Arcen Games

General Category => AI War Classic => AI War Classic - After Action Reports => : RockyBst April 26, 2014, 07:26:02 AM

: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst April 26, 2014, 07:26:02 AM
Omnipotent AI getting you down? Tired of getting beaten into a bloody pulp by your robotic overlords? Then it's time to give someone else a chance.

120 planet realistic map
Human Marauders: 10/10
Human Resistance: 10/10
Colony Rebellions: 10/10
Zenith Trader
Zenith Miners: 10/10
Dyson Sphere: 10/10
Zenith Cookie Monster
Broken Golems: Easy
Botnet Golem: Easy
Neinzul Rocketry Corps: 10/10
Neinzul Preservation Wardens: 10/10
Neinzul Roaming Enclaves: 10/10
Fallen Spire: 10/10
Spire Civilian Leaders
Spirecraft: Easy
Darkspire: 10/10

AI One: Diff 7 Fortress Baron, with a Train Master sub-type
AI Two: Diff 7 Teleporter Turtle with a Counter-Spy sub-type

AI plots, for both:

Avenger
Hybrid Hives: 10/10
Advanced Hybrids: 10/10
Astro Trains: 10/10
Hunter: 10/10
Beachheads
Shark A/B: Disabled. I mean come on, I wouldn't last 10 minutes otherwise.

As for me:

2 homeworlds: Zenith Hyrdas and Tackle Drone launchers. Not sure I've ever actually played with either.
200% Resource boost - I'm going to need it for the hybrids alone.
Likelihood of semi-hilarious death: 97%

I think I've got just enough counter-cheese here to let me live. Possibly. Will I regret choosing double 10/10 astro trains for one AI? Regret the 10/10 dyson sphere with dyson antagonisers springing up everywhere, and counter-spies on half the planets? Regret ... y'know what, let's just assume I'll regret everything.

00.00: Okay, so I've backed myself into a fairly small corner on this map. My homeworlds are exposed to only two other planets, and taking them will be an instant priority.

Initial tech unlocks:

Another 6k knowledge trickling in from the homeworlds over the next 10 minutes or so, not yet decided what to do with it.

For now, blow turrets. 6 forcefields and 4 mini-forts on both homeworlds, then start churning out mobile ships.

P.S my economy is already 50% better than I had at the end of that 10/10 game.

00.02: Scout the immediate neighbours. Murderlance has a counter-spy, train station, 5 metal harvesters and 6 (4 hostile) entry points. Sounds like a good whipping boy.

Poan has a fort 1, train station and 3 hostile entry points. No metal harvesters, which is annoying. Still, it's next to the homeworlds so has to be taken.

00.05: Alright, +200% economy is slightly ridiculous. I currently have 24 Mk. 2 engineers building ships and my metal income is just slightly negative.

00.06: Nuclear train on Poan. Nuclear train on Poan. Oh man, what have I let myself in for. It's covered by 2 shields, a couple of widows, and 2 regens. Even worse, it's just routing through ... meaning that even if I kill the train station on Poan, I may well get another one.

00.07: Scout auto-explore doesn't really find anything good, although they do see the cookie monster on a planet 3 hops away. Oh, and one of the co-processors.

Two waves announced, both to Murdke ... both 31 bombers. I've been playing higher diffs way too long, these are absolutely petty waves. And declared 3 minutes out? Man.

00.09: Scout auto-explore hits a few more planets. They find another co-processor right next to one of my whipping boy planets, a core needler controller and a starship constructor on a planet with a super fortress. How does the AI have a super fortress nine minutes into the game?

6,000 knowledge. 4,000 to get a Mil 2 command station, 2,000 for Mk. II forcefields.

00.10: Waves hit Murdke. Seeing as at this point I have a fleet of 800 ships, including a full cap of leech, flagship and bomber starships this doesn't really faze me.

Okay then, let's talk strategy. First up, yep, I'm regretting those astro-trains. I think the first order of business is going to be staying on the homeworlds and wiping out every single train station within deep-strikiing distance. And taking out tachyons / counter-spies at the same time of course. Until that's done it isn't worth the risk of colonising any other planets. And besides, I have a perfectly healthy economy from just the homeworlds.

State of the union:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/starting-union.png)


: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst April 26, 2014, 10:08:03 AM
00.11: Oh hey, my first roaming enclave showed up. Thanks fella, your protection will make my homeworlds invulnerable. And preservation wardens are starting to aimlessly throw themselves at my planets too.

Well, turret time then. Seeing as I have 192 of each variety, and that would destroy my power grid when combined with the fleet, let's leave it at a sedate 60 of each per homeworlds. Also, looks like it's matter converter time once again!

00.14: Oh F@*$. Hey, guess who just decided to pop his head into one of my homeworlds for no apparent reason? That's right, the nuclear astro-train! Everything explodes. Planet loses supply.

On further reflection, looks like he might have come from Muderlanceras and been routing towards Poan. Honestly there's no way I can continue this game while one homeworld contributes no metal or energy and is completely incapable of building turrets, soo...

00.11: With a sickening pop, time rewinds by four minutes. Plans to murder train stations are stepped up significantly.

00.14: Train stations on Poan and Murderlanceras are taken out. I also destroy the counter-spy on Murderlanceras, so I can picquet a scout and have advanced warning next time something happens. Like, say, the neinzul rocketry corps decide to lob a nuke at one of my homeworlds.

00.15: Marauders decided to turn up on Poan and are now taking care of the guardposts and ships for me. Nice of them. Especially when they disperse to go wreak havoc on other AI worlds as well. Maybe they'll take out a tachyon or two for me.

00.17: Warp gate guardians. Why did it have to be warp gate guardians. I only have 16 AIP, for crying out loud! I thought these guys didn't spawn in until diff 8+, anyway?

00.20: The anti-train station campaign continues. At least I'm also taking out hybrid equipment factories, tachyons and special forces guard posts at the same time.

Nuclear train on Poan - again. Routing towards my homeworld - again. This time I can move the fleet to intercept it though. It dies about 3mm from the wormhole. Okay, popping Poan command station and setting up an anti-train turret beach-head here. I just wish I knew how or why they were routing the way they are.

00.25: 600 turrets on Poan, 5 forcefields over the wormhole to Murdke. All aimed at blowing away any nuke trains before they make it to the homeworld.

00.30: Yay, super-hybrid time. Also, holy hell. Just took the fleet through Murderlanceras on the way back from wiping another train station - there were 92 hybrid hives waiting for them. I think about 3 starships is all that survived. Well over 1,000 ships on planet.

00.31: Hybrids passing through Poan, hopefully the beachhead can winnow some. Also, nuke train passing through. With no shields. Snipers!

00.32: Wow, 12% damage. Guess I should have had the missile turrets in better range. At least I'm taking out a few hybrids, and the resistance have showed up to assist.

00.35: Oh god. Just took another look at Murderlanceras. There are over 400 hybrids there at the moment. More than 5k ships. And they're nuke immune. And tractor immune. Looks like the best thing I have against them at the moment is bombers, so Mk. II bombers and a spire starship are unlocked with the 3,000 knowledge from Poan.

00.36: Scouts report a nuke train on Shoal, moving towards Poan. Looks like this one is aiming for the homeworld again.

...

There's a supply interdictor train with it. And 3 shields, and 2 widows. This is bad.

00.36.30: Time to pull out my secret weapon: a Mk. III lightning warhead. Without this bad-boy, my fleet just can't provide enough damage to take out the nuke train before it hits the homeworld (I may have save scummed once or twice to prove this). With it, 4.8 million damage is done in an instant and the fleet can juuust kill the nuke train before it hits home. +3 AIP. The turret ball defence obviously isn't going to work if supply interdictor trains are around, so I need to get myself a good supply of spirecraft rams and penetrators - stat.

00.36.45: What do you get when you put a supply interdictor astro train on a player homeworld? -360,000 energy. Thankfully the hybrids don't seem to be taking this as a cue to attack, but they're sure as hell going to chew my (widowed) fleet to pieces once the trains move on.

00.37: Fleet down. All but 36 ships. Reprisal level 1, although let's be honest with these wave sizes I'm not too concered about that.

00.41: 421 Enclaves + 5,000-odd drone ships, + one Mk. 3 lightning warhead = 4,100 deaths. Only 8 enclaves remain. I should probably have done that with a Martyr, on reflection.

50% astro train secret project completion.

00.45: Oh, you have EMP astro trains now? That's ... that's real nice.

00.50: Fleet sent to clear up the few dozen enclaves and 1,000-odd missile frigates on Murderlanceras. At which point, of course, both the super hybrid and an unshielded nuke train show up on Poan. Both out of range of the turrets.

00.54: Y'know what, I haven't actually seen any trains go through Murderlanceras since I took out that train station early on. I think it might be safe to take.

00.57: Okay then. Mil 2 in the centre of the system, 8 forcefields. Beat off the inevitable counter-attack of 150-odd enclaves. 3k knowledge, Mk. II tackle drone launchers and grav turrets sounds like a good bet. Take half the turrets from each homeworld and mine up all five entry points with those lovely area mines. Whipping boy (sorta) in place.

Poan I'm going to leave uncolonised, because honestly all I'm losing there is the energy. And as so many dangerous astro trains go through it I'd rather have a command station free planet than a nuked one where I can't build turrets. Plus uncolonised means that enclaves pass through all the time, which means I can shoot them all the time and at least keep the numbers down somewhat.

1.00: Well, that was a rather ... nuclear first hour. However I've got my basic defences in place and I've started re-routing trains. The ever increasing number of enclaves is going to be a real problem going forward, especially with raiding. But as soon as I go make a spirecraft raid on some world, probably Harmoat, I'll be a lot more secure against nuke trains.

AIP: 78
Defences on Murderlanceras:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/Muderlanceras.png)

A fairly average day on Poan - at times there's two train groups and upwards of 500 ships here:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/Poan.png)

And state of the union:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/1hourunion.png)

: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: keith.lamothe April 26, 2014, 11:04:23 AM
Omnipotent AI getting you down? Tired of getting beaten into a bloody pulp by your robotic overlords? Then it's time to give someone else a chance.
Arcen Games: How Do You Want To Die Today?


(lobby setup)
It's.. it's full of tens.


2 homeworlds: Zenith Hyrdas and Tackle Drone launchers. Not sure I've ever actually played with either.
Hydras I don't have much experience with, but TDLs I heartily recommend.  Don't do much about tractor immune stuff, but combined with Riots you basically have the ultimate in "trolling fleet ships".


y'know what, let's just assume I'll regret everything.
That is probably simplest, yes.


00.06: Nuclear train on Poan. Nuclear train on Poan.
The RNG's just trying to be up-front about what you've signed up for.


How does the AI have a super fortress nine minutes into the game?
Fortress Barons start with some.


00.14: Oh F@*$. Hey, guess who just decided to pop his head into one of my homeworlds for no apparent reason? That's right, the nuclear astro-train! Everything explodes.
You're welcome.


00.35: Oh god. Just took another look at Murderlanceras. There are over 400 hybrids there at the moment. More than 5k ships.
That... could pose performance issues.  Particularly since I think that 5k doesn't even count the hybrid modules.

Generally speaking, the game gets pretty nervous about a planet when the AI has 5000 ships there.  Stops spawning stuff there, etc.

Anyway, seems like thus far they've concentrated on murdering you, not your CPU.


00.41: 421 Enclaves + 5,000-odd drone ships, + one Mk. 3 lightning warhead = 4,100 deaths. Only 8 enclaves remain.
Perhaps their clustering behavior is suboptimal ;)


50% astro train secret project completion.
I... hope you have some defenses up by then.  There's a few different things it can do, but iirc there's always an offensive component.


In any event, an excellent way of actually increasing the insanity-quotient following the Cage Match of Doom.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst April 26, 2014, 05:29:38 PM
So, looks like the theme of this game is going to be 'Golems, golems everywhere'. Seeing as I don't have any of my own at this point, I'm kinda glad those buffs aren't in yet.

01.01: So, uh, 32 Mk. 5 missile guardians just showed up on Poan for some reason. Why? Who knows.

01.02.30: Oh, guess who else just showed up. A Mk. V H/K, with his Mk. IV buddy. That would be the hunter plot, then. This guy has 500 million health, and 2.6 million attack * 25. Slightly absurd, and a real reason for me to go find an artillery golem fairly sharpish.

Oh, and of course right after he warps in a supply interdictor train shows up.

01.03: First AI construction complete. 3 massive AI ships en-route to my planets. Uh-oh.

01.04: A wild cookie monster appears! Seems like he's just passing through though, and eating some of the constant stream of enclave drones while he does so.

01.04: So, my entire 900 ship strong fleet just got eaten by the Mk. V H/K and his buddies. I got him down to 31%. On reflection, I should probably have just let him have Poan.

01.12.30: So uh, those three massive ships. That wouldn't happen be the black widow golem, armored golem and H/K currently proceeding through the ruins of Poan's turret beachhead, would it? The ones heading right for my homeworld?

I'm almost refleeted, not sure whether to let them in the homeworld and hence get the scrap and turret support, or take the fleet to them and keep them on Poan.

01.13: What is life without risk. They warp in to the homeworld. Black widow goes down in about 10 seconds.

01.13.32: H/K down. Armored golem and core starships / warp / zombie guardians are still up though.

01.14.26: Last enemy dies. Currently 120,000 metal/s, with about 30 million scrap. That's one way to cut refleeting times, just a shame I don't have anywhere to dump the excess into as the trader hasn't been to see me yet.

01.16: Still some 200 enclaves and supporting vessels on Poan, but with sufficient remains rebuilders I may have a way to soak some of the excess metal.

01.18: What's worse than a Mk. V and Mk IV H/Ks? Four H/Ks, Mk. II and upwards! These guys really like Poan. Eh, at least I killed the Mk. 5 this time.

01.20: An strange hybrid-like signal, you say? Why, I never!

01.30: Scouts finally find the first ARS. Sitting three hops away, next to a world with an advanced factory and a rocketry silo. Aaand the world next door has a regen golem, rocketry silo and dark spire generator.

Looks like I'm heading out that way, but they will likely be throw away worlds for now.

01.30: Both AI cargo train projects just finished. 6 massive ships this time, so, uh, 4 golems and 2 H/Ks I assume. I may have to see about getting the Poan defence grid back up before they get here.

01.34: Six raids take out a data centre 3 hops away. It's nice to get -20 for a change.

Seeing as there are 200 enclaves and about 2,000 ship on Poan, that beachhead isn't going up again any time soon. Looks like turrets are going back up on Murdke, the Poan accessible homeworld.

By the way, when did tractors start dragging away mobile rally points to other planets? That is really irritating.

01.40: Nuke train on Shoal. Looks like it's routing for my homeworld again. Problem: 240 hybrids on Poan will obliterate my fleet before I can intercept it. Solution: Lightning warhead, of course.

01.41: Oh come on. I was ignoring the seven concurrent waves to Murderlanceras because they were tiny, about 100 ships each. So of course one of the waves was a beachhead, and all my defences are useless. Including forcefields. Anyway, 240 hybrids explode (they probably shouldn't cluster right on the wormhole), fleet kills the unshielded nuke, then flies to the rescue.

01.41.30: Of course by this point Murderlanceras command station is down and 120 enclaves are enjoying themselves with the helpless turrets.

01.43: Scouts indicate cookie monster moving towards Murderlanceras. Retreat the fleet.

Oh, and he's decided to stay here. At least he'll eat some of the enclave drones I suppose. Need to see if I can sneak a rebuilder past him to get the command station back up.

01.44: Supply interdiction astro train takes out all the turrets and forcefields on Murderlanceras just as the command station goes back up. Of course.

Poan has an artilley golem, black widow and H/K. Must be the first astro-train battlefleet. Man, I much preferred it when they just put super-forts everywhere.

01.46: On the plus side, the golems seem too afraid to attack. On the negative side, I now have four golems rambling around and no scrap.

01.48: Oh hey, the golems have decided to play after all. Artillery golem, black widow, H/K, 5 core starships and 7 warp gate guardians move to Muderlanceras. And as the cookie monster is still there, I can't really move the fleet in to take care of them.

01.50: Command station goes down. Enclaves come in. Chaos and screaming ensues. At least the turrets managed to get the H/K down to half health I suppose.

Boy I'm glad I didn't enable Shark 10/10.

01.52: Golems give some thought to the Murdke wormhole, then decide it's too scary because of the fleet next door to it. Can't say I'm a huge fan of the anti-rope-a-dope changes, even if they do make the AI more intelligent. Makes it a pain to clean up threat like this.

01.54: Oh joy, now we're up to 9 massive ships en-route. Thankfully, golems are slow beasties.

But hallelujah, the devourer has moved on. Time to throw 800 ships against 2 golems, a H/K and a load of warp guardians / core starships. After the first wave takes out the enclaves and their 500-odd supporting ships.

02.00: Fleet pretty much wipes taking out the black widow golem. About 5 minutes to refleet and take back Murderlanceras.

Like I said, golems everywhere. Especially as I just got a sneak peak of what is waiting for me down line: Seven mining golems. Seven. My need for an artillery golem is becoming overwhelming.

I say sneak peak by the way because I caught some unhandled exceptions and had to load from an auto-save. The mining golems haven't shown up again since, 6 minutes later. But I'm sure they'll be here soon.

