Arcen Games

General Category => AI War Classic => AI War Classic - After Action Reports => : Doddler March 29, 2010, 02:15:25 PM

: Play Diary: A crazy game
: Doddler March 29, 2010, 02:15:25 PM
I'm not sure if this is particularly interesting, I started a game on Friday and thought it would be interesting if I wrote an after action report.  What I ended up doing is on a second computer wrote down the majority of my actions and took a whole bunch of screenshots.  I was going to compile the after action report in a more readable format, but I thought the play by play of the game might be interesting too.

The match was intended to be difficult.  It's a Grid style galaxy, with no wave warnings, cross planet waves, and hide unexplored worlds.  The AI types were both set to aggressive archetypes, the Mad Bomber and Sledge Hammer, difficulty 7.  The Sledge Hammer AI was set to Avenger plot.  Because all of these settings together tend to spell an absurdly difficult game, I added a -10% handicap to the AIs.

I took a huge number of screenshots, but haven't had a chance to mess around with them.  I'll update the post later.  Edit: Added some screenshots.

# Planets: 80 planets
Map Style: Grid
Map Seed: 306649625_
Expansion: The Zenith Remnant
Ships: Complex, all ship types enabled.
Combat Style: Fast & Dangerous
Visibility: Full Fog of War
Cheats: Off
Unexplored: Hide Unexplored Planets
Minor Factions: All Enabled
AI Modifiers: No Wave Warnings, Cross Planet Waves
Auto AI Progress: 2 every 15 minutes
AI Plots: Avenger on AI 2
AI 1: Difficulty 7 Mad Bomber, -10% handicap
AI 2: Difficulty 7 Sledge Hammer, -10% handicap

Starting System: Zenith Mirror, 2x adjacent

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-00_00.jpg)

0:00

Home is metal rich, so mirror start might not have been the best.  Unlock fighters, start building a crapload of them.
Starting scouting, unlock fighter 2, tractor 2, laser 1 and 2, engineer 2

All systems are looking really bad.  Adjacent systems are 0/0 and 0/1.  I found a zenith power on a Mk 3 world, as well as a co processor and research.  Research is on a Mk 4 world though,  which is pretty rough.

I got bugged out, couldn't search one system, but managed to come around to scout from the other side.  This system, Neicen, seems really nice, although its adjacent to a Mk IV world.

About 10 minutes in.  I've hit 400 ships,  and used all the energy I have available.  I have some tractors on my two portals, so I think I'm safe enough to go out.

First system I attack is Tiouvdor.  It's a 0/1, but it has a starship fabricator, which is nice.  While I'm building a colony ship, I set up some control nodes.  Auto FDR engineers and military, auto build engineer 1 and remains rebuilder.

Trader is in my system, looking to the future, I start a planetary shield booster, and put it on pause.

A wave attack of fighters appears, it destroys Tiouvdor station.

AI seems to constantly be attacking through the Rewdely portal,  so I start to camp it.

I send 250 ships to Centi, a 0/0 but adjascent to my home system.  A flagship and raid starship wreck me though because apparantly I have no fighters with me.

I send the fleet from Tiovdor to Centi, and clear it out, losing only 30/250 ships.  Not bad.

I notice I'm at 300 threat, oh oh!  I sent my fleet back to Tiovdor, the most likely location for an attack.  Apparently my liberal placement of turrets has delayed the construction of most of my defenses due to lack of resources.  The wave consists of mostly frigates and cutlass.  Luckily the cutlasses are bugged and just sit on the portal without fighting.  After firing on them they decide they actually want to fight, but it's too late, for a melee ship cutlass cannot keep up even with a frigate.  So pathetic.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-00_30.jpg)

30 minutes
I have two systems, my home system of Chamond, and Tiouvdor.  Centi is cleared but I don't have a colony ship there.  AI progress is 54.  I have horrible resources at this point, but hopefully my next moves can resolve this problem.

I unlock scout 2, because I have serious scouting problems.  I also build a bunch of metal to crystal converters to address my 120k mass and 0 crystal problem.

I send some mark 1 scouts out to keep an eye in case threat jumps up again.

Midis is a weakly defended 3/1 resource system.  I send about 200 ships out to rough the place up.  I destroy the command, the ships rush to Tiouvdor into 200 more waiting ships.  Good stuff.  Desperate for resources, I destroy a distro node in Midis.  

