First let me start by focusing on what my plans are for this GOTM. The short 1 word answer "Blitzkrieg". The slightly longer answer:
Points are determined mainly by building things and killing things. In order to kill things you need to build things(and you need things to kill). The more planets I have, the more resources I have, and the more ships the ai has. Thus, take as many planets as possible as quickly as possible. This runs into a few hitches, but more on that as we go along.
We started with bulletproof fighters. I'm really not sure what niche bulletproofs currently are trying to hold, but in my test game they pretty much bombed, so no bulletproofs for me. For a blitzkrieg what techs do you expect me to unlock? Missile turrets and Orbital command station's mk II? Why these two first: The point of the blitzkrieg was to get resources, what does the mkII command station give? Right, more resources. Why missile turrets. Well the quickest way to take any planet is to rush its command station, but that can release all of the hostile ships. Bombers are the main threat, and missile turrets are pretty good at killing bombers.
Aright so I get my starship factory up asap and start churning out mk 1 ships and a light starships. I throw up minimal defenses at the wormholes(about 5 basics and about 5 mlrs, and 5/5/5 basic/mlrs/missiles at the command station). At around the 5 minute mark I have 1 light starships and ~90 mkI ships (2:2:1 ratio of fighter:bomber:frigates) and launch my first attack on Bravo Tango(out of the surrounding 4 it has the best resources 4/2).
The next hour looks like this:
8 minutes: bravo tango is basically mine--CS mkII up.
13 minutes: we start the attack on Bravo Whiskey 2 light + 160 ships or so
22 minutes: Bravo Whiskey pacified and moved on to Phi Delta(First ARS)
30 minutes: ARS taken, its parasites, and I just unlocked the first parasite starship. Ah well, so it goes. Score: ~35k
50 minutes: 2 more planets(1 more ARS), anti-armors whee(I'll explain why I was so happy about anti-armors in a minute).
1 hour: 115k score, one more planet down.
1:10: Took out the 3rd ars(mk III world). Major losses, but that's all good, 250k score. Armors unlocked.
At the 1:10 hour mark I have 8 planets and 3 ARS's. Techwise I've done the following: Before taking the ARS I unlocked leech starships(and while they weren't that useful, they at least paid for themselves in knowledge, by stealing me some combat units and alot of engineers). The first disappointment was that my first special ship was parasites. Ah well, so it goes. I also love MRS's so they were unlocked around here, and finally I unlocked anti-armor mk2's. Why anti-armor mk2's? Two reasons, first I like them even though they tend to die like crazy, and second, because they die like crazy and have to be replaced(for points
.
The rest of the game was just taking planets as fast as possible and surviving the threat released each time I killed a command station. Heres a summary of the next 3 hours:
2 hours: about 500k score, 12 planets. I've managed to lose way too many command stations with my lack of defenses + rushing command stations though. I also managed to get a MRS stolen by the enemy, a first for me(saw it running off to one of the enemy planets and healing). I hunted it down later, and managed to kill it, but it was somewhat amusing.
3 hours: the ai is down to 23 planets, I control 16 Points: Almost 1.2M points. I just took the advanced factory world, but no mk III ships unlocked yet, so I'll pass actually building a CS on the planet yet. In fact I'll never quite get around to building a command station on that planet, never had the time to secure enough planets in that area to make moving my entrenched front worth it.
3.5 hours: score:1.6M, The ai is down to 19 planets.
4 hours score: 2M Ai has 15 planets, I have 19, I havn't gotten around to claiming the rest yet. 1 ARS left still(just got autocannons). A few minutes later I get the warning: 2,400 ships massing for a cross planet attack. Ai progress is only 480, so I'm not that worried. I have about that many ships myself, so no huge deal.
Tech wise, I unlocked in this time period mainly turrets and a few higher mark ships. My horde of mkI units(with a few mkII's unlocked--early on this was bombers and armors in addition to my anti-armors) was doing fine in steamrolling the ai, but I was having problems defending the units released when I took down a command station(which several times near the end was over 1k units). Thus, I grabbed mkII basics,MLRS, Missiles and the first two marks of lasers. Finally at about hour 3 I unlocked a few more ships(mk2 frigates and mk3 armors and anti-armors), as the progress was getting up there and I needed a bit more firepower to keep rolling over the ai.
Here's where I made my first major mistakes though:
There were a couple of MK IV's that had been next to me all game, that had an alarming number of troops building up, so it was nuke time. After the first nuke, which took out about 2.4k mkIV ships, I discovered you don't get points for nuking ships, ah well. The second was a slightly bigger mistake mistake. I wasn't paying enough attention and nuked a second mk IV world, one adjacent to a homeworld. I hadn't scouted it in a while, but when the nuke goes off, the threat jumps up by 1336. Hmm, you know what that means, about 1.3k core units just got freed up. However, for some reason none of the core ships I had just set free decided to attack, shucks, no points for me (actually, it was probably a good thing, with that and the cross planet attack, but ah well--we will return to these units in a bit).
4:17, the cross planet attack launches, I have 2k units to counter its 2.4k(plus max of pretty much every markI and II turret spread out). I also have pretty nice depth of defense, I think the nearest non nuked ai planet is about 4 hops from my homeworld. I end up losing about 8 command stations, mostly to space planes(some of them were on the same planet more than once).
4:30ish, I decided I want to poke that core world, out spills 1.3k core frigates(and I don't notice
--they were apparently all sitting on the wormhole and we passed each other going through). I spend the next 15 minutes chasing them down and replacing command stations.
As an aside, it takes about 10 seconds to replace a command station with a group of 31 engineers(mostly mkII and mkIII-all stolen from the ai). You build the colony ship next to the wormhole into the planet, and assist with all engineers(takes about 5 seconds). Send the colony ship into the planet(takes about 2 seconds) with the engineers, and build the command station and assist again with the engineers(takes about 3 seconds). It takes slightly longer than 10 seconds for space planes to warp onto a planet, run to the command station and kill it. I lost 39 command stations this game(and built 50).
5 hours: In an attempt to get last minute points I suicide my fleet on a mkIII world right after finishing with a mkII world, lose my entire fleet and have about 400 of them are coming back at me(stolen by parasites).
Finally some numbers
Final Score: 3,115,505 points.
Planets I own at the 5 hour mark:16
Planets owned by the Ai at the 5 hour mark: 12
Number of nuked planets: 2
Ai Progress: 663
K-L ratio: 171%, 27k killed, 16k lost, 19k built.
The game swears I spent 7M metal more than I earned, but I'm pretty sure the real numbers are that I spent about 6.5M metal and crystal and about 50k knowledge.
I attached my final save for anyone interested. If anyone wants to see one of the internal saves, I have a save every hour or so and can attach that, just ask.
Any questions?
