You already seem to be 2 hours in your attempt Chemical... that's longer than I will last for sure. I'm so not used to complete chaos. And I don't even have trains runnning in and out of my systems yet.
1 hour 4 minutes: While I'm getting ready for the doom strikeforce, I notice that the Dark Spire threat stopped increasing. In fact, it's getting less and less. I look around and notice the mk III fort at Hail. It's killing a lot of Dark Spire, but is slowly dying. We'll see how long it lasts.
1 hour 6 minutes: The wave of doom has spawned. 3 Massive ships with a total of 3866 Firepower are on their way to my planets. Awesome. Well, that's gonna get ugly. I ty to make a few more bombers, but I doubt it will be enough to stop this. Also used last knowledge to unlock mk II forcefields and stacked em deep over my home command. I only got 3 mk II Implosion Artillery, hope I can take down the H/K far enough with them. I also got 11 enclaves. I hope they provide the H/K with enough units to kill.
1 hour 12: The Cargo Strikeforce is finally in sight. I still think the sprite of the H/K is too small. It doesn't look threatening enough and is actually easy to miss in a crowd. Unless it's meant to be a sneaky Assassin.
Also got an Artillery golem, Armored golem and a bunch of core starships heading my way. That Arty will be the first to munch through my forcefields. To be honest, I had hoped both Golems were Artillery ones. They have less health and are therefore easier to kill with my rams. Now I will have less rams left to deal with the core starships.
1 hour 13: The strikeforce is getting awfully close. I notice none of the ships have mines listed in their immunities so I figured I'd quickly build a whole bunch and hope it works.
30 seconds later they arrive. Rams do their work excellently and the Golems die within seconds. The mines will hopefully take care of the core starships and guardians. Then all that's left is the H/K.
In reality the Enclaves took care of the starships, while everything else (especially Implosion, Bombers and Zombards) took the H/k out. The poor bastard only managed to kill 1 of the 12 forcefields protecting my home.
Well that proved to be quite effective. I guess defending against a H/K is indeed possible at less than 1 hour and 15 mins in the game. Granted, I had lots of friendly enclaves.
Allright, I think I got about 10 minutes until the second Cargo Train Strikeforce launches. I better get some more asteroids and pump out some rams. I actually even have the time and resources to do some scouting.
1 hour 16: I scout my first ARS, located at Aska. Also with a Broken Regenerator Golem on it. It's got Dark Spire too though, so I'll have to leave it alone at least for a while. The Dark Spire destroyed every single tachyon guardian in a wide area, so scouting is even easier than normal on 1/1.
It's funny to see that the threat has dropped below 100 now, while it was over 500 first, mstly from the Dark Spire. I guess that one mk III fort (maybe there were others) did it's job well.
Data Center and the Dyson Sphere found at Cannon. Magnificent find really. One I'm done setting up a nice set of coreworlds, this is where I will go to, smoothly bypassing the Dark Spire along the way. Intensity 10 Dyson Sphere could really boost my defense big time I think. I just gotta destroy whatever the super hybrid is going to build.
1 hour 17: I forgot that I'm dealing with nuclear command and accidentally blew up my whole fleet when taking Fizz. Better rebuild it quickly. I gotta build those Rams too. Silly rookie mistake really, but I guess it's late.
1 hour 20: Data Center, Broken Artillery Golem and Broken Botnet Golem on Doomsayer. And of course also Dark Spire. Hmm. The Botnet is going to be useless in this game anyways, so I might just destroy that Data Center at some point but leave the rest of the planet alone.
Anyway, I realize I should just go to bed to prevent any more newbie mistakes. I'll probably continue somewhere tomorrow. Now that I survived the first Cargo wave, I'm curious to see how far I can get. Still alive so far.