Because of metal surplus,  I decide to unlock bomber II.

Another zenith power adjacent to the first zenith power, what the heck!  That's all kinds of crazy.  It's a hugely defended Mk IV system though with 600 ships.  Won't be getting there for a while.

I realized midis has a special forces hidden beneath a Mk II shield.  That's going to suck, I hold off for a minute on attacking Midis.

I found the Dyson sphere... going to be really hard to get to though.

A big wave of 150 bombers appears in midis Tiouvdor with no warning.  Gotta watch out for that!  Another 150 threat pops up, looks like its 120 fighters and some special forces guys.  They go to Centi and destroy the station there.  Not like centi is very useful, so I'm not too concerned of its loss.

I build a disable auto manufactory management.  The crystal converters need to be on all the time, not just when building ships.

1 hour.  I have control of 3 systems.  Resources are a big issue, but I have midis being colonized soon,  which is 3/1.  I have to kind of make a plan of attack, on where I want to go, who I want to piss off, and what ultimately I need to take control of.  I want to take the research station on Deburnudon, a Mk IV system, but it's really scary, so I prefer to make a move on securing more resources.  I have my eye on Sovil for the gravity drill and Neicen, a 4/3 world.

150 bombers again in Tiouvdor, blow up the command station.  It's beginning to become predictable, I need to do more to stop it.

216 threat... infiltrators going to Midis.  Caught it in time to send ships and save the command.  I have so much engine damage on my fleet though it isn't funny.

My love of fighters (and his love of bombers) has inspired me to unlock fighter Mk 3.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-01_30.jpg)

1h 30m into the game.  I control 5 systems.  Resources aren't good but that'll change soon.  Exploring a lot of systems, which is good on this game mode.

Control over Neicen was almost certain till he reinforced 200 ships to two guard posts.  Pretty lame he can do that!  But none the less, I have control.

By now its apparent he's using spiders.  Ugg, not happy.

280 threat, takes a bit before I can find out where its going to, since none of my scouts can spot the attacking force.  They're heading to Midis, all infiltrators.  Yippie.  Threat jumps to 446.  Oh oh.  But it turns out they're all going through the gravity drill planet, that makes it a little easier to cope with, 250 fighters and 169 frigates.  They'll arrive at different times to make it even easier.

They take huge casualties, but destroy the Hatchver command station, and then make a run for Tiouvdor.  They destroy Tiouvdor, but thats where it ends.

Neicen is colonized,  resource output skyrockets.  I want the Gravity Drill though... even though there are 200 Mk IV ships and a ion cannon.

Crystal situation evened out... so I unlocked missile frigate II.

I attack with 450 ships to Sovil. Ion cannon is hard to stop with a gravity drill.  I take out the ion cannon next to the gravity drill, but my ships aren't doing so hot.  250 left.  He's down to 90 though, so I take out the command.  Just before that happens, like 100 more reinforcements.  To make it worse, they ignore the effects of the gravity drill for some reason for the first few seconds.  I bring more ships to block them from my homeworld, and fight on Sovil.  The battle is slow because of the drill, but I take out all the ships.

The drill is important because it means I can use it as a roadblock against attack from that corner.

Neicen got destroyed by a random wave of 80 bombers.  Oops.

I discovered a core world, this is interesting.  I wonder which AI it is.  I can't destroy the sledge hammer at this point because he's set up with the AI plot.

So I decided to take out Rewdely.  It's a hub world that links to a lot of places, but it buffers my systems really well so I decided to take it out.  It has two distribution nodes... both of them trojan.  Lame :(

Trader is back to my home system.  My planetary shield booster is almost done now.  I decide to start a zenith power.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-02_30.jpg)

Holy crap 800 threat, I don't even have that many ships.  They destroy an undefended Neicen and then enter Sovil.  The gravity drill will slow them down but it will also keep me from getting reinforcements.  I stop 400 ships in Sovil, although I lost my station there.  The rest are heading to Midis it seems.  I might have enough to stop it.

Broke through the Mk III world with a fleet of 500 ships and freed the dyson.  Hopefully it will be doing some work behind the scenes to help me out from this point on.

400 bombers in at Midis... was able to hold them off with a quick response of 500 ships.  Helps that I built a force field there.