4/26/2014 10:09:23 PM (7.020) Mem: 212,701,184 Plat:WindowsPlayer
-----------------------------------UnhandledErrors-----------------------------------
4/26/2014 10:09:23 PM (7.020)
-----------------------------------Error-----------------------------------Log String: FixedUpdate: System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Array index is out of range.
  at ReinforcementLogic.Helper_PickUnitsForReinforcement (.Player player, Int32 AITechLevel, .Planet ToPlanet, .Buy[] buyCategories, FInt StrengthToSpend, .BuyCategory[] CatsByTech) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at ReinforcementLogic.DoReinforcementsLogic (.Player player) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Player.DoResourceEvent () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunOneCycleOfSimulation () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunNextCycle (Boolean DoRendering) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunFrame () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at MainCameraLogic.UsedToBeFixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
Stack Trace:   at ReinforcementLogic.Helper_PickUnitsForReinforcement (.Player player, Int32 AITechLevel, .Planet ToPlanet, .Buy[] buyCategories, FInt StrengthToSpend, .BuyCategory[] CatsByTech) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at ReinforcementLogic.DoReinforcementsLogic (.Player player) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Player.DoResourceEvent () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunOneCycleOfSimulation () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunNextCycle (Boolean DoRendering) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunFrame () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at MainCameraLogic.UsedToBeFixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

I think I've gone backwards over the last hour. I've gone from three planets and a beachhead with minimal threat, to two planets with 5 outstanding golems, 3 H/Ks, and I'm going to assume about 3 Mk V H/Ks in the hunter fleet by now. On the plus side I have 7 AIP less than an hour ago. So yay?

EDIT: Okay, these unhandled errors are getting a touch ridiculous now. See attached save, with a few core starships and 2 armored golems pounding on my homeworld. Any clues?

EDIT EDIT: Oooh, is it possibly because there's a reinforcement warp gate (warp guardian) on a player homeworld?
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: Aeson April 26, 2014, 08:05:28 PM
Good luck doing FS 10/10. Those exos hurt, and I don't really think that anything else you've turned on will help much with it, unless you really delay FS or don't go far up the campaign.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: Toranth April 26, 2014, 08:55:51 PM
01.02.30: Oh, guess who else just showed up. A Mk. V H/K, with his Mk. IV buddy. That would be the hunter plot, then. This guy has 500 million health, and 2.6 million attack * 25. Slightly absurd, and a real reason for me to go find an artillery golem fairly sharpish.
It won't help:  H/Ks are immune to Artillery ammo  :(
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst April 27, 2014, 08:52:41 AM
It won't help:  H/Ks are immune to Artillery ammo  :(

But not implosions. Beautiful, beautiful spirecraft implosions.

I'll probably only do fallen spire far enough to get the first lot of frigates. Uh, I do get an extra large number of frigates on 10/10 right?

02.03: Heeeey, there are those mining golems. All seven of them. Most of them on planets I haven't been to yet, and I have 30 minutes to kill every one of them.

02.04: H/K on Murderlanceras goes down. Still leaves a painful load of warp gate guardians, with their 80 million health, core starships, a half health arty golem, hybrids etc...

02.07: Oh, hi two armored golems and a H/K. Are you going to just sit on Murderlanceras as well? Sure, it's not like I wanted that planet back or anything...

02.08: Whoo, they're not just sitting there. They're attacking my barely defended second homeworld! Wait, that's a bad thing.

The 47 engineers on Ijip are told to build every single remaining turret. And forcefields. Lots more forcefields.

02.09: So hey, did you know that a dozen Mk. V core starships can make absolute mincemeat out of even 24 forcefields? By the time I kill the last one most of them are at 20%. Thankfully the three golems keep their distance though.

02.10: Artillery golem and H/K down. That just leaves 10 warp gate guardians and 2 armored golems, for a total of 1.3 billion health.

02.12: 223,000m/s from scrap. Those armored golems sure pay nice, shame that I have literally nothing to pour it all into. Plenty of unhandled errors from the warp gate guardians, but no crash this time. Entire docks output is redirected to Murderlanceras, let's see if we can take it back while there's still absurd amounts of money sloshing about.

02.13: Fleet is terminating the 50 hybrids and supporting ships on the planet. Turrets on Ijep are scrapped so that 40 remains rebuilders and 25 engineers can put them back up on Murderlanceras. I still have absurd amounts coming in from scrap.

Oh, and the warp gate guardians left me the present of three waves to Ijep before they died.

02.17: Murderlanceras de-hybridising and rebuilding complete. Including getting rid of the pesky mining golem sitting on it. That means I now have 17 minutes to remove the other six.

Therkilldoor is easily accessible from Murderlanceras, has a mining golem, and has previously been somewhat cleaned. Unfortunately there are currently 240 hybrids there. So, lightning warhead it is then.

02.18: Tackledrone launchers keep the riff-raff away from the fleet, golem goes down. Only five left, and Poan seems like a decent next move.

02.22: A strange device somewhere in the galaxy is antagonising the 10/10 dyson sphere. Joyous. At least I might be able to back-track the stream of gatlings attacking my worlds and work out where it is.

02.24: Thanks to the hunter crew the fleet wipes on Poan. So, 4 miners left. Oh and the AI sends out another pair of golems from astro train construction.

Two of the remaining miners are on Harmoat and Shoal, both of which I've cleaned before but both of which are fairly low priority. And I'd have to go through the hunter fleet on Poan to get there. I might just let those get eaten.

And the last two are both low priority worlds hanging off Murderlanceras: Solyhung, with 8 metal extractors, and Panyae which is a co-processor world with 10 Xampite. Neither is particularly interesting, but let's see if I can't get the fleet to Panyae anyway. At least I might be able to take out some hybrid spawners on the way.

02.26: Looks like Panyae is where the dysons are coming through. About 16 at a time. It also has the usual 150-odd hybrids. This could be 'fun'.

02.27: Well, I take out the counter-spy so I can at least get consistent scout date off Panyae. Then an artillery golem, armored golem and H/K with the usual supporting fleet attack my homeworld via Poan. Hey, free salvage!

You know what's really annoying though? Dyson gatlings don't give any salvage, as they cost 1 metal.

02.29: 280 hybrids decide to join the battle-group attacking my homeworld, which is now down to just the last few warp guardians and the armored golem. Engineers fast-build a lightning warhead.

02.31: I missed with the warhead. Still, they're all dead now. 3 minutes remain until four planets die to miners.

02.33: One minute left. 450 ships, against over 2,000 on Panyae. What the heck, I'm still raking it in on salvage so they'll be rebuilt soon enough.

02.34: I got the miner down to 91%. Then four planets died. AI reprisal level 3, which it turns out is a paltry 1,300 fighters.

02.39: I've decided to take Therkilldor, for knowledge and because it has a nice selection of asteroids. The first attempt doesn't go so well when when the hunter fleet shows up.

My plan for that knowledge? Assault transports. Never unlocked them before, but with the number of hybrids around they seem like a mighty fine choice at the moment.

02.44: Therkilldor command station pops. The hybrids are not amused.

Also, I now have 12 massive ships en-route to my planets. So that would be 9 golems and 3 H/Ks, then.

02.47: Uh, I just completely missed the two artillery golems on my homeworld. And I'm assuming, at one point, a H/K as well. Ah well, the turrets seem to be taking care of them okay. It is nice that artilley golems tend to fire on the sniper turrets at the edge of the grav well.

02.50: Mil 2 command station up on Therkilldor. Fleet ships taking out the inevitable hybrid counter-assault, then I'll start pouring some of this 4 million-and-change metal into asteroids.

2 Reptite = 1 shield, 1 implosion artillery
10 Pysite = 6 implosion artillery (perfect anti-golem weapons), 4 Mk. II Martyrs.
4 Xampite = 1 set of Mk. II scouts, one Mk. III Martyr, one penetrator, and one double sized set of Mk. II rams.

02.53: 40 engineers make quick work of that lot. Cookie monster on Panyae, apparently en-route for Murderlanceras again. Spirecraft are told to dash for the homeworld so they don't get cut off and cut to pieces.

02.54: Oh dear. Devourer is going to Ijep. Luckily there's no ships there, but it looks like he's going to stay for a while. So no ship production from that homeworld for 10 minutes or so.

Implosions and Maytrs are put to sleep under a cloaker, to be woken the next time there's a golem or hybrid incursion. The penetrator should be able to quite handily take out a nuke or EMP train if one is nearby. As for Therkilldor itself, it's pretty much throwaway. Set of mini-forts and 2 forcefields around the mil 2 are the only defences it's getting.

02.57: Oh hey, look at that. H/Ks are attacking one of my homeworlds. Implosion time! Need the fleet to take out the sniper guardians first though, don't want to lose these guys. And keeping them away from the 30,000 range warp guardians who can insta-kill them would also be a good idea.

03.00: Well, we're back up to 12 massive ships again. But at this stage I'm fairly confident I can handle any two or three golems who peek their heads into a homeworld. Just a tad concerned what might happen if, say, 9 golems get it into their heads to join the threat fleet...

For now, my priorities are:

Send some raids to take out the two date centres my spirecraft scouts just found

Capture Jadikic, the priority 8 world next to Therkilldoor, which has a black widow golem and Mk. V viral shredder fab on it. Hey, even if I lose the fab as long as I have some shredders in cold storage I can rebuild them.

After that take Gorisuip, which has an ARS. It also has two rocketry silos next door, so I'll probably not defend it. Combined, those two will get me 19 more Pysite. Implosions for everyone!

Oh, and track down the dyson sphere / where that antagoniser is. Although even on 10/10 the base defences are handling the gatlings okay. At the moment I've traced them back to at least Dekal.

EDIT: State of the union

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/3hourunion.png)

 
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst April 27, 2014, 06:14:39 PM
03.01: Armored golem, arty golem and a H/K come to call on the homeworld. They get relatively quickly imploded, but are of course instantly replaced by another cargo train.

03.03: An assault transport full of raids completely fails to take out a date centre. Devourer golem is moving on, which means the fleet desperately flees as it enters Murderlanceras.

Subspace signal on Harmoat, one of the planets I let get exploded.

03.05: Ooh, auto-picqueting scouts finally found the Dyson antagonisers. It's on Panza, which is two hops away through Solyhung. Guess where I'm neutering next.

They also found the super hybrid itself and ... a nuke train. Which appears to be heading straight for Murderlanceras. Penentrator, you're up!

03.05.20: Another nuke train, this time on Poan. And an EMP train. I'm gonna need more penetrators to cover all the approaches.

I've debated putting a command station up on Poan just to absorb nuke trains, but then I noticed that they don't explode on planets which have already been destroyed. So it would only soak a single train anyway.

03.06: Looks like we're safe for now. Nuke train goes past Murderlanceras and is last seen exiting Aelurn. Still, I need to take these two down as a priority in case they come back.

Did I mention that I've started putting forcefields over all the wormhole exits from my worlds, just so widow trains don't steal half the fleet every time they pass through? And I do mean literally half, they steal about 350 ships each time.

03.09: Assault transport data centre raid, take two. This time I send five and they make it.

03.10: Penetrator manages to catch one of the nuke trains as it passes through Poan again. Escapes with about 15% health after the hybrids once more display their displeasure. Even with scouts dropping like flies due to counter-spies and tachyon trains, here's what my warning box normally looks like:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/warningfun.png)

Maybe add a few waves in there as well.

03.10: Fleet wipes, hard, trying to take out hybrids on Solyhung so I can get to Panza. Should just sent a missile. Or a Martyr. Hey, I have Martyrs now.

03.12: We're now up to 15 massive ships apparently en-route to my planets. Still at least one more nuke train roaming around somewhere, marauders attacking Therkilldor. On the plus side, a Mk. II Martyr just made quite a mess of 100 hybrids and 1,600 other assorted ships.

03.13: Dammit. Nuke train just detonated on Therkilldor. My entire fleet was there fighting off the marauders as well. Fleet wiped, no more metal or energy from there. No more turrets or forcefields, either. I can still stick a mil 2 up to retain control though. At least I know that we're clear of nuke trains for another hour or so until more spawn in I suppose.

I also just noticed that I never capped the mercenary space docks I had churning out parasites, so my entire metal stock is gone.

03.14: Ah. Argggh. Arty and armored golem making mincemeat of one of my homeworlds again. How long have they been there? Implosions, to your positions.

The combination of dyson gatlings always giving me low 'attack' numbers and there only being a few vessels in the golem battlegroups makes noticing these attacks somewhat hit and miss.

03.22: CPA declared. 522 ships. That's ... that's like 40 hybrids worth. I won't even notice that in the threat fleet.

03.22: EMP astro-train hits Murderlanceras. EMP immune units hit it. That's one way to take one down, I suppose...

The forcefield inhibitor astro train with it is painful though, as it means the widows will once again successfully steal half my fleet.

03.24: Solyhung is, of course, back up to 150 hybrids by the point. I'm going to need more Martys.

Uh ... dyson converter? That ... that doesn't sound good.

03.26: 14 assault transports, 3 cloakers, one martyr. Let's take this converter down.

It is, of course, sitting under a Mk. II shield. But my forces blast it soon enough, along with a selection of the 26 hybrid hive spawners on the planet. And the train station, for good measure.

03.27: Oh, hello two black widow golems and a H/K on my homeworld. I'm kind of getting used to this now. Implosions!

Somewhat surprisingly my assault transports are still alive and manage to evac a good 300 ships from that raid. Impressive, considering I was expecting a full fleet wipe just on the antagoniser let alone the train station and 15-odd hybrid spawners as well.

03.30: 1,000 missile frigate reprisal to a homeworld. Apparently the AI are upset with me. Ah well, at least I got rid of the golem infestation. Y'know, except for the 9 still en-route to my planets.

Also, that super hybrid is already off an building another antagoniser. On Raedhung this time, which has the core needler turret controller. Well, at least I know where it is for a change.

03.31: Nuke train on Jubuvi, at least that's a way off. However scouts also report a super-fort on Jakidic, i.e. the planet I wanted to take next. Blasted astro trains.

So, uh, bad news. Spirecraft asteroids aren't nuke immune. So when those four planets got blown up earlier, so did their asteroids. Meaning I can't raid them for rams to take out the superfort.

03.36: Fleet removes the tachyon on Jakidic, then retreats from the 3,500 ships there. Looks like my best bet for rams might be Dorvil, just off Murderlanceras. It of course has the usual 100 enclaves / 2,000 ships that all the worlds next to mine do. So Martyr, cleanup, quick-build some rams and more Martyrs.

03.42: While the fleet wipes the remaining ships and another train station, engineers build me a half dozen Mk II rams, a trio of Martyrs and another penetrator. All the rest of the asteroids go to implosion artilley, giving me a fleet of 14 anti-golem lovelies now.

Of course while this is going on I completely fail to notice that the CPA, 2 black widows and a H/K have hit Murderlanceras. And 100 or so hybrids are trying their luck with my homeworld's fixed defences. While the player fleet is engaged, the threat fleet will play.

03.45: Annoyingly the command station went down before the black widows, so no scrap. Still, I have the comfort of knowing that with 18 more massive ships incoming I'm sure to get some soon.

03.47: Two Mk II rams is just enough to take out a superfort. Now follow up with a Martyr to take out the enclaves, and the fleet to clean house...

03.52: Turns out this is more of a 2 Martys and a fleet wipe job. Especially as the hunter plot with it's variety of H/Ks appears to be sitting next door. Reprisal level 3, and of course the golems have taken this opportunity to waltz in to my homeworld.

03.55: Two EMP trains hit Murderlanceras at once. EMP immune units (i.e hydras) hit back. Of course, the 3 minute paralysis is timed perfectly for the 800 bomber reprisal wave to take out the command station.

03.59: 3,000 attack on my homeworld? Dratted hybrids. Martyr takes out 220 of them.

04.00: Defences back up, coffers overflowing, fleet up in about 2 minutes. Then time to take 10 assault transports and quickly capture Jakidic along with its Mk. 4 ion cannon, black widow golem and core shredder fab. Plan is to insta-cap for 40-odd engineers, hopefully preventing the hunter fleet from coming. The take care of the remaining 500-odd ships before they take out the broken golem.

P.S. this really is a lot of golems. I'm becoming uncomfortably blase about them waltzing in to my homeworlds. Thank goodness for implosion artillery.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: Aeson April 28, 2014, 11:42:24 AM
I'll probably only do fallen spire far enough to get the first lot of frigates. Uh, I do get an extra large number of frigates on 10/10 right?
No, the scaling only affects the magnitude of the AI response. I don't know if the balance has changed recently, but a while back even the first shard recovery exo was a serious threat on FS 10/10.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst April 28, 2014, 04:08:05 PM
Blast, I was hoping for a horde of 50+ frigates to help me take down golems. Ah well.

04.02: Uh, there's also a translocator eye here. How did I not see that before? Guess I've always been out-numbered on my assaults.

04.04: Popped the command station and eye, retreating for now until I can come back with the colony ship. Uh, reprisal wave is 1,440 attractor drones. Interesting choice.

04.05: Oh hey, it's mining golem time again!

The hit list this time is:


04.07: Jakidic is mine. Train station and mining golem explode rather quickly, and 40 engineers get the black widow golem up in absolute record time. It only took about 50 seconds.

Human colony rebellion on is announced on Aosrinmar. I don't even know where that is. In fact I've never even played with colony rebellions enabled before. Looks like I've got two hours to get over there though.

