Having them spawn further away from my territory doesn't really bother me overmuch. once they reach my territory the waves are flying into my defenses and I no longer have to split my fleets up. A little thought about where to place your planets and only carving out one corner of the map helps too.
Ok I just finally finished the campaign (version 5.003, diff 6) Just thought I'd give my thoughts.
I really enjoyed it overall. The writing was good, the ever increasing waves of badguys was nice. And the spire fleetships are addictive. Overall i found the most difficult Assault waves against that shards were the vary beginning ones. partly becasue I had spire ships in the later ones, buit more becasue the waves were more spread out, and I was not franticly trying to move fleets to repel attacks on my borders while managing defending the shard. The increased space between the waves gave me a breather while allowing me to check on stuff and get stuff rebuild and whatnot. That too a lot of the grind feeling out of it. Curiously, however, there was hardly any attacks on the shard when the core shard was on its way.
The defense spawns on the homeworld were a really nice touch. On the core shard I blundered unscouted into an AI homeworld (where the core naturally was) and I was met with a solid wall of ships and I was screaming "What the F*** IS THAT??!!!?!?!!" I still could have probably killed that homeworld if the core shields had been taken down. I will say its bloody hard to defend survey ships while fighting off spire ships, a Golem and that *special* ship however...
Overall, a nice first stab at a campaign. A little variety in the shard retrieval missions would have been very good, but overall I enjoyed it. The final frantic missions spent holding off the AI fleets were really good too. I'll probably play it again.
I found I used the Dread more on home defense during the campaign btw.