The fleet that liberated the dyson sphere is rampaging through systems discovering new places.  It's irrelevant right now that they can't act as scouts, I just need to go through a warp for it to show on the system map.

Unlocking bomber Mk III.  Huge fleet is growing at home, looks like I can probably make a move on the research station.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-03_30.jpg)

Found a research station in a system called Covold.  It's a long way away though and it has a special forces alarm post.  Not a friendly place.

I'm attacking Deburnudon.  The ion cannon is under a Mk III shield WITH the special forces post.  Ouch.  It takes 600 ships to break it, and when I do, I decide I'd rather have the Ion Cannon alive for when I capture the planet.

I found a connection between the top and bottom of the map along the left side.  That makes the end game potentially easier for me.

It's now 3 hours in, doing pretty good.  Planetary shield booster in the homeworld is complete.  I unlock Flagship.

A comple attacks on Deburnudon failed,  but I'm making progress, 200 ships remaining.  Almost moving to the point where I am willing to break the orbital.  Orbital dies, and I hold off the 100 ships released.

450 threat,  coming into Rewdely.  Looks half bombers, half cutlas.  No major losses.

Captured the adv research... I unlock... spider.  Interesting, I've never really used them before.  Engine damage is cool but perhaps not hugely useful when your goal is just to kill.  We'll have to see!

I got a broken botnet golem, but I'm just going to use it as a big target for the AI to kill, there's little reason to consider repairing it.

So now I'm not sure what I want to do.  I think I want the pair of zenith power... with those two, if I can hold them, I will have no need to spend resources on energy.  They're also decent resource planets to boot.

I plow through the MK III world Witolio.  It's got a zenith power, but its on a warp facing a hostile system.  I'll decide what to do about that after I take the second system.  It's a IV system with 450 ships though, it won't be easy.  First hit of 600 ships gets the hostiles down to about 220.  That's almost safe breaking.  I haven't had any attacks in a bit, so I don't want to go too overboard.

In order to protect the zeniths, I unlock force field II.  It probably won't be enough, I might want to go bigger, but for now it'll do.

Haszar falls.  It took heavy losses but it also nets me not just a zenith but an Ion II.  

600 Threat.  200 Chameleons to Sovil, where the drill is,  and 400 bombers to Deburnudon.  Scary as all hell.  AI progress is 275 now, so all attacks are Mk II.  Sovil survives, but loses the force field I placed there.  On Deburnudon, lucky for me the bombers are all going after the golem.  Just as planned.  If it didn't I could have been in serious trouble.

The dyson is wrecking everything in proximity of it, which will help me in the long run.

4 hours in, suddenly 1372 threat.  This is the big one.  I'm not sure what to do... I don't want to lose the zenith, but it's an attack that I could easily lose to.

100 ships appear in Midis, easily dispatched.  300 appear in Deburnudon, outnumbering me 3 to 1.  With the Ion cannon I should be ok.   But I need to find out where the last 1000 ships are going.  Another 100 appear in Deburnudon.  I send another 200 ships to help, hopefully they'll arrive in time.  Now there's 400 ships in the system.  The ion cannon is taking damage.  There's some dyson gatlings here that will help though.

100 ships appear in Rewdely, but that's my rally point so I think I'm safe.  150 appear in Haszar, where my zenith power is.  Even though I only have 60 ships there, the zenith is under a mk II force field and there's an ion II, it should be able to handle that much.

200 more now in Sovil.  The turrets and grav drill are rocking the infiltrators, they're not meant to be slow targets.  More ships appear in Rewdely,  and are quickly taken care of.

Threat is back down to 85.  Thank goodness.

Core world spotted, bottom left.  I'm not surprised, its the farthest point away from me.

I unlock zenith mirror II, I need more ship types.  Also, I unlock scout III.  I need to start using scouts on worlds so I can see where attacks will be coming from.

I don't want AI progress to get too high,  so planning on doing some data center raids, and doing some knowledge raiding while I'm at it.  I start with Verilmik to the south.

433 threat.  Thanks to scouts I have placed, I can see 160 frigates and 200 bombers in Puhas.  Shouldn't be a big issue knowing where its coming from.  Holy crap 200 resistance fighters.  That is probably more than I need. :o

Mining golem announcement in Haszar, great.  To make it worse my FDR guys are chasing after it.  After building an FDR 80k limit control node its good.  I'll worry about the golem when he's close enough to do something about.