04.09: I nick 5 forcefields and most of the turrets from the homeworld that hasn't been breached in an hour or two. I don't expect Jakidic to last forever, but I can at least give it a fair shot at holding off waves and time to get the fleet there. Also, there's apparently an interplanetary munitions booster there which didn't disappear on ownership change. Seems like a good target for sabotage hacking.

I've worked out where Aosrinmar is ... it's the planet five hops away with the dire guardian lair and rocketry silo. Joy.

04.12: 3k knowledge. Seeing as my economy is strong, often to overflowing, and I can always build matter converters for energy then fortresses seem like a good idea. They will, of course, discourage golems from attacking. But I can live with that.

Standard load of 100-odd hybrids on Goriusip. Kill the tachyon, then send them a Martyr from my new asteroid stocks on Jakidic. Oh, and put 20 of the Mk. V shredders into cold storage on my homeworld, just in case I ever lose the fab.

04.14: Once again, I'm reminded that you can't sabotage hack on your own planets. Looks like the only way to get rid of this munitions booster is to blow it up and take the 5 AIP hit.

04.15: Uh, at some point in the last minute Goriusip seems to have acquired a super fortress. Blasted astro-trains. Ramming time.

04.18: Super fortress down. Mining golem down. Train station down. Aren't assult transports lovely. I'll come back and clean up / cap the ARS later. For now I have 17 minutes to decide if I want to save any of the other mined worlds.

Oh, and the rocketry corps just sent me their first present. In the form of two Mk III lightning warheads. How lovely. The black widow manages to take them out from well beyond range though.

04.19: Oh, I thought I hadn't seen a golem in a while. And now I have four. Three black widows, that's just mean. Especially when combined with a 1,000 ship youngling tiger reprisal hitting in one minute.

04.21: 2 fortresses for every planet, I think. Ooh, and hey the trader is on Murderlanceras. Let's have two OMDs to help take care of those nasty little golems. And a planetary armor inhibitor, because why not. Well, now I've got something to soak up my next 200,000m/s surplus.

04.26: Nuke train on Shoal, heading towards Poan. Penetrator in place on Poan to intercept it. Assault transports have taken out mining golems on Poan and Dorvil, that just leaves Aelurn and Dicgendi to clear.

Oh, and apparently there's four golems and a H/K moving through Harmoat to Poan. Looks like I'm going to be having some visitors to the homeworld in a moment.

04.27: Nuke train is heading straight for my homeworld. Good job I noticed it. That would be one heck of a one-two punch from the AI, nuke your homeworld then follow up with four golems to take out the now unshielded command station. Unfortunately the golems take out the brave penetrator pilot, then turn around and run away. C'mon, I need the scrap!

04.30: I'm now a touch worried that I appear to have six golems waiting outside my worlds. At least they're on two different planets ... for now.

Ah good sending my fleet to take out the miner on Dicgende, and hence engaging the hybrid horde, made two of them attack. For a certain definition of good. Implosions followed up by a fortresses to the face are, at least, fairly effective. And will be even more so now that I have enough metal to get an OMDs up.

04.35: Never did take out the last mining golem on Aelurn, so that planet explodes. That makes for a total of 6 devastated planet so far then, or 5% of the entire map.

04.40: OMD is up, as is most of the fleet. Assault transports are sent to drill a tachyon path to a data centre, and run slap bang into two armored golems. Then an EMP train hits the planet. With the exception of four starships the entire fleet wipes, either to the golems themselves or the 2,000 hybrids and drones on the escape route. Reprisal level 3, * 2.

Oh, and four golems take the opportunity to jump into Murderlanceras. The sight of implosions and OMD slugs taking them out is glorious.

04.41.30: By the time I've taken out 3 golems and a H/K and there's still 4 golems and 2 H/Ks left on the planet, it's fairly obviously the command station is going down. Especially with 2,000 wave ships hitting in 30 seconds or so. Implosions, enclaves etc. retreat in reasonably good order.

04.45: 3 golems, 2 H/Ks and about 25 mixed core starships / warp guardians on my homeworld. That is, the undefended one without any turrets. Luckily I have a secret weapon - 4 spirecraft rams. If the implosions can deal enough damage, I should be able to wipe the golems.

04.46: One H/K dealt with and all ten core starships. Those are what I was really worried about, they can absolutely power through forcefields.

Implosions focus the black widow, then a ram takes it out. Another for the H/K. That leaves 2 armored golems and change.
 
04.47: Implosions and the last two rams make short work of the last two golems, while a 900 bombers wave to Jakidic is blunted by 150 viral shredders and an angry black widow golem.

Looks like the dyson antagoniser is online now, too. And they're streaming in to my second homeworld.

04.47: Capped out on metal again, with a +240,000m/s excess. And of course, Murderlanceras is offline so I don't have any trader toys to pour it into. Always from famine to feast. Oh, and I now have Mk. V 370 viral shredders. I love those guys.

04.50: 230 hybrids attacking my (turreted up) homeworld. And no martyr this time to stop them. Erp. At least I've managed to quick build two forts on each of my remaining planets and not even make a dent in the metal income.

Hey, what happens when you get 50 Mk. II engineers to build a missile silo? Six seconds later you have a lightning III warhead. The hard part is watching it inch from the wormhole across the planet until it finally impacts on and kills the 180 hybrids chewing on my home command station shields.

04.50: Only 250 ships on Murderlanceras after that little display of petulence. Time to use space docks and fleet ships like you'd normally use railpods. And send the black widow golem and a few hundred shredders in to help as well, why not.

04.53: 50 remains rebuilders and 50 Mk. I engineers make quick work of rebuilding, even while the battle rages around them. Then I get the best news yet - Zenith trader on my homeworlds. Time for 2 zenith power generators with their 1.2 million energy goodness.

04.55: Oh look. Another two black widow golems on Murderlanceras, where I've only just got the command station back up. So that would be my black widow, backed up with implosions, v.s. 2 black widows, a H/K and change. Guess who I'm betting on.

05.00: My black widow wins the grudge match, and also does an admirable job of intercepting dyson gatlings for a while. However the command station went down before I got the golems so I got absolutely no scrap for that. Meaning that my economy is once more floored, this time with only about 300 ships built. The fleetship dock cannon stops, all ships retreat from Murderlanceras. Refleet a bit, then in five minutes I should be fine taking it back.

AIP: 150
Devourer Golem: On Poan, eating hybrid drones.

EDIT: State of Murderlanceras

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/murderedlanceras.png)

That would be 'crispy', then.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst April 28, 2014, 06:58:43 PM
05.05: The black widow is back up to 33%, so is sent in to clear up the three core starships and various other pieces on Murderlanceras. It does so successfully, albeit getting down to 4% health in the process.

Then, just as the command station goes back up and the remains rebuilders go to work, an artillery and armored golem enter the world. So much for that.

05.08: Ah good, they're attacking one of my homeworlds. Well, kind of good seeing as my fleet in currently a grand total of 100 ships. Eh, at least I get scrap.

05.10: They're dead, I'm back in black, fleet ships start pouring out and 50 engineers are told to soak up excess money by healing the black widow golem. Who would have thought inviting golems in to your homeworld could be so rewarding.

05.13: Ahhh, much more like it. Battle engineering group gets Muderlanceras back up with all turrets plus two forts in record time. At the same time I complete one of the zenith power generators (bye-bye 12 matter converters) and an ion cannon on the homeworld. And still have enough money left over for a pretty much complete refleet. In fact, I'll start building a trio of Martyrs, 2 new penetrators and 8 implosion artillery I think, and I'll probably still be positive.

Yeah, reducing the golem salvage value may have been a good move. Not sure on 10% myself though, I would have gone for more like 20/25.

05.17: Dual EMP trains on my homeworld. Ouch. Black widow is immune though, so they swiftly die.

05.23: Okay then, fully refleeted and the completed spirecraft are on their way to my homeworlds under cloaker cover. Seems like a good time to take out this dyson antagoniser on Raedhung. Especially as it's right next door to the planet which is currently undergoing a colony rebellion.

First step - colonise Poan again. One fort + mini-forts, nothing serious, but enough to soak a nuke train and get us one step closer to Raedhung.

05.24: Ahh. Arghhh. Two artillery golems on Poan. This is why you always make sure your scout cover hasn't been taken out by astro trains before jumping the entire fleet into a system.

05.27: The second time around I remember to bring implosions. The two arties and the H/K go down at the cost of an almost total fleet wipe. Hey, at least I doubled the number of shredders! Mil II command station going up.

An AI leech starship and ten marauders have been slugging it out on Jakidic for the last couple of minutes. I kinda don't want to interrupt them.

05.32: The two routes to Raelurn are through Harmoat and Aelurn. Seeing as I already pretty much neutered Harmoat earlier, that seems like the sensible choice. 900 ships in assault transports ready to rock.

05.34: Parasite eye, and I have 400 too many ships. Better make this quick.

Hybrid facility down, although the super hybrid itself makes a quick get away. 600 ships get back into the assault transports.

05.35: Then get back out to take down the train station. I also forgot how effective viral spawners are at taking out tachyons, so 50 or so are told to roam the planet taking them out. And some sent through the wormhole to Aosrinmar to clean the one on that side too.

33 minutes until the colony invisibility drops. Transports take the fleet home to recoup. The viral spawners discover that the hunter fleet is sitting on Aosrinmar right next to the human colony. Because of course it is.

Man, seriously, +100 AIP if this thing blows up? I didn't realise that colony rebellions were THAT bad.

05.42: The strange hybrid facility is on Orerlu this time, a relatively tame and easy to get to planet. No need to take it down for another hour or two yet.

Let's see if we can get the Hunter fleet to move on by blowing up the command station on Aosrinmar. 6 assaults transports with 50 bombers each should be sufficient.

05.44: One assault transport manages to slip past the five H/Ks camped out on the wormhole. 50-odd bombers pop the command station shield guardpost, then the command station itself. Let's hope this makes the hunters pick another staging planet.

05.45: Yup, it worked. Hunters have moved on. As have the two lightning warheads spawned by the rocketry corps, which have gone ... somewhere.

05.48: Whoops, EMP train just burnt Murderlanceras then two golems warped in. Should probably have my fleet go deal with that.

Of course, as the command station was unshielded it went down early on - so no scrap to rebuild with.

05.55: Fifteen minutes before the cloaker drops. Seems like a good time to cap this planet. 7 assault transports take 1,000 ships plus the colony crew. Mil II goes up on the opposite side of the grav well, on the hope that anything which pops the command station will then at least have to move to attack it.

Also, apparently it isn't immune to cloaking. So I may just sit a cloaker starship next to it for the rest of the game.

05.57: Command station and a fortress up, and everything that's not mine on the planet is dead except for the rocket silo and dire guardian lair. Let's take a look at what I've won for myself.

116 Fighter/Bombers - 2.4 million health 200k attack every 12 seconds. 1.9 million DPS for a full cap, with a slight bonus against ultra-heavy.
116 Frigates - 2.2 million health, 96k attack every 7 seconds. 1.5 million DPS for a full cap, with a 2.4x bonus to ultra-heavy.

Against golems then you're talking 3.8 + 2.7 million DPS, or a full cap of both should be able to kill a 250 million health golem in about 40 seconds.

All of these are EMP and Nuke immune, non-reclaimable, black hole and tractor immune. These are niiiice. And their first job will be to take down the dire guardian lair.

06.00: 2,000 knowledge to hardened forcefields Mk. II. You can never have too many forcefields. Save the other 1,000 so that I can buy mil 3 command stations next time I take a planet.

Right, objectives from here are to pop the dire guardians lair then go take the ARS world Goriusup. After that I might spend a little time with my new toys cleaning up train stations in this area of the galaxy, see if I can't get them to stop routing through my homeworld.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/somanytrains.png)

So, so many train stations at +3AIP a pop. I figure if I kill the eight remaining in the bottom left-hand part of the galaxy, they'll stop routing through my worlds.

There's also a spire civvy leader that I've just noticed, sitting right off Aosrinmar. After 6 hours of AIP increases, it would be nice to take one of the bleeders out.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: Aeson April 28, 2014, 09:07:47 PM
Man, seriously, +100 AIP if this thing blows up? I didn't realise that colony rebellions were THAT bad.

...

05.57: Command station and a fortress up, and everything that's not mine on the planet is dead except for the rocket silo and dire guardian lair. Let's take a look at what I've won for myself.

116 Fighter/Bombers - 2.4 million health 200k attack every 12 seconds. 1.9 million DPS for a full cap, with a slight bonus against ultra-heavy.
116 Frigates - 2.2 million health, 96k attack every 7 seconds. 1.5 million DPS for a full cap, with a 2.4x bonus to ultra-heavy.
I myself have a love-hate relationship with Human Colony Rebellions. On the one hand, the first one you get gives you a very nice set of ships that you can build at any Rebel Colony, and the Rebel Colony itself is cloaked and will remain so for up to two hours after you lose control of the planet. On the other hand, the rebellions keep spawning, the ships you get don't scale in cap with the number of secured rebel colonies, and they all have that little AIP issue you noticed. I also once lost a Rebel Colony on a world I controlled, and I think the reason was that it got in the way of an AOE attack aimed at my command station, but I'm not certain and it was a fairly long time ago so things might have changed.

Just saying, be prepared to have to take all sorts of out of the way planets you'd never have taken otherwise when you have Human Colony Rebellions active, and be prepared to defend or rebuild or something. I have no idea if your cloaker starship idea will work, but I'm also not sure that I'd really want to sacrifice a cloaker starship on colony babysitting duties, especially since I doubt it will do anything if a Mining Golem shows up (although I don't recall if rebel colonies are nuke-immune, so that might not be so much of an issue).
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst April 29, 2014, 03:28:03 PM
So with the recent update priorities have shifted slightly - without golems as a steady source of metal, I should probably unlock metal harvesters Mk. III rather than Mil III command stations.

Also I've been putting off capturing core turret worlds since about the first hour because I didn't want to lose them to golems. I've literally just remembered that I can hack the fabs now. That was kind of a major oversight.

06.01: Nuke train on Murdoch, heading towards Raedhung. This is too good a chance to safely dispose of it to pass up.

The fleet hops into the assault transports then lies in wait. They burn the train down in a few seconds, before the hybrids and their 2,000 or so supporting ships can even respond, and then are back in the transports. Except for the 250 poor suckers who got tractored by the rest of the trains, of course.

06.05: Oh, and a nuke train sitting at the station on Solyhung. Penetrator terminates it before it gets any bright ideas about routing through Murderlanceras. Then a ram takes out the station for good meaure.

06.08: Mining time. Golems on:

Murderlanceras
Poan
Jakidic
Goriusip
Aosrinimar
Dorvil
and Kela.

You may notice that I already own four of those planets, so these should be relatively easy to take down. Oh, and two armored golems and a H/K attacking Murderlanceras.

06.10: Golem battlegroup and the first three mining golems go down easy as pie. I send the two forts on Jakidic to take care of the mining golem there, but they quickly retreat when it becomes obvious they don't have enough health to do it. I'll need to send something else in to do that job.

06.14: Fleet pretty much wipes taking out the train station and mining golem on Kela. A munition boosting command station and Mk. II fortress are a terrible combination.

Oh, and 180 hybrids and 2,000 or so supporting ships attack Jakidic. Luckily there's a bit of a "Here's one I made earlier" situation, and a Martyr blasts all but 300 of them.

06.16: Ah joy, my first encounter with the new golems. Artillery, x2.

06.22: With no fleet to get in the way they happily carve their way through Murderlanceras and on my homeworld. Where implosions and roaming enclaves stop them. Getting about 3 million scrap per golem now, which isn't too bad I suppose. Not quite the firehose I had previously though, obviously.

On the plus side my new 5.25 million DPS black widow golem is now a handy little hybrid / starship cleanup tool. And probably wouldn't be too awful against mining golems, at that.

06.30: Mining golems on Dorvil and Jakidic down, so it's about time to take down the golem, super-fort and command station on Goriusip.

06.33: Super-fort down. Martyr is taking out the hybrids. Uh, 500 attack on Poan? Is that the much vaunted threat fleet, that has previously been too confused to enter my planets? I doubt they'll last long against the roaming enclave defence force.

I can however see an armored and artilley golem just waiting to jump into Murderlanceras once my fleet is engaged with the mining golem.

06.35: Oh come on, really? In the space between me ramming the super-fort and sending in the fleet another superfort goes up. I'm gonna need more rams.

Still, fleet takes down the mining golem with 3 minutes remaining on the clock. All seven planets secured.

06.37: CPA incoming. 1,100 ships. They can just go join the rest of the threat fleet, honestly. The 900 youngling reprisal is a bit more annoying, because it's going to force me to pause my ram ram-raiding of Dicgende.

06.40: Viral spawners take out the tachyon and counter-spy on Dicgende, then escape with twice the number of ships they came in with. Did I mention that I like these guys?

06.42: Black widow and viral spawners eat youngling tigers for breakfast. Quite literally, in the viral spawner's case.

06.45: 8 more rams (I picked Mk I by mistake, so only 40 million damage each) and a Martyr from engineer heavy spire asteroid raiding. Enough to deal with the superfort and 100 odd hybrids that have already built back up on Goriusip.

06.49: -800,000 energy. Don't you love it when a supply interdictor astro train passes through your homeworld. Four golems sense weakness and jump into Murderlanceras. Looks like Goriusip will have to wait a little longer, again.

