Soooo yeah, I just finished up a brutal 18+ hour campaign to do the LOTS Quest and it ended in failure. It was on a normal-realistic-80-planet-map. 7.0 AIs random. Epic-Speed. I mostly just gave out because I was getting hit by the uber maws and was under attack so I went and nuked the entire galaxy, just to see what it was like
I had setup the game as a ton of faction setup and it was very interesting. The only factions I left out were the Neinzul enemy factions and the mining golem. (Hate that mining golem). It was a brutal game. The marauders were difficult enough to deal with without the exo-galaxy attacks coming in. I unfortunately had spread myself out too thin. I had attacks coming in from 5-6 systems and it simply overwhelmed me. And then having human colonies spawn out of no where did nothing to help x_x.
My first starter bonus ship was Zenith Blades. I later got Neinzul Weasels and Spire teleporting leeches. (Spire leeches need to be less costly imo, I quit building them due to the drain on my economy VS usefulness). I also unlocked Zenith Starships.
I really think there is a few too many ships coming in when your doing the shards. I had built up thousands of blade spawners in order to keep them at bay, but I have a feeling that I messed up a lot along the way and it was a brutal campaign. Especially the 4-jump-from-my system shard. There needs to be something done about this part to make it feel less like a slog through 21 massive fleets coming through to kill you. I realize the AI needs to do this to counter the spire, but there has got to be a better way of handling this.
But I had a lot of fun till the ending part where it felt like a slogging through the AI bit. With hundreds of maws coming at me with unstoppable AI waves, I gave out and let the AI win. Next time around though (which shouldn't be too long from now
) I'll be tweaking how I play the game, probably take off marauders. Hard to say.
The really fun stuff was getting the spire ships. I liked how I could customize the cities and cruisers. Seeing them mow down AI waves filled me with way too much glee
. Golems felt pretty balanced despite the micromanagement required, however as I mentioned on the tracker, the regenerator golem is simply too weak for its role. Its health needs a buff imo. Overall, it was fun till the end. Which admittedly, I had used cheats at the end of it to save myself and the game just felt over at that point. I can see from rewinding the game a bit in my head where I made fatal mistakes that costed me the game. So I'll learn the next time around.
I think ultimately what killed this campaign was the utter chaos I had put on myself. With realistic setup, multiple factions, the varied and odd bonus ships and several bad mistakes is what finally caused me to say I quit. And then the AI ran me over.
So this might have colored my view of the LOTS quest a bit. It felt like a lot of ships.
Still, thumbs up for an excellent and polished game. Can't wait to start my new campaign (after some sleep its 12:47am now as I type this). LOTS is going to be very fun.
King
