huge starbases built on his main planets were destroyed by tiny waves of 5 destroyers... Later on he resigned to prevent me from taking his last planets, since an Unknown player has a neutral Race. This tactic was useless in Beta 6 when the maths penalty was reduced to 25%, but now in Beta 7 it is viable if your victim has -68% defense, with a total penalty of -93% , so he loses 10 destroyers for each destroyer you send.

Notes

• Warning: Backstabbing can seriously ruin your reputation in the Astrowars Community, so honourable players avoid this tactic.
• Stakhanov considers himself to be the grand-master of Backstabbing