06.51: 4 golems, 2 H/Ks on a homeworld without any turrets you say? Pfft, a trifling matter. And even with the salvage debuff, 23 million scrap. Of which I'll retrieve half. Mainly I'm just annoyed that they took out half my implosion artillery.

There's never a Zenith trader around when you need one.

06.56: All defences back online, fleet is getting there. 1,700 attractor drone reprisal to Murderlanceras? Okay then. Oh, and dire guardian spawning in five minutes on Aosrinmar, a.k.a the human colony rebellion planet.

Oh, what's this? A full fleet of rebel fighter/bombers and frigates? You shouldn't have.

06.58: 232 Rebel ships explosively decommission the dire guardian lair and the dire widow, implosion and spider guardians which spawn from it. And I only lose about 80 of them in the process.

Meanwhile, the fleet is occupied with rather a lot of attractor drones.

06.59: Wow, uhmm. I now have 700 attractor drones. And 400 viral spawners on Murderlanceras alone. Which is pretty impressive for four Mk I leech starships and a few dozen mercenary parasites.

Anyway, fleet blob to Goriusip.

07.00: Rams take out the superfort, fleet ships pop the command station before the AI can purchase another. There are 1,000 ships on planet again thanks to the hybrids, but this time I'm just going to have my fleet slug it out with them I think. Soon Goriusp will be mine.

Next targets: Train station cleanup, core turret controller hacks, maybe capturing that armored golem down in the bottom part of the map.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst April 30, 2014, 03:11:43 PM
07.04: And so it came to pass. My favourite part was when a widow train passed through and stole all by bombers. So I put all the riots back in the transports, stealing 200 of their ships, and unloaded them right next to my base defences. Payback.

ARS gives me ... electric bombers. Actually, not too bad at all. 3.2x bonus against ultra-heavy, a.k.a golems. It's at this point of course I realise that I have 4,500 knowledge, and need 5,000 for metal harvesters. Oh well, time to spend some of my 262 accrued HaP on knowledge raids.

I'm expecting this place to get nuked sooner or later, as it's a bit of a train crossroads. So no defences put up beyond a mini-fort and a hundred viral shredders to take out the riff-raff.

07.07: Best part of 1,000 ships hitting Aosrinmar in 3 minutes. Rebel fleet can deal with them, I'm sure.

Oh joy, another colony rebellion. This time it's Dislaju, 3 hops away from Poan up at the top of the map. Now this one does have a core MRLS controller and a Mk. V grenadier fab, so it's probably not going to be too much of a hardship to capture it. To hold it, on the other hand...

07.12: 30 massive ships en-route to my planets. Viral shredders doing their normal tachyon clearing thing. Scouts find the super-terminal - and a planet with two(!) train stations.

Simultaneous knowledge hacks finish on Harmoat and Xuta. 10,500 knowledge, 4.5k threat. 189 HaP left.

Knowledge goes on:
Mil III command stations (-5k)
Metal Extractors III (-5k)
Zenith Starships (-500)

After replacing all Mil IIs with Mil IIIs, my economy goes from 12,430 metal/s to 19,000 - Not as massive an improvement as I was hoping for, but still a nice boost to refleeting.

07.16: Before Goriusip gets nuked I should probably use up these asteroids. 5 implosions from reptite, 6 implosions and an translocator from the Pysite. Xampite goes on two sets of rams, another implosion and a Martyr.

07.17: Hmm, 100 hybrids attacking Aosrinmar. Let's see how the 180-odd rebel ships handle it before firing up a Martyr.

07.17.15: Yeah, hybrids just outran them. Good thing I keep a Martry under the shields of every command station now.

07.19: When about 600 threat ships join in, the command station eventually goes down. But on the plus side I find out that the colony does get another two hour shield if I lose the planet, which is a heck of a lot. Anyway, rebels clean up the rest of the mess and rebuilders port in.

07.19: Looks like the dyson antagoniser is back up. And this time it's on Vovergor - a planet right next to my recently taken Goriusip. It also has a design backup for youngling nanoswarms, a regen golem, the obligatory super-fort, and !WARNING! A dark spire vengeance generator.

Nice and gentle does this - ram the fort, wipe the antagoniser ASAP and get out of there before the vengeance generator wakes up.

07.20: When golems attack, Murderlanceras goes down. Things are obviously not helped when yet another supply interdictor astro train runs through my homeworld and puts me on -900,000 energy again. Command stations explode violently, etc.

07.24: Sigh. We now have four golems and 2 H/Ks sitting on Murderlanceras. Cleaning this threat is going to be a chore. So of course I do the only sensible thing - send all of my ships three hops away to incite them to attack my homeworlds.

07.30: Assault transports get back to the homeworld about 20 seconds after the golems hit it. The trick here is to not warp in the implosion artillery until after the arty golems have a large list of chaff targets - and with 19 implosions, the golems soon go down.

Just a shame I fleet wiped to do it - goodbye attractor drones.

07.35: Oh lovely, devourer golem is prancing around on Goriusip. And appears to have eaten my ion blaster. Right lads, remember not to get out of the cars.

Oh, hey, assault transports can be killed the devourer too ... lovely. Although for some reason viral shredders are immune.

07.39: Oh. Man. When the rams take out the superfort, all hell breaks loose. I make that the best part of 70 dark spire ships, from the death of one fort. I haven't even taken the fleet out of the ships to go after the dyson antagoniser yet. They also pop a distribution node for me ... thanks guys?

Assault fleet takes out the antagoniser with minimal losses, as the AI is intent on fighting off the dark spire. Then the hunter fleet shows up. I'm almost tempted to suicide the entire fleet just to see what happens.

07.41: Nuke train an Aelurn, heading straight for Poan. While the penetrator takes it out, I notice something ... I've never neutered Aelurn, and it has 23 hybrid hive spawners. Guess where the fleet is going next.

On further investigation, it looks like it's going to be close to impossible to get trains to stop routing through my homeworlds. Here, for example, is a world 10 hops away from my homeworld which will still route a train through it while trying to reach a train station 15 hops away.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/ohtrains.png)

I figure I'd have to clear the best part of half the galaxy, around 50-60 worlds, to stop this. I really messed up putting my homeworlds where they are, rather than in the little 'safe' cluster at the bottom left.

07.43: Goriusip got nuked. Well, that happened somewhat faster than I was anticipating. Also every time a planet gets astro-train nuked I seem to get a null pointer exception:

4/30/2014 7:03:28 PM (7.021) Mem: 187,961,344 Plat:WindowsPlayer
-----------------------------------UnhandledErrors-----------------------------------
4/30/2014 7:03:28 PM (7.021)
-----------------------------------Error-----------------------------------Log String: FixedUpdate: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at ForegroundObject.MovePlayerUnit (Boolean RecalculateFull, Boolean RecalcualteMiddling) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunOneCycleOfSimulation () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunNextCycle (Boolean DoRendering) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunFrame () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at MainCameraLogic.UsedToBeFixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
Stack Trace:   at ForegroundObject.MovePlayerUnit (Boolean RecalculateFull, Boolean RecalcualteMiddling) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunOneCycleOfSimulation () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunNextCycle (Boolean DoRendering) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at Game.RunFrame () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at MainCameraLogic.UsedToBeFixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

Attached is a save where Poan is about to get wiped out, if you want to try and replicate.

07.44: Black widow and the fleet waltz into Aelurn. OMD goes down, as do the four Mk. IV guardposts needed to take out the parasite eye. At this point only 350 ships left, so retreat and refleet. Then it's hive culling time.

Uh ... -20AIP for the death of a data centre? I think the dark spire just took out a data centre for me - one on the other side of galaxy I hadn't even found yet. Thanks guys!

07.50: Aelurn is cleaned of everything except the command stations. I don't know how much impact killing 23 hybrid hive spawners will have, but it will at least slow them a touch.

Out of interest, do the hybrids actually construct anything any more? Obviously there aren't any AI turrets now, and they don't seem to be recolonising any systems. Was that entire aspect essentially removed?

Anyway, next fleet target is Raedhung for a good cleansing then a core needler turret hack, followed by Sezon right next to it so I can get an armored golem.

07.53: Ram terminates the train station on Xuta. 900 fleet ships, backed up by all 232 rebels, prepare to go and completely neuter Raedhung. First though, a Martyr to chew through some of the 2,800 ships on planet.

07.54: Martyr takes out roughly 1,900 ships including most of the hybrids. Hacker jumps in and goes to the extremities of the grav well to start a fab hack. Fleet enters and prioritises the guard posts, to get rid of the parasite eye.

08.00: Easy as pie, although six golems are currently attacking my fixed defences while the fleet is engaged elsewhere. The rebel fleet really helped in taking out the guard posts. Needler turrets start going up everywhere.

So, I've just read up and apparently hybrid hive spawners only show up on Mk IV, core and homeworlds. So far I've scouted 40 of the 120 planets and found 8 Mk. IV worlds. So let's put the total at about 30.

30*23 = 690 hybrid hive spawners in the galaxy.

Anyway I've got access to two more Mk. IV planets from Raedhung, so I might clean some of those up. One of them also has a civvy leader that I should really get around to killing. And obviously I want to take Sezon next, with its lovely broken armored golem.

State of the union:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/8hourunion.png)
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst April 30, 2014, 07:25:54 PM
08.10: Urgh, those golems took an annoyingly long time to bait off Murderlanceras. Ended up having to send the fleet five hops away in the end. Oh, and in the meantime mining golems have appeared again:

Poan, Raedhung, Kela, Murderlanceras, Jakidic, Dicgende and Aosrinmar this time. Should be easy enough to take care of those, the rebel fleet can probably take out 3/4 on their own.

08.17: All miners destroyed within 7 1/2 minutes, that's got to be a new record. Oh, and Panza train station rammed for good measure.

Fleet are now lining up to take out Sezon.

08.18: Nuke train is stationary at Jicidis. Penetrator is suicided to remove it.

08.23: Under the combined might of both normal and rebel fleets, Sezon goes down in under a minute. Turns out there's also another nuke train on Jicidis, so a penetrator is sent to take care of that threat as well.

It fails. The regenerator train next to it respawns the nuker...

08.27: Right then. Although it completely tanks my economy I now have an armed and operational armored golem. And 41 minutes to save a human colony from rebellion. First, though, raids to kill the civvy leader next door.

2,500 knowledge is spent on Mk III scouts and Mk II scout starships. Because really, at 8 1/2 hours in I should have information on more than just 40 planets.

08.28: Ahhh. Arghhhh. The hunters show up to my newly captured planet with 5 H/Ks. They must have started moving here in the five seconds between me entering orbit and blowing the command station up. All ships make for the exit post-haste, including the armored golem.

08.30: Hardly any units on Murdoch. Raids take out the civvy leader, a cap of rebel frigates bombard hive spawners from a distance and a ram takes out the train station. Then the hunter H/Ks show up again.

Well, mission accomplished. There's now little of value remaining down in the bottom left part of the galaxy. So the rebel fleet is no longer going to be left to guard Aosrinmar, instead it can join everyone else in the push to Dislaju. Hey if the command station here goes down I've got two hours to rebuild it, and nobody's gonna nuke it at least.

08.33: Devourer golem at Poan, moving through to Harmoat. Which wouldn't be a problem, if it wasn't for the fact that my entire fleet, including the full load of rebels, is coming through that way. Evasive manoeuvres time.

08.35: Wow, those scouts and scout starships are a real step up. Even on auto-explore they manage to get about 5 planets deeper than before. With targeted exploration I can probably see most anything, even before I capture an advanced factory for a Mk. 4 scout.

08.39: So, 30 minutes to save the colony. First planet on the hit list is Shoal, which currently has a super-fort and a trader bought black hole machine. Something tells me a pair of rams, two golems and a 1,400 ship fleet should be enough to take care of this.

08.40: Hmm, I think the word I'm looking for here is 'disintegrated'. The fleet disintegrated Shoal's defences. Next up Jubuvi, with another super-fort. Good thing I bought spare rams.

08.41: Hunters show up. Not even the fleet blob of doom can stand against 5 H/Ks. Leg it. Armored golem gets down to 40% before managing to escape. Still, frigates got over on to Jubuvi and have drilled a nice tachyon path to Dislaju for the assault transports.

08.48: 800 fleet ships in assault transports pop the command station. Just have to wait to see if the H/K squad turns up now.

08.51: H/Ks haven't shown up yet. I'm going to call it safe (for a certain value of safe) to colonise.

Of course, just as I say that an arty, armored and two black widow golems decide to smack up Poan. Everyone runs for the homeworld, the armored golem only escaping with 21% health. If it wasn't for the arty golem focus firing my guys, I would probably have taken them on.

08.53: Looks like the golems, having destroyed Poan, are looping around to Murderlanceras. That works for me, far more defences there to soak them a bit.

08.56: Command station up on Dislaju. Golems have decided they're too afraid to attack Murderlanceras despite the fleet being on miles away. So the sole effect of their attack has been to clean Poan (it's already mostly rebuilt) and minorly damage my armored golem. Bravo, folks.

08.57: Something has changed the balance of power, possibly the enclaves coming to defend Poan from wardens, and they've decided to attack after all. Excellent, scrap to build my MRLS turrets. Fleet ships are stuffed back into assault transports, and implosions are fired up.

08.59: Artillery golem is focus fired first and goes down in about 30 seconds, from then on it's just a case of getting my armored and black widow golems in on the action and watching the other five massive ships burn. I will be needing more implosion artilley, however.

09.00: The scrap from that attack needs to be used to finish the second zenith power generator, finish an OMD on Muderlanceras, build 8 caps of core MRLS turrets, repair the golems, refleet and destroy all defences on my current heavily defended homeworld and move them to Poan.

Seeing as this will take about 15 million metal in all, safe to say the salvage won't actually cover it all.

I'm in a fairly good place at the moment then, despite the 27 massive ships that are apparently still roaming after me. I do, however, have 303 AIP. So objectives for the next hour are primarily hacking based:

- Hack the core missile turret controller to get me a third cap of turrets. Those should be sufficient for general defence once my fleet switches to homeworld seek-and-destroy mode.
- Hack one of the advanced factories. If nothing else, this will give me Mk. IV scouts to see what all the other planets offer.
- Possibly, hack the super terminal. Depends how much HaP I have after the two above objectives.

After that it'll be time to start drilling out to remote ARS / data centre worlds and aiming to find the AI homeworlds themselves.

State of the union

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/9hour.png)
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst May 03, 2014, 08:06:48 AM
09.01: The most easily accessible advanced factory is on Jicidis. And my scouts have just found the botnet golem on a planet right next to it. Looks like the tasks for the next hour are set.

09.10: As ever it's rebuilding fortresses and repairing the golems which takes the majority of the time. While we're waiting though another civvy leader goes down, and the golems go clean up 100 or so hybrids on Therkilldor.

09.14: The second attempt at clearing out Hybrids, this time of Goriusip, doesn't go quite for well. Fleet wipe, a couple of retaliation waves. Nothing the distributed defences can't handle.

09.20: Refleeted, hybrids on Goriusip down and command station back up (for all the good it'll do on a nuked world - a mil III won't even fire). Dislaju is really getting hammered by roaming enclaves, 3/4 at a time. So viral shredders take up residence there.

Raids in assault transports are sent after the nearest known data centre ... of course, there's a trader bought black hole machine in the way. Assault transports can't get through, the raiders could but they all die first.

09.25: 3,200 attractor drones to Aosrinamar. That's one heck of a reprisal. Parasites and leech starships start licking their lips in anticipation.

Hmm, I think some of this 3,500 knowledge can go towards leech starships Mk II. The rest to Mk II hydras.

09.30: Not quite as effective as I'd hoped. Martyr wiped 1,500 to start with, the leeches clean up the rest. But I only actually end up with about 350.

In the meantime, shredders have been doing some tachyon clearing. Botnet golem world has a normal fort and a super-fort, but they're both a fair way from the wormhole exit. And the asteroid fields. So, fleet will go in under cover of assault transports then quick-build some rams.

09.33: Nuke train nearly 'Oh Yeah!'s Poan. By which I mean of course it did 'Oh Yeah!' Poan and I save scummed, seeing as I had the penetrator sitting just right there and only missed the scout warning by a few seconds. That message is certainly one way to fix a null pointer exception Keith ;)

09.40: Power goes out, Poan command station explodes, the usual golem battlegroup is on the scene.
 
6 hops away Operation Death-Leap, after having waited far too long for a tachyon astro train to move on, is now starting. 1,600 ships in assault transports enter the botnet world.
 
09.41.26: Ships out
 
09.41.30: Rams up

09.41.49: Wait for that blasted tachyon train to clear off

09.42.28: Boom. FRD weapons free, gents.

09.44: H/Ks show up. I have 1,400 ships left but the transports are deep into the red. They might just make it back to Jicidis, where I'll have to deal with 100+ hybrids. Eh, better than guaranteed death. I also quick build a Martyr, might help a little.

09.45: Even with the Martyr and the armored golem to pull off their attention, only about 200 ships escaped the hybrid gauntlet. Reprisal level one. They'll rebuild fast enough and I managed to pop the command station, so it should be a case of just transporting back and mopping up.

It's at this point that I notice the 2 golem battle group of Dislaju. Who thankfully appear to be ignoring that juicy core MRLS controller and just passing through. I suppose they set out with a target of the homeworlds, and anything off course gets ignored?

