Very funny mistake feast.
most options turned on
That sounds like a first mistake. Manageable, however, but above 7/7, mistakes become lethal.
full fog of war
I believe you also checked "don't show unexplored planets" (the way you talk about scouting hints that). Rebelling Colonies + "extra-extra-FoW" is highly discouraged.
I discovered the exile (Woo Hoo!), hacked it, and then succeeded in the arduous, tedious task of repairing it.
While I was repairing the exile, I had been getting warnings that a rebel colony was about to lose invisibility, and when I finally finished repairing the exile, there was ony 10 minutes remaining
Wow. That is a double mistake. 1st: ignoring a rebel colony outside of scout range (even more critical with "extra-extra-FoW"). You need to (1) scout earlier and (2) don't ignore warnings. 2nd: rushing for the exile, which is your grander problem in this game.
probably a total of 5 hours of gametime
As rebelling colonies don't trigger before the 4th hour (IIRC) but not long after, I suppose you repaired the Exile at the 5th hour mark (not 5 hours after the beginning of repairing it). That would mean you searched, found, hacked and repaired it in less than 5 hours, neglecting defenses and fleet (and I suppose other crucial things like ARS and adv. facto/ssc). Anyway, listening at how you used your exile, it seems you had no fleet to accompany it, so I'll suppose your main fleet was at best in defense.
The true mistake resides in not using the Exile to finish the game. You don't talk about the lore at all, and I doubt you thoroughly read the journal. It clearly warns you about the dangers of repairing the Exile and states you must be ready before. With no scout (at least no homeworld was scouted) and no/few/idle fleet, you weren't, apparently.
The exile triggers big waves during the repair. That mean you'll need metal for both repairing the Exile (the faster the better) and sustaining defenses. That requires a grand economy. Let see what you let us guess... You say the +80 of the ignored rebelling colony brought you at 305 AIP, which means you were at 225 before. Provided you poorly scouted, I bet you didn't found many datacenters and weren't able to hit the four co-processors, which mean you didn't get all the bangs (metal) from your bucks (AIP). However 225 isn't low, so I bet you still had a chunk of the galaxy for you.
But the result speaks by itself: you weren't able to properly defend you rebuilding Exile, losing tremendous amount of metal with each wave scratching its paint. You were forced to suspend your military production in order to finish the Exile earlier, which is a desperate decision.
Then when the Exile went online, you sealed the grave you dug for yourself by going after the colony instead of the homeworld. Once the Exile is online, the AI sends exos which are more and more powerful with time, and exponentially more with how close the Exile is from a homeworld and an exogalactic homeworld (which is its destination). You are basically forced to move-click the Exile toward the nearest homeworld as soon as it goes online and don't give it any order before reaching said homeworld (then the next and last order is a move toward the exo wormhole. Nothing else). I think the Exile could become an allied unit upon complete repair and doing that move itself, but you need to be able to chose your path (even if the shortest seems the best) and your time of departure (you may want to wait for your fleet to escort, but you need to have it ready when the Exile's repair completes).
However, you blindly did that. You reached a homeworld while searching something you should have ignored (or cared about earlier). However, with no supporting fleet and your previous wandering, the Exile was of course "tired" (50% health
before entering the homeworld is bad... very-very bad), alone, and the AI had time to rage up significantly.
And then, once in your dug and sealed grave, you managed to dig deeper. You called the Exile back. Even delaying its progression toward the homeworld to wait for fleet reinforcement is a high price. Calling it back is death wish.
Let's imagine you didn't turned rebelling colonies on. Let's say you scouted earlier and intentionally went to the homeworld without wandering. You were already screwed. But still, retreat wasn't an option. The Exile is in reach of the exo wormhole:
you go for it. Even if you have a small chance of success, retreat is
no chance of survival.
And you were so focused on your Exile's survival you didn't even noticed your empire was crumbling.
That AAR was hilarious. Thanks a lot for sharing.
I hope that !!fun!! self-dug grave will serve other players to learn all the lethal mistakes that shouldn't be done when handling an Exodian Blade.
You were warned:
It's sharp.