My data raiding is encountering an issue, which is a raid engine.  Forgot it was there!  I do find it kind of ironic that the raid engine is in a system named Raid.  It's a quick fix to get rid of it though.

I finally have sight of everything, and one Mk III scount is sitting on the last AI homeworld.  A bit of busywork shows the location now of all adv research, factories, and coprocessors.  My goal first I think is to take out as many co processors and data centers through raids as possible, then I'll try to secure an advanced factory and maybe some of the better fabs while collecting research and the advanced researches, then hit the two AI worlds.

Step one is taking out those coprocessors.  They're all fairly accessible except for one on an AI core world far away from home space.  A big enough fleet though I think can make it.

200 Zenith chameleons attack Sovil, destroying the gravity drill.  Well damn :(

Rampaging through AI worlds with a fleet of 600 ships, destroying 5 data centers.  I progress is down to 198 now.  Sweet.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-mininggolem.jpg)

I have a fleet of 800 ships to take on the Mining golem.  It's still 45 minutes out, but I'd rather take it out early.  The golem goes down, only 75 ships are lost in the battle.

Rebel colony appears in Pusuo.  That's a ways away but not hugely out of the way for what I may be planning.  Still,  it means I'll have to take action earlier than intended.

In order to work my way to the colony, I take Parsev, a mark III world in the way.  Capturing it costs the better part of 800 ships, but its a fair trade.  Another 50 resistance ships came to help, which is nice.

Auto FDR mobile military and Devourer golems are fully incompatible.  They really need to fix the whole your ships rushing the golem issue.

While its off the beaten path, I take Linurn.  It's a 4/4 resource system with a core bomber fabricator.  A tasty target.

The zenith I started at the start of the game in my base finished.  Yay.  That's two zeniths... I disable all my normal power reactors, and enjoy not spending resources on energy.

Attempting to do some knowledge raiding, I enter Veraja with 500 ships.  It's a dead end, so it wouldn't be much to take research from there.  Well, I thought anyways.  Permamines on the portal instantly killed the entire fleet.  Oops.

Turns out Vilk, another system I was hoping to attack, is also protected by permamines.  Just great.  Luckily I have transports unlocked. I haven't used transports since they were buffed, but oh man are they strong now.  I take Vilk easily, it only has 5-10 ships defending due to dyson interference.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-06_46.jpg)

In fact, like more than half of the AI's systems are wrecked by the dyson.  It kind of makes things easy...

45 minutes left, I have a fleet in Pusuo to liberate the rebel colony.

7 hours in, 320 AI progress.  I have max resources and at ship cap.  To resolve this... issue,  I'm going to focus on capturing the remaining advanced research stations.

I capture an advanced research on Ipkinori.  I unlocked Sniper.

500 ships attack, wreaking havoc on my newly captured systems.

Captured another adv research.  Parasite, sweet.

8:17 - 2125 threat.  Thaaaats bad.  Luckily I'm pretty heavily defended, with about 200-400 ships at every major access point into my systems.  Most everything holds, and nothing important is lost.  It is scary though, being threatened by that many ships with no warning.  I unlock force field III to prepare better in case of further attacks.

Finally, I capture Oorxuna, which is home of a Mk IV factory.  I put up a mkIII force field and start building.  Even with two zenith powers my energy is running low, so I make a detour to take a 3rd zenith power.  I take Loenansi, and set up a defensive perimeter around the zenith power.  It also has an experimental engineer fab, which I haven't used before.

9:08, a raid engine somehow causes 1400 threat.  Or maybe it was a lot of attacks at the same time.  Not sure how or what happened, but they are not happy.  They're also coming right at my IV factory.  Luckily I got enough shops there in time to prevent the loss of the factory.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-09_50.jpg)

The AI has a munitions booster right where I need to be going, right next to the raid engine.  I have 800 ships gathered from the attack on my factory, I sent them out to attack.  I take out the munitions booster, but 1400 ships are sent from the raid engine again.  Wtf.  But!  The ships all rush the devourer in Vegen.  That's definitely lucky for me, because otherwise I might have lost the factory.

The raid engine itself is on a world with only 8 ships, but blocked from access by defended Mk III ships.  Those raid engine waves are going to kill me if I let it happen again, so I load up 600 ships into three transports and blitz past to the raid engine and destroy it.  Mission accomplished.