09.48: Oh hey, that battle group is now attacking Poan. I'm sure they'll be dealt with soon enough.

Good news! I've found the first AI homeworld. Bad news - It has five armored and five artillery golems on it. And 8 black widow golems. And 9 H/Ks. And a core raid engine. And the only core world next to it also has a raid engine.  Guess I know where all those massive ships are now.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/home1.png)

09.51: 2,800 fighters on Aosrinmar. Cute. Not even worth spending a Martyr on, I'll just let them destroy it then rebuild later.

Oh, and an 1,800 ship CPA.

09.54: There appears to be a beachhead on Goriusip. Which is acting as a black hole machine. Wave must have hit and taken out the defenceless command station while I wasn't looking.

09.57: 1,200 ships FRD clearing guardposts on Deramic. The 1,500 remaining fighters and 14 spire starships on Aosrinmar don't seem to want to move on - possibly because they can sense the rebel colony despite it's cloak? Anyway, that'll make them a prime target for the botty.

Oh, and another rebellion. This time on Melshuafr, which is annoyingly far away from my territory (5/6 hops) and of no strategic value whatsoever.

09.59: The special forces appear to be attacking Deramic. Broken botnet golem down to 9% before I can get shield cover up - doesn't help that it's sitting on the wormhole they're coming from. Hopefully the hunters don't show up.

10.00: Hey, guess what. The hunters showed up. Fortunately it doesn't seem like they were interested in attacking anything, just moving through the planet to somewhere else.

Anyway, botnet is going up in the next five minutes. CPA hits in four. Considering that'll give me a combined 5,000+ threat, he may have his work cut out for him.

After soaking the CPA I'm going to put warp gates up on Deramic to bring all new ships in here - meaning I have a solid base for hacking the advanced factory next door. Then it'll be time to clear a path to the superterminal world and shed some of this AIP, incidentally passing through the planet where a dyson antagoniser is being built along the way.

State of the union. Note the guesstimated location of the second AI homeworld in the top right.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/10hourunion.png)
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst May 03, 2014, 02:27:55 PM
10.03: Botnet golem - Online. Let's take this bad boy out for a spin by taking him into Jicidis and letting him loose on the 700-odd hybrid drones.

10.04: Yeah, that wasn't really as effective as I hoped. I forgot that hybrids are faster than their drones. Anyway, CPA hits. Half and half Mk I /II, total threat is now 5,248.

10.06: Oh joy, mining golem time. And this time they've chosen an assortment of new targets: Jicidis, Raedhung, Dorvil, Deramic, Sezon, Etgin and Cenurin. The first five shouldn't be a problem, the other two are low priority worlds off the botnet world. I may just let them burn.

10.09: 2,200 ships on Jicidis, including half the CPA. Black widow, armored and botnet golems stand by to warp in supported by 1,400 fleet ships.

10.13: Jicidis status - neutered. After the last fleet ship dies we've even got 600 zombies left over, although the botnet did drop to 25% health due to a concerted attack effort by 600+ bombers. That thing sure is slow.

A couple of minutes to repair it and refleet, then we'll start hacking.

10.17: Right then, hacking time. Get ready for 15 minutes of fun.

10.19: Hoo boy, that's ... is that an exo attacking Poan? Or just an amalgamation of threat? Sure is a whole lot of guardians.

I think it might be both actually. There's 21 carriers but most of them have < 10 ships in them, so I'm assuming it is opportunistic support. But really, 80+ Mk V guardians at a 'low' hacking level is rather nasty. 1,200 attacking, 900 ships are taken from the hack and assault transported to Poan before the fixed defences can be completely wiped out.

10.20: The most annoying part is that after destroying the command station they then run away juuust before my mobile ships arrive. I'm not sure it could have been an exo then if they didn't just arrow for the homeworlds. So I have no idea at all what that was about.

10.21: Whoops, 1,400 bomber reprisal to Sezon. I missed that one. Engineers are told to quick-build a Martyr, but the command station goes down before it wiped out the bomber forces. Looks like the fleet is going back there again.

10.22: Oh hey, the sort-of-exo has shown up again. Attacking Murderlanceras this time. Thinking about it, maybe it's something from the astro trains?

10.23: Hunter squad is on Jicidis. All ships are told to temporarily leg it, especially the golems. There's 60 Mk V missile guardians now, and 60 * 4 million damage every 12 seconds will ruin even an armored golem's day.

10.25: Exo is beaten back with the help of my mobile response force. Defending three different planets, each a couple of hops apart, within three minutes. Not bad. 7 minutes left on the hack timer, 11 on the four mining golems I've yet to kill.

10.29: When golems attack, 1,300 fleet ships are stuck into transports again. To be honest the hacker has been fine sitting there for the last couple of minutes under a cloak, so I should be fine with just popping the golems in every now and again.

10.32: Hack successful. I can now build ... uh ... Mk IV scouts? I should really unlock some Mk. III ships.

Next up then is to neuter Panyae (a fairly intensely built up co-processor world off Murderlanceras) and then Miccacau (which has the dyson antagoniser on it). After that pop the superterminal world, Geoasi. There's some other good stuff to get out that way as well, an ARS world right next to it and another two 3/4 hops away. And three data centres within striking distance puts the icing on the cake.

I've also located all the co-processors now, but seeing as one of them is nine hops away from my nearest planet I'm going to have to wait until I take an ARS world out in that direction.

10.35: The two low priority planets die to mining golems. Can't say I'm particularly bothered.

10.38: Golems have been repatriated back to safe territory. A carrier pops on Dislaju and 600 threat ships come pouring out - the fixed defences can probably handle them.

Okay, I'm sending a three golem battering ram to clean up the threat on Aosrinmar and put the shield back up around that rebel colony. In the meantime, the fleet can be thinking about taking down Panyae and it's 3,000 ship shield.

10.43: Golems are a touch worse for wear, but Aosrinmar is back up online and I now have 400 friendly fighter zombies. Fleet has just carried out a spirecraft ram raid, and now has a spare Martyr and pair of rams for the super-fort / hybrids on Panyae.

10.46: Fort dead, all the hybrids clustered around the command station (~140) dead. Time for my fleet ships to make merry with the entrails of their defences, or at least it would be if they weren't fending off a few hundred hybrids on Deramic.

10.52: Despite the 50 remaining hybrids and constant stream of dyson gatlings, Golems and fleet jump in to Panyae together. Time to rip things up.

10.55: Planet is cleaned of all guardposts, hybrid spawners, ships etc. Tachyons on the other side of the Miccacau wormhole exit are removed. Reprisal 1. Then the hunters show up.

10.55.30: A fair few ships die, but the golems are far enough away to escape the missile barrage. That reprisal wave? 5,280 attractor drones. Somewhat excessive, I may have to send the botnet to deal with that.

Oh, and there's a nuke train on Panza. Probably headed for Aelurn -> Poan.

10.55.30: What a guess. Penetrator makes it with literally half a second to spare - the astro train disintegrates as it is passing through the wormhole to Poan.

10.57: Annd reprisal again from the 600 fleet ships that widow trains managed to grab when they went to try and take out the EMP accompanying the nuke train.

10.58: Well, no way I can get the botty over to Dislaju to save it from that swarm of attractor drones. So, time to build 70 engineers, a Martyr, 6 translocators and as much of the rebel fleet as we can manage.

11.00: And that worked nicely. Okay then, push on to (and through) Miccacau.

Oh, by the way what on earth is this about:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/wtftrain.png)

I mean, I've seen some trains routing to places that I didn't think they had any right to be. Like occasionally passing through Aosrinmar in the bottom left when there isn't a train station within three hops. But a nuke train just sitting next to the command station, chilling, really takes the biscuit. Eventually it moves on all on its lonesome, but it looks almost like the train spawning logic will spawn a train wherever there used to be a train station, rather than only where there currently is one.

The guy also seems to be able to teleport. See the attached save where he's suddenly at Kela (only sometimes! Sometimes he disappears off goodness knows where), where to get there he would have needed to path through one of my worlds...



: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: keith.lamothe May 03, 2014, 05:31:04 PM
Busy busy.  Been following quietly to some extent.  At least whenever I saw a stack trace I looked into it ;)

Currently 120,000 metal/s, with about 30 million scrap.
Shoulda seen the expression on that H/K's face, when it popped through the wormhole and heard the air wrenches popping its tires off.  It didn't realize that the initials stood for Human Home Chop Shop.


By the way, when did tractors start dragging away mobile rally points to other planets? That is really irritating.
That's a remarkably good troll on the AI's part.  Fixed in 7.021, regrettably.


Problem: 240 hybrids on Poan will obliterate my fleet before I can intercept it. Solution: Lightning warhead, of course.
The solution is always warheads.


I say sneak peak by the way because I caught some unhandled exceptions and had to load from an auto-save.
Thanks for letting me know about the warp-guardians-on-human-HWs, fixed in 7.021.


A strange device somewhere in the galaxy is antagonising the 10/10 dyson sphere. Joyous. At least I might be able to back-track the stream of gatlings attacking my worlds and work out where it is.
A twist on Hansel and Gretel I had not anticipated.


Did I mention that I've started putting forcefields over all the wormhole exits from my worlds, just so widow trains don't steal half the fleet every time they pass through? And I do mean literally half, they steal about 350 ships each time.
Humans didn't invent the chop-shop.


here's what my warning box normally looks like:
I guess it could just abbreviate with "It's hitting the fan. Everywhere."


Nuke train just detonated on Therkilldor
Chalk up another one for the Dynamic Entry Specialist.


The combination of dyson gatlings always giving me low 'attack' numbers and there only being a few vessels in the golem battlegroups makes noticing these attacks somewhat hit and miss.
Is that "ambient" attack hitting your homeworlds?  If not you could set planet-level alerts on your homeworlds themselves so it'd tell you about it in the... the alert box that's already overflowing, I suppose ;)


The forcefield inhibitor astro train with it is painful though, as it means the widows will once again successfully steal half my fleet.
Combi-Troll.


40 engineers get the black widow golem up in absolute record time. It only took about 50 seconds.
Science Advisor: "Well, sir, this is very ancient technology in very bad shape.  It could take months to... %&@#$!  You couldn't even let me finish the sentence?  I hate engineers."


murderedlanceras.png
Indeed.  "Whipping Boy" doesn't even begin to describe what that planet's been through.


I've literally just remembered that I can hack the fabs now. That was kind of a major oversight.
Forgetting hugely important things is part of the fun.  Like when I forgot about that Avenger...


Wow, uhmm. I now have 700 attractor drones.
Must be your magnetic personality.


So of course I do the only sensible thing - send all of my ships three hops away to incite them to attack my homeworlds.
There is no stopping this insanity, apparently ;)


Oh. Man. When the rams take out the superfort, all hell breaks loose. I make that the best part of 70 dark spire ships, from the death of one fort.
Probably not too much to worry about.  Those guys used to be able to wipe galaxies on high intensity, but are tamer now.  I hope to make them less tame (at least that high), though, once I can find a way of doing so that doesn't involve melting everyone's CPU under eleven billionty spawns.


Also every time a planet gets astro-train nuked I seem to get a null pointer exception:
Thanks for letting me know, fixed in 7.022.


Uh ... -20AIP for the death of a data centre? I think the dark spire just took out a data centre for me - one on the other side of galaxy I hadn't even found yet. Thanks guys!
(Sounds of massive bar fight in the background) "No problem!" (sound of bottle smashing)


Out of interest, do the hybrids actually construct anything any more? Obviously there aren't any AI turrets now, and they don't seem to be recolonising any systems. Was that entire aspect essentially removed?
Basically, for now.  Though it sounds like they might be building more spawners if you found 23 on one planet.


It fails. The regenerator train next to it respawns the nuker...
Combi-Troll-tastic.


That message is certainly one way to fix a null pointer exception Keith ;)
Haha.  Actually, previously it was trying to generate that message but in the process caused a null pointer exception.  Now its Brother-Koolaidius imitation is restored.


It's at this point that I notice the 2 golem battle group of Dislaju. Who thankfully appear to be ignoring that juicy core MRLS controller and just passing through. I suppose they set out with a target of the homeworlds, and anything off course gets ignored?
Yea, exos are extraordinarily single minded until either their leader or their target dies.  They stop for nothing (except BHMs, iirc).  But if one chose that MLRS fab as its initial target they'd get it.  They don't always pick a command station.


Good news! I've found the first AI homeworld. Bad news - It has five armored and five artillery golems on it. And 8 black widow golems. And 9 H/Ks. And a core raid engine.
The RNG has not forgotten.


10.22: Oh hey, the sort-of-exo has shown up again. Attacking Murderlanceras this time. Thinking about it, maybe it's something from the astro trains?
If you're curious you can toggle debug info with F3 and mouseover a ship to see if its Threatfleet, Special Forces, or part of an exo (has a "GWC" for galaxy-wide-chase somewhere in the tooltip).  If it doesn't say any of those things and it's attacking you then it's generally just normal threat.


Hack successful. I can now build ... uh ... Mk IV scouts?
(Suddenly everyone stares at the Science Advisor)


Oh, by the way what on earth is this about:
Uh... it was on leave? ;)

No idea what those trains are up to sometimes, really.  Though I'll make a note to take a look at your save when I have time.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: keith.lamothe May 03, 2014, 05:36:41 PM
Also: Good Grief That's A Lot of Golems.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst May 03, 2014, 09:26:27 PM
Yeah, I'd noticed a few sneaky fixes going in the last version or two. Thanks for that.

I've been staying well clear of dark spire planets for now, as on 10/10 I'm thinking that they'd cream me pretty quick. I think one of the ARS worlds I need to take has a vengeance generator though, so we'll see how that goes.

I think the 23 spawners is just standard at this hybrid difficulty, every Mk. IV planet I've seen so far has 23. I've never actually ever seen any respawning or spawning new ones, even though there are 'Admiral' class hybrids running around and hence I'd assume equivalent class builders. Overall though a lot of the nuances of the hybrids get lost because they're so behind the scenes.

Scouting is a right pain at the moment, and the major problem is EMPs. Even tachyon immune units get disabled by EMPs, so spirecraft scouts and Mk IV scouts aren't quite as much use as you'd expect.

And as you say, far too many golems. Thankfully most of them are sitting on the AI homeworld at the moment rather than coming towards me, as I don't think even I'd be able to stop 22 golems and 11 H/Ks if they decided to go on a rampage. Funnily enough the combined strength of 33 massive ships is only 108,000, which is somewhat less than that all powerful youngling tiger wave I managed to cheese in the 10/10 game.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: keith.lamothe May 03, 2014, 09:31:27 PM
as I don't think even I'd be able to stop 22 golems and 11 H/Ks if they decided to go on a rampage
Yea, that'd be pretty rough.

... wait.

Um, y'know, there's this fix in 7.023:

Fixed a bug from the last month or so where threat/threatfleet/special-forces units controlled by the second AI player on a planet with no significant human presence would basically get stuck and not do their normal "which planet do I go to next?" logic.


Those golems and H/Ks just chilling wouldn't happen to belong to the second AI player, would they?
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: Aklyon May 03, 2014, 10:45:29 PM
That pic with the orange AI units confused me the first time I saw it, I was wondering how I'd gotten all those buildings :P

Other than that, you seem to be on a roll with ridiculous add everything/ensure apocalypse starts that are interesting to read, rocky.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst May 04, 2014, 08:27:17 AM
Just took a look at the objectives log, and it does indeed appear that it's the second AI homeworld with all the golems on it. So I'm expecting a massive assault when this next patch goes in. I'm already thinking up cheeses...

11.01: Unfortunately my Mk IV scouts don't seem able to actually get anywhere before being destroyed, even though they are supposedly immune to tachyon beams. I just watched it happen. Brand new Mk IV scout ran into a tachyon astro train - instantly decloaked. It's immune to tachyon beams, but apparently not whatever kind of planetary tachyon coverage that train provides. The same goes for spirecraft scouts, I think.

That solo wandering nuke train is heading straight for Deramic. Engineers are told to rapidly build a penetrator, and it goes down just outside the wormhole.

11.04: Whoops, that Dyson antagoniser is now a dyson converter. Get in the cars lads. Oh, the engineers are still building them?

11.06: Wow, 44 raid starships in a reprisal wave is all sorts of nasty when you have a MRLS controller. Luckily the six translocators still do their job fairly effectively.

11.07: Fleet on Miccacau. They're sitting right next to the super hybrid, let's see if we can kill this guy this time.

11.09: Super hybrid, dyson converter and trader bought black hole machine go down in a blaze of glory. And we take out the train station too, because why not.

Oh, 351 AIP? That might be why not. Ah well, the superterminal is right next door.

MRLS controller on Dislaju gets down to 4,236 health thanks to a passing supply interdictor train and a spire starship. Yes, that's right: 0.1% of its normal 4 million health.

11.13: Geoasi command station down, along with the sentry eye that I initially failed to notice. However there's now zombies, just, everywhere. 500 remaining ships back into the transports, let's give it a few minutes to see if the hunters turn up.

Oh, and the cookie monster is on Jakidic.

11.15: Alright, everyone seems to have moved on. Colonisation time.

Of course, seconds after the command station starts building there's 700 ships on the planet again. Hybrids have shown up to ruin my day. Eh, at least I might be able to preserve one of the two ion cannons.

