So we were using the prerelease version 1202D with me(etgfrogs) and my two brothers(Mr. Smithal and KillerFrogs), seed 1 with 50 system(which makes for a wierd map which is fun), 2 level 5 random easy/medium ai and all 3 of us took 2 home worlds for fun and no handicap. All 3 of immediately notice the exo wormhole right by our bases so we baracade them up as much as possible(love the new 600 turret limit), and proceed to take over everything on the bottom half of the map. Right before we were about to take the first advanced lab and factory one of Mr. Smithal's home world got rushed through the exo-wormhole by a flagship and lost his homeworld, for the first 5 minutes we were wondering what happened and what can we do at this point, so I donated one of my colony ships to him and he rebuilt the systems. So we then noticed that the AI needed to kill all 3 of us to win we redoubled our exo wormhole's defenses to kill any other flagships that tried to come through.
At the point where we took our first Advanced lab we were at 400 Ai progress and hour 3, we agreed that i should have the first factory since i was doing the best so far and i start producing mk 4 shields, scouts and bombers. we start start advancing to the ai home world which was interesting because the map generated a more or less single path to there with only a few minor side systems, we get to around 14 hops out and 4 waves go after one of my home world and sends a zenith AND a flagship which destroy it. At this point we were almost worried because there was only player left, i had build orbital stations over the ruins of my home worlds so i could continue with the campaign.
Realising we needed to win soon or run higher and higher risk of the killerfrogs' home world being destroyed from another focused attack we decided to do a do or die. We then spent around 20 minutes just building our fleets to near cap being all of us got the mk 4 ships. We then gathered together around the ai homeworld and all advanced our fleets to it. me and killerfrogs kept our fleets together while Mr. Smithal used teleport raiders to kill any waves of ships that tried to come near our fleet and he also brought along about 25 engineer II to repair the fleet as it traveled. Thankfully all the worlds were mk 2 up untill 5 hops out so we lost only around 500 ships from 3000 at start. We came across our first mk 3 planet on our journey and lost about 100 or so ships but we got pretty good at keeping our ships together(see picture turtle formation). We go across 3 more planets that was mk 2 with little losses then we reach the mk 4 before the ai homeworld. To our suprise we didn't the message of ships being insta-destroyed by the ion cannon because all the ships left alive was mk 2 and higher and make it through realy quickly but quite a few losses. So we got to the AI homeworld and our engineers got destroyed because of the sniper fire which we rushed the core destroyed it and rushed next door to the other ai homeworld and killed the core as well. At the end I had 50 ships left, Killerfrogs had 100 ships(he was always the 2nd one to jump) and Mr.Smithal teleporting raiders had an unfortunate run in with the lightning towers surounding the last ai core.
Overall it was a very fun game, good learning experiance and even better is we didn't experiance any major bugs or glitches with version 1202D. Defenitly makes it worth purchasing 3 copies of the game for myself and my two brothers.