I take the ships that I used to destroy the raid engine and move them to Nucalu, a core world.  I destroy a data center on the world as well as a co processor.  The move however generates a large amount of AI threat.
: Re: Play Diary: A crazy game
: Doddler March 29, 2010, 02:15:41 PM
With 5 experimental engineers, the IV factory can rebuild almost its entire forces in an instant.  Presuming I can take the -2000 resource drain a second.

The 200 core forces released by my attack on the core world are distracted by the devourer on murdoch.  They won't kill it, and it won't kill them, but it buys me a few minutes before they become aggressive against me.  As expected, the army of core ships rush Shuhere.  400 ships additionally are attacking into Oorxuna where my IV factory is, preventing me from sending my IV ships to help against the core attack.

The core ships more or less rampage though my planets, destroying Shuhere, Vilik, and Parsav.  Another AI rush hits Pusuo.  The rebel colony on Pusuo returns to invisible.  Things are going to hell pretty damn fast.  A lot of my time is going into moving around colony ships.  I need to fix things up.  It also reminds me that the game needs more AI taunts. ^^;

Mining golem is now due to take out Wosekpu.  I don't know where Wosekpu is, much less how to pronounce it.  I probably won't stop it.

While rebuilding, I decide to do a bit on the side with my home fleet.  I take on Wirewtch in order to destroy the co processor there.  I then strike Nauch to take ou tthe co processor, and Vegen is already without a command station so taking out the coprocessor there is super easy.  With the coprocessors out of the question, AI progress drops to 382.  To be more specific, that's 642 with 260 reduction.  Not bad.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-10_00.jpg)

The time is 10 hours.  I believe I have the home world of the Mad bomber within my sights.  While I'm uncertain if it'll work, my goal is to transport a large number of ships in directly to the command station and destroy it before they can react.  The action will unleash probably 800 core ships against me.  That's not a pretty picture.  I expect the core ships to rush Oorxuna when released, as it's only 4 hops away, but I can't be 100% certain of this fact.  Still, I think super defending Oorxuna is probably the best chance I have of surviving a core assault.  Preparation is key, there are dual Mk III shields, and a billion turrets.  By the time an assault occurs, I expect to be able to back up the system with a large number of IV and III ships.  I guess we'll have to see how it works!

I lose a hundred ships to the devourer.  God damn ships need to stop rushing headlong into that thing while in FDR.

Before I do anything dumb I wanted to unlock better defenses, so I do some knowledge raiding.  According to the tooltip heavy beamcannon II is worse than mk I.  That's odd.  Well I'll stick to Mk I, and instead also get spider turrets.

Over 500 ships are rushing into the Shuhere system. half frigates, half cutlass.  The cutlass are bugged on the portal and not attacking.

-3000 crystal, maybe I overdid it on the spider turrets.  None the less, it's good that they're in position!

Lacking anything really interesting to spend my knowledge on, I unlock parasite Mk III.  This has the added benefit of also giving me IV parasites.  Not sure if they'll be handy, ,but it can't hurt.

My luck, trader is coming through Oorxuna.  This gives me an opportunity to drop the super amazing planetary shield booster.  I love these things,  the AI will stand no chance against the defense here with this.

As part of a test run, I send 5 transports to the AI homeworld to see how they fare.  All 5 transports make it.  Using the transports, the AI releases almost all of his core homeworld ships in retaliation.  This is more or less what I expected, but it saves me the trouble of having to fight them after I lose my defensive ships.  The AI homeworld empties from 1010 ships to 461, the remaining ships charging Oorxuna.  The shield booster is up, and all the defenses I could muster are ready for the attack.  But can it take 600 core ships?  Over 450 of them are core bombers, which is a dangerous number to be playing with.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-10_20.jpg)

Try as they may, the core ships were completely unable to harm any of my defensive ships.  They made a beeline for the command center, but 800 ships firing on them and being unable to fire back because of the shield booster more or less did them in.  It seemed entirely possible that I gained ships from the parasites.

Another Rebel Colony appears in Genuolar, the system that previously had the Raid engine.  Its not too far away, I"ll take care of it once the homeworld is subdued.

Aproximately 700 ships are loaded into 5 transports.  They take the same path to the homeworld, the one I invision is least destructive to them.  The core shield drops,  but it appears I don't have enough power to completely take out the command station.  The command is slowly losing health... and breaks with only 60 ships remaining! 