11.16: Hybrids down, intergalactic warp gates and basic defensive infrastructure up. I started this hack at 374 AIP (thanks civvy leaders / train stations!), I'm hoping to chew off at least 100.

11.18: To help things along, raids take out two nearby data centres which are nicely laid out one planet after the other. 321 AIP.

Interestingly, a lot of these wormholes are missing tachyon sentinals. I'm assuming that must be the dark spire / hostile to all enclaves doing. Nice feedback mechanism there by the way, when hostile to all enclaves die it charges the dark spire just the same as player or AI ships dying.

11.20: 2,000 fighter reprisal to Sezon. Going to have to see if I can get the botty down there. Oh, and it looks like we've got hundreds of super hybrids again. What fun. Maybe I should have just left the other one in peace.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/sooper.png)

11.21: Oh bugger. Devourer golem at Geoasi, chowing down on my fleet. Luckily it seems he's just passing through, and only kills a few hundred ships.

11.23: Fighter reprisal hits Sezon while the patented three golem battering ram is still two hops away. Will the hardened forcefields hold out?

11.24: Nope, spire starships make sure of that. Although there are 1,200 juicy fighters left when the botty eventually gets there...

11.26: After the other golems are told to stand down, I make that 1,087 zombified fighters. Fly, my pretties!

And let's get some rebuilders in here, huh.

11.30: AIP 276. 4k knowledge goes on Mk III (and hence IV) tackle drone launchers - taking two more planets will let me do the same for Hydras and bombers.

I suppose I have to start thinking about that blasted rebel colony now, as the shield drops in 40 minutes. However I really can't be bothered to carve out a 5 hop deep route over there. So, I'm going to cheat.

11.33: EMP train explodes on Sezon. Again the closest train station is three hops away, and it's not on any sensible train route. Why on earth are they showing up down there.

11.34: One Xampite gets you two Mk II spirecraft jumpship. One gets 4 bomber and 2 spire starships, the other a colony ship and 9 engineers. Ten hops later, the spirecraft are barely atrophied when the enemy command station explodes.

I'm going to keep this planet just long enough to suck all the knowledge out of it. Once that's done I'll self-implode my command station to stop any pesky nuker astro train from getting in at it. Then all I need to do is remember to come back in two hours just before the shield drops again. I'm not even going to bother getting rid of the guardposts / eye.

11.35: Oh hey, cool, my scouts finally found the dyson sphere. Not so cool: Gravitic command station with every other guard post on the planet being a command station shield. Won't be able to jumpship kill this command station then.

Knowledge from Melshuafr goes on Mk III (and IV) hydras. Because I love their EMP immunity.

11.37: Sounds like the dark spire barfight is continuing. AI just bust out a 500 unit carrier and 200 unit barracks on a planet I've never even scouted.

Raids take out a third data centre, might as well offset the AIP from Melshuafr. Oh, and apparently the AI has unlocked spire corvettes now, as I can see hordes of the things flying around. Those'll be fun.

11.38: Oh. Hell. So, uh, turns out I wrong about where the second AI homeworld was. I just slapped a couple of raids into one of the jumpships, figuring I could cap this epic AIP reduction session by taking out the co-processors. On their way to the furthest away world, they stop one hop short. Why? Oh, y'know, just an AI homeworld. Jumpship explodes. Raids fall out. Core CPA post triggers.

2,800 ships en-route.

11.39: 67 HaP left, each super terminal tick has been taking 5 for a little while now. I think I'll stop before the response goes much further / I wipe my HaP stash altogether. AIP: 234.

11.43: Melshuafr command station is doing a bang-up job of repelling 700+ ships with just a Mil III command station and ~20 core turrets. It'd be a shame to explode it at this point, let's see how long it can last.

Meanwhile, refleeting after unwisely clustering my units around the wormhole to Charcuza (the ARS world next door to Geoasi with the munitions boosting command station). Not so nice being on the receiving end of those lightning warheads :(

11.45: Couple of golems passing through Dislaju, and they cheekily take out my translocators. Melshuafr went down to a supply interdictor train in the end, but no great loss so long as I remember to rebuild it at some point within the next two hours.

11.49: Raids go on a bit of a rampage and take down the first two co-processors, the last remaining (currently known) data centre and a civvy leader. Fleet ships take care of the other two co-processors: AIP 154. So that would be 220 less than half an hour ago then, and pretty close to the floor.

Somehow the instant I kill the last co-processors I get reprisal level 2 from both AIs. I have no idea where that's from, as I don't think I've lost many ships lately. Unless possiby the spirecraft jumpships / raids are expensive enough to trigger it.

11.51: Oh hey, I just worked it out. With the loss of AIP (in this case a massive -120), the salvage wave threshold got lowered tremendously. Anyway, 3,500 fighters coming in to give a total threat/wave of ~9,000 ships. I should really take the botty out for a spin.

11.52: Botty and 600 mixed fleet ships are taking care of 1,500 threat on Goriusip - Lots of lovely bombers to zombify. Meanwhile, a 4 golem / 2 H/K battlegroup has taken this opportunity to hit Poan. Two arty golems, so I can't risk sending my own black widow / armored in to counter them.
 
Oh yeah, and the fighters are here. So we're currently on 4,000+ attack.
 
11.52: Haha, and just to add to the insanity the devourer golem has now shown up on Poan. Along with 90 hybrids. Maybe that's what scared them into attacking in the first place.

Botty has finished up and I now have 1,100 new zombies.

11.55: Poan went down, fairly obviously, but it managed to take a fair amount of the attack with it. Both H/Ks and an armored go down to fixed defences, then my golems take out another arty during the cleanup after the first one flees. Fighter waves are beaten off without too much hassle - back down to 3,500 threat now.
 
11.57: Jumpshipping raids take out three more civvy leaders just before they would have AIP increased. They even make it back to friendly territory this time. All known AI progress reducers in the galaxy are now down, although to be fair I still have another 28 planets to scout.

11.59: I've sent a couple of cloaked rams to take out the superfort on Charcuza, but they keep on getting killed even while cloaked. Which is weird, as I can't see anything that cause them to decloak. Fleet prepares to jump in anyway, I'm sure we can focus fire the fort down without too many losses. That ARS will be mine soon enough, leaving only three more to capture.

Then suddenly, mining golems! Poan, Derimic, Jakidic, Dorvil, Jubuvi, Boatsuc and Melshuafr. Those last two might be a problem, as they're both five hops away from my planets.


So, 12 hours in. This was a very effective hour AIP reduction wise, even if not quite as game breaking as the super terminal used to be. From here on it's pretty much a case of capping ARSes and taking out shield generators. Oh and there's still four civvy leaders left out there, so AIP: 158.

I actually just counted, and there's currently 15 super-hybrids running around. Making as many dyson antagonisers, which might be a pain to clean up. It also gives me an insane amount of notifications, I think I'm up to 3/4 entire pages now. Anyway, see: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,12954.0.html and http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11086

I haven't seen 'Hybrids are mobilising' yet this game, though.

State of the union:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/12hourunion.png)
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: keith.lamothe May 04, 2014, 11:00:13 AM
Just took a look at the objectives log, and it does indeed appear that it's the second AI homeworld with all the golems on it. So I'm expecting a massive assault when this next patch goes in. I'm already thinking up cheeses...
It's common for players to be nervous about the impact of an upcoming patch on their ongoing game.

Here I'm observing the very uncommon case of the AI getting nervous about the impact of an upcoming patch on an ongoing game.

What next?  Jinking a couple dozen golems into a black hole by some creatively micro'd scouts?


It's immune to tachyon beams, but apparently not whatever kind of planetary tachyon coverage that train provides. The same goes for spirecraft scouts, I think.
Odd, I thought the immunity still applied.


Interestingly, a lot of these wormholes are missing tachyon sentinals. I'm assuming that must be the dark spire / hostile to all enclaves doing.
The broken glass and splinters of bar stools are a dead giveaway.


Oh, and it looks like we've got hundreds of super hybrids again.
That bug's still kicking around in there?  Hmm, maybe sterner measures are needed to prevent it exceeding the 1 super hybrid (of that type, and there's just the one for now) cap.  Made a note of that mantis you linked about this.

In other news: if you have so many alerts that the alert box has a scrollbar, start considering alternate possible habitable galaxies.


I'm going to keep this planet just long enough to suck all the knowledge out of it. Once that's done I'll self-implode my command station to stop any pesky nuker astro train from getting in at it. Then all I need to do is remember to come back in two hours just before the shield drops again. I'm not even going to bother getting rid of the guardposts / eye.
I had forgotten that you'd set "Human Decency 0/10" in the lobby.


11.35: Oh hey, cool, my scouts finally found the dyson sphere. Not so cool: Gravitic command station with every other guard post on the planet being a command station shield. Won't be able to jumpship kill this command station then.
Ah yes, the paranoid subcommander, with the cs-shield posts scattered around the grav well ring.  The RNG was in good form to pick a grav station on top of all that.


11.38: Oh. Hell. So, uh, turns out I wrong about where the second AI homeworld was. I just slapped a couple of raids into one of the jumpships, figuring I could cap this epic AIP reduction session by taking out the co-processors. On their way to the furthest away world, they stop one hop short. Why? Oh, y'know, just an AI homeworld. Jumpship explodes. Raids fall out. Core CPA post triggers.
Hahahahaha.

With this difficulty level that's not such a big deal, but still classic AIW.


Not so nice being on the receiving end of those lightning warheads :(
Speaking of upcoming patches...


11.52: Haha, and just to add to the insanity the devourer golem has now shown up on Poan. Along with 90 hybrids. Maybe that's what scared them into attacking in the first place.
Cookie fed well that night, I'm sure.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst May 04, 2014, 12:30:33 PM
In other news: if you have so many alerts that the alert box has a scrollbar, start considering alternate possible habitable galaxies.

*cough*

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/notifications.png)

And I don't even have the nofications for seven mining golems yet...

EDIT:

12.01: Throwing the entire fleet into the grinder may not have been the best of ideas, but hey it worked. 800 ships left, reprisal one, and a cleansed planet. Except for the two train stations, but I don't think it's worth the 6 AIP to remove them.

Looks like Deramic has gone down to a wave in the meantime, I'm going to have to go clean that up.

12.04: Widow trains steal the best part of 600 ships. 1,200 missile frigates hit Geoasi.

12.08: 800 ship rescue fleet on its way to Deramic. Cookie monster on Poan, not doing very much. Command station going up on Charcuza.

ARS gives me protector starships. HELL YES.

12.10: 4,000 knowledge could buy me Mk IV bombers. But instead it goes on Mk III forcefields, because you can never have too many forcefields. Honestly though I think the main reason I'm running out of them is due to the 15 low level ones on each homeworld, so seeing as I haven't actually had a golem hit in a while let's rationalise things a bit with just two of every mark. It's at this point I notice that neither homeworld actually has a home command forcefield - did I accidentally delete that at some point in the past?

12.14: Armored golem takes out a few dozen hybrids and the mining golem on Dorvil, 'rescue' (probably a bit late in the day to be calling it that) fleet to Deramic does the same.

12.17: Supply interdictor on Poan presages yet another golem attack. That thing must suppress the total firepower on the planet. Also, cheeky bleeders stole my trick! They have an implosion guardian this time, which rapidly decimates my black widow's health as it is running away.

Ten minutes to deal with the golem on Melshuafr. I'm going to send a jumpship over there over there with some rebuilders and engineers, see if I can't just get the rebel fleet to take it out.

12.20: After the fourth EMP train goes off on Melshuafr, bringing the total paralysis time for the rebel colony up to 3 minutes 50, it starts to dawn on me that this may not work.

Even better, while paralysed the cloaks drops and the AI can apparently see and fire on it. Joyous.

12.22: Poan is fairly well destroyed by this point, so the arty and armored golem are just sitting there looking smug with themselves. Until 800 fleet ships and my own armored golem warp in to wipe that smirk off their faces. Shame I don't have any implosions left, I really need to build some more.

By the way, that same radar dampening issue that affects penetrators seems to affect armored golems too. They have to be manually moved within range.

12.25: This ion eye shooting all my ships on Melshuafr is really aggravating. Especially as it triggers when there's more than about 50 ... including engineers and turrets.

12.26: After a real comedy of errors, including but not limited to:

- The spirecraft asteroid field being within range of the remaining shielded guardpost
- The penetrator built to take out the shielded guardpost getting astro train tachyoned and hence dying to it
- The Spirecraft siege tower repeatedly auto-kiting itself to a range where it can't fire on the mining golem. (I've seen this with the armored golem as well - they're just not getting close enough to fire, and when they are close enough they move out of range. I've got auto-kite set to 1,000 normally, with it turned off they work properly. So some inconsistency there)
- Human colony gets repeatedly EMPed, the EMP immune translocator I built to help protect it then that getting wiped out by the mining golem
- Constant supply interdictor astro-trains taking out my turrets and ability to build ships at the colony

The eye is finally down, and the colony safe (at 50k health, i.e 1%). I can't get rams close to the golem without them getting wiped, so back so back to the colony rebels.

2 minutes 42 seconds remaining. Then a wave of youngling fireflies shows up.

12.28: With about 30 seconds on the clock the golem goes down. Seeing as the colony isn't currently EMPed, time to quickly wipe out the command station and every sign of life so that the next time a train passes through there's no enemy units floating around to attack the colony.

12.30: As an experiment I send the spirecraft to my closest world to see how far they get. The answer is, not very. On the plus side I'm sure that the death of the best part of 800,000 metal should cause a nice dark spire spawn.

Okay then, now that's all been dealt with. Next high priority target is likely Rollikill, an ARS world 3 hops away.

12.38: Let's start things off with some light tachyon shredding on Revurloc. I say light because it has a vengeance generator, so I don't really want to destroy the whole planet.

12.42: All tachyons along that route have been shredded, so bar tachyon astro-trains the assault transports should be able to get through now. Standard tactics apply - jump the fleet in, mine the planet for the rams we're going to use to destroy the superfort, blow the command station then wait to see if the hunters show up.

12.44: As my 1,300 ship fleets enters the planet I see the bar fight in progress. But this time to AI has bought out the big boys - hunters vs. dark spire. Hunters win, of course. It's at this point I realise that I left the cloaker starships at home.

12.46.42: So, uhm, I'm sitting here with 10 cloaked transports. And the hunters are right next to me. And they're not moving. Blow it, everyone out the cars anyway.

12.46.59: Rams up. Everyone is back in the transports. Only lost about 50 units, mainly because the H/Ks were just far enough away.

12.49: Problem - Translocator eye under four heavy forcefield, and every other guard post also under the same four forcefield along with a troop accelerator command station. Solution: Suicide the fleet and hope they take it out before the hunters take them out. And on the positive side, even if they fail the complete obliteration of the fleet will likely spawn in a large number of dark spire to help finish the job.

12.50: The suicide thing alllmost worked, there was very little shield remaining when the hunter H/Ks finally obliterated the last of the fleet. Sadly the dark spire were useless, they just got shredded by the H/Ks. Certainly not the all conquering brawlers I remember them being. One x Resprisal 2, one x Reprisal 3.

12.52: Oh for the love of pete. Dark spire take down four Mk IV counter-attack guardposts, for 1,500 total attack to my homeworld. YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE HELPING, GUYS.

12.52.30: 2,000+ youngling tigers attacking Poan. Black widow and armored golem are on the scene. Elsewhere, Benny Hill's yakety sax plays as the devourer golem chases two spirecraft translocators around Senow.

12.53: Younglings go down no problems, thanks to the enclaves. What I'm slighly more concerned about, even with the full rebel fleet there, is the 2,000 bombers which are about to smack Dislaju and possibly take out the MRLS controller. Let's see if I can punch the botnet through to there.

12.54: Oh, uhmm, about those younglings. Yeah, 900 just showed up on Dislaju. Man, those things can really cream shield bearers.

12.55: Sorry boys, you're on your own. Now way I can push these golems through 200+ hybrids and a super-fort. But say, what are those shiny rocks you got there?

1,000 ships go to finish the job and pop Rolikkill command station.

12.57: Bombers go boom, command station goes boom, when the dark spire gets involved barracks and distribution nodes go boom ... just a whole lotta exploding.

Right, 13 hours. Two new ARS planets, or at least it will be once I get a colony ship over there. Target then will be Quzi, an ARS world right next to the dyson sphere.

Another colony rebellion has shown up, this time it's Boatark. Which is once again miles from anywhere.

Oh, and I've got 1,500 Mk IV ships hitting my homeworld in about two minutes. Eh, couple of golems and a few hundred fleet ships. Should be fine.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst May 05, 2014, 05:40:10 PM
The name for the next hour and a half is going to be 'Operation: Oh F#@!, Golems!'.

Incoming exo-galactic patch in 00:59.59. When the patch hits I imagine the 36 massive ships and their entourages currently sitting on the second AIs world are suddenly going to wake up and attack us. So, before that happens:

- Get full caps of implosion artillery
- See if we can hack that core missile turret controller
- Do two shard chases to get the fallen spire frigates

Oh, and build Martys. Lots and lots of Martyrs.

I mean, technically I could just build a missile silo and set an FRD rally point on the AI homeworld for the armored missiles. But let's try not to exploit that too hard, huh.

13.03: Well, that counter-attack went down fairly easy. And now I have ~500 Mk IV zombies to go cause mischief for me.

