The AI is feeling a bit on the easy side in 3088; not that I am complaining! I'm playing on AI 7 moderate rand/moderate rand with a partner (since this would be my first game since a long time) and we're just utterly raping cuddling the AI to death. I doubt our progress will stop, as we now have in possession of nearly 32 planets, and some buffers if we were to ever lose grounding.
As you see, I have around 3700 ships in total, and my ally is essentially floating a ton of resources--before I completely militarized (and both of us wasting resources on those resistance fighter ships) we were floating 600K resources (I was ensuring I kept spending so as to prevent complete waste) easily for a constant few hours, though my ally was far more resource-saving than I was, which resulted in a far less substantial fleet on his side. Not that I was to complain, because his buffered my economy!
The AI Progress we have been ignoring for the entire game--nothing to really worry about, tier three ships are a pushover in the waves especially when we have more important things to be completing. I haven't the need to spam turrets on the side where my main fleet was, and thus that was helpful. My main strategy at the time was to (and you can learn from this):
1) Attack, hold wormhole for a while,
2) Since we unlocked infiltrators, use them to destroy the command station and if any ion cannon on the planet. This will trigger the predictable "free AI ships" that will come to the death cloud consisting of many ship types supported by seven MRSs and parasites,
3) Attack-move in group-move or FRD everything away until the planet is completely clear.
Works fine, parasites and MRS work very well together when you have a massive fleet to both destroy and distract the AI ships. I actually chose the FF bearer as the starting ship, and this definitely helps out with decreasing casualties of the more expensive ships, because the FF bearer is resource/HP = efficient as a meatshield.
I expect us to win within a few hours, probably two if we're not too intent on capturing all the AI planets, but I was annoyed when IV planet connecting to the one my fleet was at had a thousand ships already on it when it was only recent when I personally alerted it. Quarrel is that: why should the players be punished because NPC factions alert planets? It doesn't quite make sense as it clearly says "AI is alerted to your presence", not "AI is alerted to some random incursion that isn't a part of the player faction, but we'll suddenly reinforce our planets a couple hours ahead of time just to be sure this isn't so".
Another minor issue is that the game doesn't display all my energy power plants because I have too many (and yes, I still manage them,) from the drop down list, as seen in the galaxy map screenshot.
Ah, the AI is enjoyable now because it doesn't constantly over-reinforce planets anymore (excluding that aforementioned planet with 1.4K ships)--that frustrated me before because you would have to spend ages waging simple attrition.
See the screenshots for lots of love making to the AI/etc.