I'm on evasive action now, that's a damn lot of ships coming my way.  Worse, that's a huge number of bomber starships.  I still have my flagships, and resistance fighters back with my turrets,  plus what the experimental engineers are quickly pushing out.  It looks like my estimate is correct, the AI ships are coming to Oorxuna.  It's going to be one heck of a fight, he's got about 400 ships incoming, plus about 20 starships, and I'm defending with about half that.  I have the shield booster on my side though and about 200 turrets.  Will it hold?  We'll have to see.

Apparently it wasn't a big issue.  The star of the show was the 60 spider turrets set up on defense.  They were able to destroy the engines on the bomber starships while my ships held them at the tractor beams in my defensive wall.

I have a couple minor issues to take care of now, but overall life is pretty good.  There are two remaining advanced research, both of which are within my grasp.  A rebel colony will decloak in an hour and a half, which I will have to take care of.  At that point, I can begin preparing for an assault on the last homeworld.

The losses caused by my rush on the AI homeworld resulted in a monstrous loss of ships, which has caused me to hit rock bottom on resources.  It'll put me out for a bit while I rebuild these lost ships.

11 hours.  470 AI progress.  One AI homeworld down.  Unless something goes seriously wrong, I should have this in the bag.  The mining golem will destroy one AI world, I'm not terribly concerned about that but it will push progress up another 20.

The last AI is the Avenger.  I'm unsure how that will work, It may actually declare me winner before the avenger comes into play.  I'm not certain, I'll plan as though the avenger must be destroyed to win, but will be happy if I can avoid fighting it.  I'm not sure what it's capable of, but it sounds like its a bad, bad guy.

It looks like I'm ship capped, which is good.  AI keeps launching waves of 200-500 ships at a time, but the few hundred ships I have situated at each possible vulnerable worlds is keeping me in good shape.  I'm not sure if I've mentioned it, but my entire ship cap in Mk I and Mk II ships are used to defend my original cluster of planets, and the Mk III and IV ships are being built in the arm I have extending to the AI homeworld.

Yekal is home of an advanced research,  a Mk III world.  I attack it with my full III/IV army.  I utilize a little trick I learned, if you target the command center with your ships,  the ships will actually leave their post to attack you.  You can use this to draw ships away from turrets.

Devourer ate another some 200 of my FDR ships before I noticed.  I swear next game the golem will be disabled.

Yekal is clear, colony ship is en route to capture the advanced research.  The ship unlocked is Z AutoBomb.  Uh... ok.

Genoular had about 70 ships, which were easily taken care of.  The AI decided to make a last ditch effort to save the system with 200 ships coming from the special forces post, but they too were not too difficult to take care of.

Understanding the need for improved defenses as I move into the last phase of the game, I unlock laser mk III.

There is one last advanced research lab, on a planet named Ultin.  I'm tempted to forgo taking Ultin and take another tasty system, Kinar, which has a fabricator for both beam and bomber starships.  Decisions decisions. 

In the end, I think I will try to take both.  I take a small side trip though to destroy the data center on Nucalu, a core world of the dead AI homeworld.  It's reinforcing really fast since I took Genuolar and want to take that center before it becomes too hard to do so.

At least, I didn't think it would be hard, but apparantly he had enough tractor beams on the portal to snare 600 ships.  I took the center but there was quite a price to pay, and that was... all of my IV ships.  Well that's fine, I have the resources to back that up.

Once it became apparant that the AI wouldn't be launching a counterattack, I moved my fleet into position to attack Ultin.

Another 200 ships of mine are golemed.  hug that thing.  I disable my auto FDR mobile military.  Hopefully that doesn't screw me later.

I took Ultin.  It was very rough in terms of losses,  but I gained control of the system and unlocked electric shuttles.  That could be pretty cool.  The ion cannon on Ultin resulted in aproximately 150 ships without engines.

Threat spikes to 2907.  Thaaaaaats really bad.  Murdoch has 700 ships, likely a lot will come from there.  Shiosav, near my core systems has 651, probably a bunch from there too.  The rest, probably from all over the place.  I guess I'll just have to move fast to stop it.