ARS gives me raiders. Oh, and there's also a Mk V etherjet tractor fab on this planet, so that's nice. Knowledge goes for Mk IV bombers.

13.04: 1,100 ship CPA announced. Seeing as a I currently have 4.8 million metal in stock and have a +40,000/s surplus from homeworld scrap, I decide it's time to replenish my implosion artillery stock. So a full cap of Mk II and III, with a half cap of Is (as I don't have any more reptite)

13.09: Huh, that's wierd. Over the past ten minutes my 15 super hybrids and associated devices have been whittled down to just two. Maybe the dark spire's doing?

13.14: I'm in the process of repatriating all my ships from Geoasi and the other planets in that section of the galaxy. Implosions are wending their slow, cloaked way back to the homeworlds. The main problem, of course, is astro trains. Need to be careful of both the full tachyon varieties and also passing right over one, due to the 500 range tachyon beams they all have.

13.19: CPA just hit, so back up to ~5,000 threat now. Transports just arrived on Murderlanceras, taking my current total fleet ships up to ~2,600. That many ships, combined with three golems ... I might just survive the first shard chase.

13.28: Well, that wasn't quite so bad as I was led to believe it might be. Although that probably has something to do with the 60 tackle drone launchers playing keep away, and best part of 2,000 enclave drones. Actually between the botty, leeches and viral spawners I think I may have ended up net positive on ships.

13.31: While we're waiting for the survey to complete, let's consider the other two seconday objectives for now: Hacking the core missile controller, and getting rid of the dyson antagoniser.

First up the 2,400 strong fleet and three golems destroys the hybrids on Shoal then wipes out every trace of life on a planet called Orerlu, which gives me an entry point to the core missile controller world. Hunter plot shows up at one point, but it looks like they're just passing through. Not that they don't leave a wicked scar on the botnet as they do, taking it down to 3%.

13.36: Scouts indicate the Dyson antagoniser is on Yembslow, a planet two hops from Deramic which I haven't blasted a tachyon path to yet. So viral shredders do their normal thing.

13.38: Then 2,000 ships follow up and take the antagoniser down. In fact take down two antagonisers. Unfortunately a badly timed tachyon astro train and the 200+ hybrids on the planet means that the transports pop and the fleet has to trail back across two hostile planets. Only about 200 make it. Reprisal level 4.

13.40: 8,000 neinzul youngling tigers hitting Charcuza in a minute's time. Something tells me it's not going to survive that, especially given the vast number of supply interdictor trains which pass through there. Oh, and all the super-hybrids seem to be back in my notifications window, lovely. Looks like they were all just dormant while the dyson antagoniser was in place. Now they're all flying around the galaxy again looking to build a new one.

13.44: As predicted, a supply interdictor train showed up and Charcuza command went down. Ah well. Golems and ~1,000 ships are clearing out Dorvil in preparation for the second shard chase.

13.45: About 600 (presumably CPA) ships hitting Rolikill, along with a 700 ship teleport wave. However I've just realised it doesn't have its etherjet tractor fab anymore. Dark spire must have taken it out. And the entire cap of ships wiped earlier, so I had etherjets for all of thirty minutes :(

Anyway, second shard chase underway. Within the first spawn there's two dire guardians, so this is a little more aggressive than the last one.

13.45 (again): Okay, so it's practically impossible to keep the 25 million health refugee ship alive on 10/10. Between the few dozen starships, dire guardians, implosion guardians etc it gets focus fired down no matter how much firepower you have. Even in ideal circumstances all of those mentioned above can slip past the black widow golem. Or survive nuking the planet, come to that.

However, there is one thing ... the refugee ship is not immune to transport. So what would happen if, say, 8 assault transports were placed equidistantly around the planet's perimeter?

13.45.30: Gotta hand it to those assault transports. They sure are fast. 8 spire frigates with their 4 million damage will be very useful against mostly imploded golems. Next up, that missile controller.

13.46: Geoasi command has gone down to the younglings, but Rolikkil is still just about up. Tigers are now attacking Dislaju, of all places.

Hybrids appear to have gotten another dyson antagoniser up already, this time on Eliuan. Which is 3 hops from my territory, and right next to a core world.

13.51: Fab hacking begins, with 1,000 cloaked ship in support. For some reason the AI's hacking response is 26 (Very low), despite the fact I've spent well over 400 HaP so far. Not that I'm going to complain, if it keeps my forces in the cars and away from the ion eye and Mk IV spirecraft corvettes. And the hunters, who are passing through as I enter.

A particularly funny moment during the last three minutes was the transports passing through Shoal, causing a 500 unit carrier to pop. When the devourer golem was right next to it. Thanks for the free threat removal! Really though, that guy should be able to eat stuff in carriers anyway. Or can he, with the latest patch ...?

13.52: Cookie monster on Dislaju, and it looks like he's here to stay. And eat my entire rebel fleet. This is going to be a problem because I've never taken care of the ~150 hybrids and superfort on Jubuvi, so they can't escape. Ships start kiting around the edge of the grav well, while three cloakers are rapidly transported in from Murderlanceras.

13.53: Cloakers have arrived at Dislaju. The existing translocator and siege tower are put into stand-down and hidden under one. The other two take up position next to the Jubuvi wormhole ... along with a Martyr and 2 rams.

13.53.30: Hahah, the remaining 1,800 youngling tigers are attacking Dislaju. While the cookie monster is roaming around hungry. This should be interesting.

13.54: About a thousand die, before the other 800 leg it. Speaking of which, might be an idea for the rebel fleet to that too...

13.55: Exo-galactic patch hitting in 00:05:00.

13.56: Most of the hybrids explode to the Martyr (although possibly not so many as would have to the new ones). Rams take out the super-fort. Rebel fleet legs it to safety across two hostile worlds. Fabricator hack finishes successfully on Darkyeul, missile turrets being springing up everywhere.

I now have to figure a way of getting those hacking support ships home, seeing as the transports are going to die the second they hop through their next wormhole.

Oh, and mining golems! Geoasi, Ulgin, Charcuza, Zinglikjer, Jubuvi, Melshuafr and Revurlock. Charcuza, Melshuafr and Geoasi I'll probably try to save. The rest I don't really care if they die. And in fact it might make it easier for me if those planets don't get super-forts again.

13.58: About half the rebel fleet makes it through the gauntlet of remaining hybrids. The wisdom of completely clearing Orerlu becomes clear, as all but 100 of the fab hacking fleet ships make it back. The economy is groaning under the strain of Mk V missile turret construction, but it'll be done soon enough.

Did you know you can get 24 Mk II Martyrs, given enough Pysite? I don't have enough, but I can afford about 12. Sezon is now completely free of asteroids, I'll have to send a cloaker down there to escort them up my homeworlds.

13.59.59: Missile turrets are up everywhere, including on Geoasi which was apparently sneakily rebuilt by cloaked remains rebuilders while I wasn't watching. The mini-forts there are currently pummeling the mining golem. All but handful of ships are rebuilt, defences are about as good as they're gonna be (and let's be honest, I have 15 minutes before the golems get near me anyway), so let's do this thing.

Exo-galactic patch in 00:00:01.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: keith.lamothe May 05, 2014, 07:27:04 PM
13.09: Huh, that's wierd. Over the past ten minutes my 15 super hybrids and associated devices have been whittled down to just two. Maybe the dark spire's doing?
It would appear there was a falling out in the Evil Villians Society.

Or maybe the Dyson Sphere paid off the Dark Spire.

... Or maybe, since they all popped up again later, they just decided they didn't like the local decor.


13.28: Well, that wasn't quite so bad as I was led to believe it might be. Although that probably has something to do with the 60 tackle drone launchers playing keep away, and best part of 2,000 enclave drones. Actually between the botty, leeches and viral spawners I think I may have ended up net positive on ships.
Grand Theft Starfleet.


Only about 200 make it. Reprisal level 4.
Be very thankful for the difficulty level.


A particularly funny moment during the last three minutes was the transports passing through Shoal, causing a 500 unit carrier to pop. When the devourer golem was right next to it. Thanks for the free threat removal!
Counter-troll!


Really though, that guy should be able to eat stuff in carriers anyway. Or can he, with the latest patch ...?
The list of ships that _can_ hit the carrier hasn't changed.  They're just a lot more willing to do it, and the damage is handled differently.


Exo-galactic patch in 00:00:01.
Boom.

Problem solved?
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst May 05, 2014, 08:07:42 PM
14.00: The patch hits. '36 massive AI ships (118,000 strength) are en-route to your planets' takes on a terrifying new meaning. Armored golem flexes as he realises his new physique, then the smile fades as he remembers his six brothers.

14.01: Little bits of threat are attacking all over. 300 ships on the previously peacefully rebuilding Charcuza, 200 taking advantage of Dislaju's supply interdicted state. Still, it's funny seeing the devourer golem two-shot a bunch of Mk IV spire corvettes. And profitable, those things are worth a fair bit.

Forwards scouts with over-active imaginations are reporting something about 'A heinous swarm of locusts, descending upon us to tear asunder all we hold dear'. A brief check of the threat fleet log indicates... yeah, they might be right:

totalExistingThreatFleetStrengthNotOnTarget:221,657.33
humanStrengthMustBeThisLowToBeAttackable:110,828.66
Priority override: targeting accessible human homeworld Murdke

14.02: That whole 'build random turrets within range to fill up the target list, then throw mini-forts at it' thing worked pretty well to take out the mining golem on Geoasi. Might have to try that again in the future. Charcuza goes down to about 30 Mk IV spire corvettes.

14.03: Three black widow, three armored golems are moving through Etgin. They'll hit Deramic in about a minute's time. Let's see what a lighting missile can do.

14.04: Uh, there's a Mk III lighting warhead here from the neinzul rocketry corps. It's just kinda ... sitting on the planet next to the Cenurin wormhole, doing nothing.

Anway, the golems don't want this planet. They just want to move through Cenurin -> Miccacau -> Probably Panza, then hit Muderlanceras. But if I was to hold off the lightning warhead until they're close to the wormhole that this neinzul one is sitting on, and catch them in both blasts at once...

14.04.45: Before

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/beforelightning.png)

14.04.49: And after.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/afterlightning.png)

Yup, that's six dead golems alright. With the 2-warheads-for-the-price-of-one offer, that was a good 10 billion damage. Now, I could just sit here and take care of them all this way. Especially seeing as I have Mk III armored warheads on special offer at 1 metal each. But where's the fun in that.

Oh, scouts report that in addition to the two artillery golems still on Deramic there's three more arties, 3 armored, 6 black widows and 10 H/Ks on Etgin heading this way.

14.06: I currently count 12 golems and 10 H/Ks on Deramic. Wonder where there other eight are. Cloaker is doing the rounds of Aosrinmar and Sezon, picking up Martyrs and the last few implosion artillery. Amazing what you can build even at a 12% salvage rate when insta-killing 6 golems gets you 36 million scrap.

Oh, hello! Zenith traders are on Poan, although sadly leaving my planets to go elsewhere.

14.07: Cloaker starship has finished his school run. So that's 26 implosion artilley and 10 Martyrs on Murderlanceras, along with an armored golem, black widow, and 2,500 assorted fleet ships. Bring it.

14.09: Ah, looks like I misjudged them slightly. They're moving through Aelurn to Poan instead, possibly because the fleet scared them off Murderlanceras. Martyrs are shifting to cover, fleet pulled back to Murdke.

14.10: Now THAT's what I call an attack. Note, this is after three Martyrs detonated already taking out four golems who were encroaching a little to close to the command station. There's also not a single massive ship outstanding.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/thisisaknife.png)

14.11: After the Maytrs had their play, the only thing left was the cleanup.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/aislethree.png)

14.11.30: Then the enclaves showed up and ... well, that was that.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/kekeke.png)

14.11.40: The very last armored golem just managed to get a shot off at the command station and took it out. It'll be rebuilt in 30 seconds.

'Why do you throw your lives away'


Okay, so I had far too much fun doing that. And I now have to get up for work in 7 hours. So it'll be left there for now.

Tomorrow: Somewhere in the region of 150 million salvage to spend! I may hold off on rebuild Poan command until the trader swings around again...

These neinzul rocketry warheads are definitely bugged by the way, they're all just sitting next to wormhole exits not doing anything. On some planets I've now got 2/3 by each wormhole. Target acquisition problems? Anyway, it certainly makes dealing with waves a darn sight easier...
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: keith.lamothe May 05, 2014, 08:51:57 PM
Forwards scouts with over-active imaginations are reporting something about 'A heinous swarm of locusts, descending upon us to tear asunder all we hold dear'
Nuke it.

Or, rather, use the warheads that now have far more tactical utility than any of the in-game nukes ;)


One bug to cancel another, you might say.


These neinzul rocketry warheads are definitely bugged by the way, they're all just sitting next to wormhole exits not doing anything. On some planets I've now got 2/3 by each wormhole. Target acquisition problems? Anyway, it certainly makes dealing with waves a darn sight easier...
Do you happen to have a save?

Goodness, though, the Neinzul Rocketry Corps has had more "defeats the entire purpose of the faction" bugs than just about any other feature.  Incredibly buggy... wait, I see what it did there.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst May 07, 2014, 05:42:38 PM
Save attached. After examining this behaviour it seems like the very instant a lightning warhead enters a planet with a human command station it stops moving. If you destroy the command station, it starts moving again.

Take a look at Deramic in particular, near the centre of the map. That has 9 missiles stacked up on two wormholes.


14.12: Right then, what was I doing before the apocalypse of the golems? I suppose I need to start thinking about winning this thing.

Showdown devices are on - so far I've found 3/4. None of them are on planets I own, and all of them are on planets of low strategic importance. Not really worth pursuing.
Fallen Spire - Ahaha, not on 10/10
That leaves taking on the homeworld the traditional way. A, B and D shield generator networks are still up.

D network - A couple of uninteresting planets, one in the middle on nowhere with a regen golem on it, one on a core world and one on the world next to the core world with a spire archive on it.

Target ... Eliuan, with its lovely spire archive. If I remember rightly this is also the location of the new dyson antagoniser, which although it appears to have dropped off my notification list is still sending a steady stream of Gatlings at me. Oh, and it's next to the core world with the raid engine on it.

14.13: One jumpship, one hacker, 5 HaP and one minute later the raid engine is no longer an issue. Without triggering either it, or the CRE on the homeworld next to it.

B class shield network then. There's Jubuvi, which I've already mostly cleared but is going to get eaten by a mining golem in 12 minutes. And Jicidis, where I've already hacked the advanced factory. The other six are far enough away from my worlds not to be worth it.

Probably Jubuvi then. Suppose I should get rid of that mining golem after all.

14.14: Speaking of mining golems, I forgot about Melshuafr. One jumpship packing a colony ship, 8 engineers and a cloaker are sent out that way.

Command station goes up, engineers quick-build a pair of rams, rams take out mining golem, command station goes back down again and the rebel cloak is reset to two hours. Piece of cake.

A class shield network. I believe, although I might be incorrect, that I only need one more ARS world to pop this. That honour will go to Quzi, primarily because the dyson sphere is right next to it and I'd feel sad having a 10/10 dyson sphere that I never liberated.

14.16: Dark spire attacking Rolikill, and a dual wave hitting it in one minute. Devourer golem is there to meet them. I am feeding this guy well.

Blob of all 64+ speed ships en-route to Jubuvi. The remainder are slapped into assault transports and sent to Charcuza to deal with the mining golem there.

14.20: 50 hybrids / 1,400 ships on Jubuvi aren't too much of a problem ... then the hunter fleet passes through. They seem to be up to 10 H/Ks now. Oh, then special forces show up along 130 riot starships. I may have to rethink this a little.

14.24: Good thing I had an Xampite left for rams, huh, Jubuvi. Even if that was somewhat of a pain due to four different tachyon astro trains passing through the system.

Thanks to an EMP astro-train stalling the transports the mining golem on Charcuza goes down with 19 seconds remaining on the countdown. Too close. Revurlock, Ulgin and Zinglikjer all explode.

14.27: Charzua and Geoasi are fully back online. Special forces and hunters are moving through Poan (where I still haven't rebuilt the command station). That means they're not so likely to come to Jubuvi's aid...

Black widow golem, a siege tower and 90-odd rebel frigates (pretty much the only surivors from that little special forces run-in) jump in. Then straight back out again, as surprise surprise there's sudddenly a super-fort there.

14.28: There now also appears to be a strike force of 29 Mk IV spire corvettes moving through Poan to my homeworld. Presumably the offensive component of the superfort. Rebuilt fixed defences and armored golem should handle them fine.

14.30: Wow, okay, those things are absolutely lethal. They chew through two forts, a half cap of normal turrets, 3 caps of Mk V turrets and half an armored golem before the fleet finally arrives and stops them. Looks like it's time to rebuild the Poan command station distribution node.

14.35: Devourer on one of my homeworlds, as is a supply interdictor taking me down to -900,000 energy. So of course the best part of 3,000 fighters decide to go after two of my planets.

14.39: Right well after beating off multiple waves and a couple of golems, I suppose I can now get back to Jubuv... oh, rebel colony decloaks in 14 minutes. Kinda forgot about that one.

14.40: 2 bomber starships, one colony ship and 7 engineers. Command station down, up, then blown up again within 20 seconds. 2 hour of lovely cloaking back again.