What ships can still move in Ultin I'm sending back to Shuhere, which is a very likely one to see a lot of AI ships.  I remember I have a zenith power in Loenansi that needs to be defended, and only has 135 ships present.  I take what I can from Shuhere temporarially to send to Loenansi.

200 ships appear in Haszar, another 100 in Parsav.  Those should be able to hold off the attack.

Shuhere has 200 AI ships, twice what is defending it.  Things aren't looking very good there.  Attack is holding at about 500, threat at 1500.  1000 ships down, 2000 more to go.

More ships are poring into Loenansi, threatening the zenith power.  I don't like that, hopefully it can hold...

Loenansi holds against the AI attack, but the ships I had to send from Shuhere cause it to break.  Attack is 300, threat is 800.  I'm getting close...

Rewdely falls.  Rewdely is the gateway to my homeworld, that's really bad.  There are ships present but not enough to stop the attack from taking the station.  I should be ok on that front, I'll just have to rebuild the station.

The attack is clear, threat is down below 500.  I lost 8 systems in the attack, but I'm still standing.  Resource production is about 1/3 of what it was previously, down to about 600 for both metal and crystal.  Nothing irreplaceable was lost in the attack.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-12_01.jpg)

12 hours in.  AI Progress is sitting at 544.  Still in the middle of the rebuilding process, but I still have most of my ships.  My driving goal is to defeat the last AI before progress gets high enough that he sends Mk III ships at me.  I survived this time, but an unannounced cross planet with Mk III ships will wreck me in extremely unhappy ways.

20 minutes after the big attack, all stations are back online.  It will be a long time before I get enough of a resource pool to be able to react quickly to the AI however.  I will use the time I have to do knowledge raids against the AI.  I will have to pull ships from my long arm to attack the remaining AI world.  However, without that arm my empire will fall, so I need to make sure it stays alive.  To help with that, I plan on unlocking fortresses.

I do a raid against Chauo, originally to raid knowledge but I'm starting to think that as a world with no AI exposure, it would make a good resource planet.  I can probably take the progress loss, so I break the system.

I have to remember to destroy the special forces post, those things spew units when the planet is in danger.

Engineers are normally bad at repairing, but 5 experimental engineers are pretty good at it.  I wish you could get something that is both this efficient at repairing and automatic like these guys normally.

I think I'm going to forgo the starship fabricators.  While it would be pretty sweet to have, the ships won't help me against the final AI homeworld.

Speaking of the AI homeworld, I plan on using the same kind of strategy.  I will soften up the AI systems through use of decoy transports to trick him into following me, and then once his worlds are soft enough, transport a huge number of bombers in and rush his command station.  And hope that once that happens, I can take care of the avenger.

Using the transports I cause the majority of the defensive force at Mizup to chase me into Sovil.  I never realized transports has such a use, apparantly they're also good defensively cause enemy ships really really like shooting at them.  I lose the Sovil station to a bunch of raiders though.  I will have to take care to watch for that.

With the new knowledge I got, I unlock fortress. I build fortresses in Shuhere, Parsev, and Genuolar.

It seems I made have made a mistake.  After releasing a large number of core forces from a core world, instead of rushing sovil like I expected they would, they rushed Haszar.  That's definately neither what I expected nor is it good for me.  I might have to remake defenses over there if it becomes the primary target for retaliation.

Or maybe I didn't.  Whiel I had all my ships in Haszar, the AI rushed core ships into Sovil.  Hopefully I can be quick enough to save it.

400 core ships enter Sovil.  It looks like they're all tractored, but tractors don't hold against core ships.  My ships are poring in from Haszar, but I'm not sure if they can save it.  The AI is concentrating on the transports on the portal, which is good for me.  The core ships are taking a huge amount of fire, but the numbers are dropping really slow.  Luckily it seems the bombers are tractored far enough from the transports that they can't hurt them because of the transports shields.  I think that's going to save me here.  The AI is so preoccupied with the transports that it won't free itself from my tractors and do some real damage.  I have over 1000 ships firing on the core ships, they're slowly dying out.

The ships are down.  I suffer minimal losses, in fact I'm up like 40 core ships because of the parasites.  these transports will probably be nerfed to hell later but they're pretty effective at a lot of things because of their AI attraction.

The AI homeworld has over 2000 ships though, it will take more than that to make it safe to attack.

The AI's retaliations aren't fixed like I thought, they are changing their target between Sovil and Haszar.  I'll have to make sure both worlds are suitably well defended, Haszar has one of the zenith powers.

I kind of wish FDR mode worked reliably, lots of times the ships will run back to their FDR rally point even when there are targets nearby.  Attack move is pretty bad too, lots of times they will run past valid targets without actually attacking them.

I had a close call where I almost lost the zenith power.  My metal is maxed and my crystal is at 0 because of all the turrets I've been building.  To even things out I've set up a huge farm of crystal manufactuaries.

To help with my poor defenses, I unlock Tractor Mk III.  It's not so much volume of ships I need to catch, but health, the tractors have twice as mcuh health.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-13_00.jpg)

I'm returning to my task of provoking AI attacks from his homeworld.  It's risky business, there's a lot of ships there.  But as long as I do it in bite sized chunks, I should be ok.  The AI is splitting his retaliations against both systems.  I likewise am splitting my defense.  Slowly but surely the AI's stockpile of units is dwindling.  His homeworld is down to 1400 ships, half its original number.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-07_00.jpg)

Maybe I overdid it,  the AI is sending 800 core ships at me.  It seems the transport trick is enough to keep them at bay.  Man I feel like I'm cheating.

The AI seems to be more or less unwilling to throw his remaining ships at me.  The homeworld has 700 ships remaining.

I fill up some transports for this final assault.  800 ships en route.  Somehow the transports feel more vulnerable when you have something important inside of them.

The transports unload next to the AI homeworld command.  The forcefield falls fast, and the core command station takes heavy damage.  Can they stop me?  Doesn't look like it actually. 500 ships remaining with 30k health.  450 ships and 25k.  Will it go down?  350 ships and 10k health.  300 and 5k.  Boom!

Epilogue tells the following data.

Doddler built a total of 29916 ships.
lost a total of 21196 ships.
and killed a total of 33521 ships.

The game ended at 13 hours and 31 minutes on the mark.  AI progress after destroying the final command station was 677.

(http://doddlercon.com/images/aiwarpost/aiwar-14_00.jpg)

After the game ended I unpaused it to see what this avenger thing was about.  It waltzed into a 2600 ship blockade, my ship cap in every ship type, and destroyed them all in 30 seconds.  It would fire it's beam cannons all in one direction destroying every ship in an arc, taking out 200-500 ships per shot.  The Avenger incurred only 10k damage in the process.  The thing PROBABLY needs to be reworked. :P
: Re: Play Diary: A crazy game
: TheMachineIsSentient April 04, 2010, 11:24:51 AM
This was a wonderful read. Thank you for sharing, and I learned a few things in the process.
: Re: Play Diary: A crazy game
: jordot42 April 09, 2010, 04:28:46 PM
Great report!  This report has motivated me to pick up the game again (other things tore me away from the game for awhile).
: Re: Play Diary: A crazy game
: allmybase April 13, 2010, 11:08:06 AM
Wow you're a great player, can't wait until I'm good like you  :-*
: Re: Play Diary: A crazy game
: allmybase April 15, 2010, 01:14:32 AM
How did you rush those AI core commands in one drop? You only had like 700 ships on each drop but you one shotted them both times, what kinds of ships were you using?? When I have like 1400 ships it still takes quite some time to wear it down (fully loaded on bombers from mark 1 to 3 as well)
: Re: Play Diary: A crazy game
: Doddler April 15, 2010, 03:26:26 PM
How did you rush those AI core commands in one drop? You only had like 700 ships on each drop but you one shotted them both times, what kinds of ships were you using?? When I have like 1400 ships it still takes quite some time to wear it down (fully loaded on bombers from mark 1 to 3 as well)

Bombers do the vast majority of the damage against core force fields and command stations, as they have a huge bonus against those structures.  In my raids, I took my ship cap in Mk III and Mk IV ships, as well as additional bombers from Mk II.  Additionally, I had a Core Bomber fabricator, so I had 25 core bombers as part of the attack fleet.  The forcefields dropped in probably no more than 20 seconds to the concentrated fire, and the command station while it lasted considerably longer didn't have enough defenses to wipe my ships out (although they came quite close both times).

One of the AI types focused very heavily on bomber type ships (Mad Bomber AI), so capturing bomber type ships using my parasites also helped.  I had a decent supply of mid-high mark chameleons from Mk II to C, which function similar to bombers.