Of course, a supply interdictor train takes this opportunity to pass through Murderlanceras. And incite 150 hybrids to attack and level the place.

14.47: Superfort and command station on Jubuvi finally go down to the simple expedient of 'throw 2,000 ships at it'. Now I have an advanced starship constructor, and nothing to build at it. Then again, I do have 6k knowledge... spire starships II, III and IV along with protectors II I think.

14.51: Refleeting is taking such a long time, I've actually just gone and popped a distribution node. Oh, and the dyson antagoniser appears to be up to 'converter' now, should probably take care of that...

14.55: Even with 20-30 dyson gatlings on-planet at a time the armored golem is doing a bang-up job of killing two every two seconds. And barely getting scratched in the process. Still, 1,000 ships go to attempt to take out the converter.

Scout info from Eliuan indicates ... 100+ hybrids, a gravitic command station with four counter-attack posts, covered by two shields, with a super-fort and two different Mk II forts right next to it. Well, 1,000 ships aren't going to cut it then. And I can't use armored warheads, partially because they'll probably take out the spire archive and partially because I just don't have the cash.

14.58: Tachyon path to Eliaun has been cleared. I'm just going to ram the converter for now, then come back later. Problem is, the closest asteroids are two hops away in the middle of a hostile planet.

Wait, problem? Sorry, tactical opportunity. 50 engineers and two cloakers and dumped into an assault transport, and a couple of ships send to find another distribution node.

15.00: Engineering mission successful. 8 Rams up. Then the power goes out, and so does the cloaking...

EDIT: Oh hey, I found the super hybrids.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/somanysupermen.png)

This is ... somewhat absurd. It wasn't until I was looking to crash a ram in the super-hybrid putting up the converter that I realised they were ALL super hybrids.

Kinda makes sense of the disappearing notifications actually ... you only get one notification per planet, regardless of the number of super-hybrids. And there's a kind of race condition going on, where the only valid dyson anatagoniser is the one that goes up first, and once it goes up all the super-hybrids cluster around to defend it. Which would explain why my fleet got melted so fast the last time I sent them to take one out.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: Coppermantis May 08, 2014, 02:24:11 AM
That is...unfortunate. Have fun.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: keith.lamothe May 08, 2014, 01:04:07 PM
Save attached. After examining this behaviour it seems like the very instant a lightning warhead enters a planet with a human command station it stops moving. If you destroy the command station, it starts moving again.

Take a look at Deramic in particular, near the centre of the map. That has 9 missiles stacked up on two wormholes.
Ok, thanks, will take a look when I get the chance.



This is ... somewhat absurd.
Nothing a half dozen lightning warheads can't solve :)  Though you'd probably need to throw in a distraction of 1000 ships or so to make sure they didn't get prematurely detonated.

Iirc the Spire Archive, along with anything that is not normally autotargeted, will be safe from the warhead aoe unless you actually target a warhead at the archive.


Anyway, the bit where it was bypassing the 1-per-galaxy cap on the super hybrids should be fixed now, so once those ones are dead it won't replace them all (just the one, if you get them all).

MkIII Debugging Warhead.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst May 11, 2014, 07:17:28 AM
15.01: Rams managed to avoid a couple of starships long enough for the power to come back on. They're now making their way to the attack.

Beachhead waves hit Poan and Sezon. Jumpships rapidly move spire frigates around to take them out before the defences are overwhelmed. Those things can also really melt a wave if positioned right.

15.06: After far too many tacyhon astro-train shenanigans, rams finally reach their target. Which, as previously pointed out, is surrounded by 38 super-hybrids. Anyway, converter dies. As does the Mk II fort, the Mk III fort and the superfort.

15.07: Oh come on. A new dyson antagoniser is up already ... without even any build time. Guess each of the 37 super hybrids keeps their own internal build clock. Luckily it seems to have gone up on Eliuan again, so should be easy enough to take out when I cap the planet. But later, I think.

Shoulda sent an armored warhead after the bleeders while I could.

15.13: Oh hey, dire guardian spawning on Boatark in 5 minutes. Guess that's what happens when you leave an unprotected rebel colony next to a dire guardian lair.

And I think I must have annoyed the gods of salvage, because a 2,500 missile frigate wave to Deramaic. Oh hey, about those 13 free lightning missiles sitting on the wormholes...

15.13: Oh wait, missile frigates. Immune to lightning missiles. Welp.

15.16: Amazingly Deramaic survived that. The new within-carrier killing works a real treat, even if it doesn't allow the military command station to knock the ships back like it did to all the loose ones.

Anyway, pretty much refleeted and a three golem battering ram is forging its way to Geoasi killing hybrids and gatlings along the way. From there I'm going to have to move through four planets to get to Quzi.

15.22: Golems fully repaired, all ships other than the absurdly expensive spire Mk III/IV starships are up. Time to go hunting. I'm not even going to bother with transports, seeing as the slowest ship I have is the armored golem. The AI shall feel the wrath of three golems and 2000+ ships proceeding in a stately group-move fashion to Quzi.

15.24: The exception to that rule is one assault transport with four bomber starships in it, which is put on lightning warhead watch. Luckily, as it turns out, as one almost turns the fleet into paste. Their brave sacrifice is not in vain, as they shoot it down just out of range of the main fleet. Strangely the assault transport is completely untouched - didn't know they were immune.

15.25: Oh dear, hunters are here. But this time I have a secret weapon ... six protector starships, packed to the gills with anti-missile tech. Will it be enough to defeat the 50+ Mk V missile guardians who can make mincemeat of my golems?

15.25.30: Amazingly all 9 H/Ks passed directly over the fleet with minimal causalities to me. And plentiful dead starships / guardians for them. Good job protector starships! Heck, we even did a massive amount of damage to the H/Ks while they were in range ... I think I could've taken the hunters out.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/passover.png)

15.25.45: Oh. Oh dear. Actually, the missile guardians are just slow. 90 Mk V guardians are waiting on the next planet ... if they get off a single volley at the golems, they'll all die. Back through the wormhole everyone, then golems as far away from the exit as possible and under the protector starships while the fleet deals with this.

15.27: Well, that was fairly successful. I think about 30 escaped that little pogrom, so when the hunter fleet returns (which it inevitably will when I set foot onto the ARS world) I should be able to take it in a stand-up fight.

Two beachhead waves have hit, Deramaic and Geoasi. Deramaic is certainly going down. Sadly the devourer golem passing through the place decided not to eat the beachhead.

15.29: Battering ram is on Quzi. Despite an EMP train blowing just as a I arrive, the counter-attack post explodes, command station explodes, then a jumpship delivers a colony ship and 9 engineers. It's all over bar the cleanup.

ARS unlock is spiders, and it only cost me about 500 ships / reprisal level one. A class shield network is down.

15.29: Victory is short lived. Astro trains steal 900 of the fleet ships, Sezon goes down to hybrids and the reprisal wave, and Deramaic is still down. Sigh.

15.32: Y'know what, blow it. The Dyson is a paranoid sub-commander, and I can't be bothered to deal with that when the super-hybrids are just going to instantly rebuild the antagoniser anyway. All golems, reverse course.

Anyway, now all those dyson gatlings are dying on Quzi. Which has a vengeance generator. Should spice the dark spire up a touch.

15.32: As the golems are retreating they run head-first into the hunters coming to Quzi. With no fleet to back them up, and no protector starships.

They, uh, steer around them.

15.33: An EMPed Jakidic goes down to 2,400 missile frigates. That makes three lost planets now. AI is tearing it up.

15.41: Quzi goes down to a supply interdictor and 1,800 bombers. 4 planets down. At least I took out the counter-attack to my homeworld alright.

Ships are getting to Deramaic using the warp gates and slowly chewing away at the beachhead. That at least should be up fairly soon.

15.46: Deramaic and Sezon back up, 500 ship rescue fleet going to rebuild Rolikkill. Mining golems on Quzi, Dislaju, Dorvil, Isiforo, Yesharp, Maswoor and Xuta. All of those last four planets I think I'll just let die.

15.50: A new rebel colony on Michdintooth. A world I haven't even scouted yet, seven hops from any of my territory. Well, maybe this'll all be over in two hours.

Rolikill is back up, so all forces are concentrating back towards Deramaic for the push on Eliuan.

15.56: Aosrinmar, one of my under-defended rear worlds, just held off a 3,500 ship attack. Gotta love core turrets and these new carrier changes.

16.00: Right, 2400 fleet ships on Deramaic. I'll push the golems over there too once they get back from their little miner killing expedition on Dorvil. Just reset the rebel timer on Melshuafr, so let's go get that spire archive.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: keith.lamothe May 11, 2014, 09:46:40 AM
15.16: Amazingly Deramaic survived that. The new within-carrier killing works a real treat, even if it doesn't allow the military command station to knock the ships back like it did to all the loose ones.
There should have been a decent amount of loose ships too.  Though I guess if they didn't die (by virtue of being knocked clean out to not-in-Kansas-anymore) there wouldn't be more deployment from the carrier.


Two beachhead waves have hit, Deramaic and Geoasi. Deramaic is certainly going down. Sadly the devourer golem passing through the place decided not to eat the beachhead.
It's learned from experience.  Loss Of Supply in the hindgut is a bad thing.


Astro trains steal 900 of the fleet ships
All aboard!


They, uh, steer around them.
Advance in retrograde!


15.56: Aosrinmar, one of my under-defended rear worlds, just held off a 3,500 ship attack. Gotta love core turrets and these new carrier changes.
AI Fleet Commander: "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling patches!"

: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst May 12, 2014, 07:24:49 PM
16.05: Quzi is back up, and building some rams to take care of that mining golem problem. Meanwhile, a dire sniper guardian and his friends are attacking Rolikkill. As I have no mobile ships over there, I might have to rely on the dark spire to kill it off.

16.12: Oh dear, the antagoniser has been upgraded to a disruptor. Time for everyone's favourite then, the 3 golem 2,500 ship battering ram.

16.17: Well, the idea was to start the assault with dual Mk III lightning warheads, take out the 38 super hybrids. However my ships have been floating outside that world for the last four minutes waiting for a succession of tachyon astro trains to pass by. Eh, let's throw the golems at the dire guardian lair while we're waiting. Dire tractor, laser and MRLS. All dead within 20 seconds.

16.20: Lightning warheads explode, 38 super hybrids die. Was that worth 6 AIP? Probably not, but it was enjoyable.

16.22: Boomed. Four counter-attack post waves hitting in 10 minutes, but the command station is down. Reprisal 2. Golems make a dash for the wormhole exit, switched off and under cover of the cloakers that escorted the lightning missiles in.

16.23: Hunters are here. But they can't see me. This plan is flawless. Unless a Tachyon astro train happens to pass by.

16.23.10: 10 H/Ks, 100+ Mk V missile guardians and ... a tachyon astro train. Typical. Ah well, golems got out in time and assault transports are skirting the edge of the grav well enough to escape. Dropping a few ships to distract the hunters help, too.

16.24: 2,200 youngling tiger reprisal to Jubuvi, the world with my brand spanking new advanced starship constructor. Luckily I have the time, money, asteroids and inclination to build Martyrs.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/good-doggie.png)

Oh, and there's also this little trick. Yup, that's a spirecraft translocator herding those lovely immobile Neinzul rocketry corps lightning warheads into position.

16.24.14: Exhibit B

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/exhibitb.png)

16.24.16: Exhibit C.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/exhibitc.png)

Unfortunately I didn't notice the 1,000 loose younglings going up to kill my engineers.

16.24.45: Problem solved. Turns out I didn't need the Martyrs after all.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/exhibitd.png)

Oh, and a 1,800 ship CPA. Which is ... well, nothing.

16.24.55: Of course, in retaliation the AI does this ...

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/traaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain.png)

Why yes, that is 1,200 ships caught in an unholy morass of Tractor/Widow astro-trains. Right after their transports exploded, moments after escaping the hunter fleet. Which they are promptly getting dragged back towards. The ship's struggles end when I realise all 1,200 of them are about to be dragged onto the core world. Right next to the Core Raid Engine. An instant 1 million scrap value, indicating that those were actually worth about 10 million metal.

On the plus side, I destroyed them on Eliuan. The planet where I just wiped the AI command station. So no salvage for you AI!

16.31: Command station goes back up, then down again, on Boatark. Another two hours on that shield.

2,000 ships on my homeworld ready to fend off the 3k Mk IV ships in the counter-attack. My one regret is that the new salvage cap means I'll get at most about 5 million metal from this.

16.33: A slight moment of worry there as they attacked from three different directions and with a rather large number of raid starships. But at the end of the day, nothing much can stand up to 97 enclaves and their 2,000 drones. Definitely worth their constant probing attacks.

I do like the more restrained salvage pace. No more 200,000m/s firehoses that I need to work out how to direct. That said, telling 10 engineers to repair my Mk IV ion cannon was a bad idea, as 2 million metal is sucked out of the economy in about 10 seconds.

16.37: CPA? Oh, you mean that practically unnoticeable bump in my threat level. I know that I'm used to diff 9 rather than 7, but CPAs do seem rather ... weedy nowadays. The only ones that have ever really challenged me are on diff 10, when I remember a year ago having to work hard to take them on at ~8.3. Maybe, after the addition of core turrets and everything else, CPAs need buffing too?

16.42: Command station is up on Eliuan, and spire archive merrily ticking away. D class shield network down, that means that the home planets are now available.

Of course, the very first thing I do is slap four spire frigates into a jumpship and wipe out the Core Raid Engine on the closest homeworld. And the OMD which is handily sitting right next to it. The core raid is an utterly paltry 352 ships. I mean really, I know it's diff 7, but that's all I get at 314 AIP?

16.42.30: Total wave: 3,700. Just standard waves. Half of which is hitting Aosrinamr ... where the cookie monster is sitting. Thanks, friend!

16.43: Oh dear, beachhead waves. Rebel frigates come to the aid of Jubuvi and manage to bring the shields back online when the advanced starship constructor has just 96,000 health remaining. Aosrinmar is not so lucky, devourer golem notwithstanding. For reference, he still doesn't eat ships in carriers or beachhead ships. Still, he at least cleaned up all 1,500 ships for me after the command station went down.

16.47: Anyway, what was I doing. Oh, right, throwing 2,400 ships and 3 golems at a core world.

16.53: First 30% of the strategic reserve chewed through, most meaningful guardposts removed. Way to the first homeworld is now clear. Inevitably, however, I did lose 900 ships to tractor astro-trains.

Time for a spot of refleeting and contemplation I think ... spire archive is about halfway done. Let's have Mk III and IV protector starships (heck yes), and that leaves me with 8,500 knowledge on the way. Flagship IIs, Missile Frigates II, III and IV, I think.

16.55: Reprisal coming in, 3,400 youngling tigers to Jubuvi. For the first time in my entire AI war career, I unlock advanced warp sensors. Why? Well, it helps to know which wormhole to shepherd these lightning missiles on to...

16.57: Worked like a charm. Two Mk. III lightning warheads take out 3,000 tigers. At no AIP cost to myself. This has to be one of my favourite new cheeses.

Right then, looks like the entire H/Ks fleet is sitting on Eliudonu. Of course, as soon as I enter the planet they decide there's nothing worth fighting and make a tactical retreat. Of course. Eh, they'll be back for the ultimate showdown soon enough.

17.00: Can I finish up this game in the next hour, before the colony rebellion? We'll see. But I'm in a position to start wiping the first AI homeworld now. And the long overdue hunter fleet royal rumble is definitely on the cards.

State of the union:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/creat/17hourunion.png)

Huh, I should probably rebuild Quzi and Geoasi.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: keith.lamothe May 12, 2014, 07:46:32 PM
16.23: Hunters are here. But they can't see me. This plan is flawless. Unless a Tachyon astro train happens to pass by.
And of course that never happens.


Why yes, that is 1,200 ships caught in an unholy morass of Tractor/Widow astro-trains.
I may as well change the plot name to "Astro Trolls".


On the plus side, I destroyed them on Eliuan. The planet where I just wiped the AI command station. So no salvage for you AI!
Of course, the trolling is far from unidirectional.


I do like the more restrained salvage pace. No more 200,000m/s firehoses that I need to work out how to direct. That said, telling 10 engineers to repair my Mk IV ion cannon was a bad idea, as 2 million metal is sucked out of the economy in about 10 seconds.
Glad the salvage change seems to be in the right ballpark (so far).

And yea, Ion Cannons are where Economies go to die.

That one on your side probably just did more to hamper you than any of the ones on the AI side have done this game.


16.37: CPA? Oh, you mean that practically unnoticeable bump in my threat level. I know that I'm used to diff 9 rather than 7, but CPAs do seem rather ... weedy nowadays. The only ones that have ever really challenged me are on diff 10, when I remember a year ago having to work hard to take them on at ~8.3. Maybe, after the addition of core turrets and everything else, CPAs need buffing too?
One step towards that, for high-AIP cases, is already in for 7.026.  I hope to rework them to use strength instead of unit-count in the near future, as currently you can still have situations where the AI's bonus picks can make a huge difference in how dangerous a CPA actually is.  If it's got a bonus roster of solid 5-cap types then that piddling 2000 ship CPA could be mostly tackle drone launchers or whatever.  But in another game it might be 2000 laser gatlings.  Soon to change, I hope.

But the overall scale of Diff 7 CPAs, I'm not sure should go up, given the concern I'm getting from other quarters that 7 can already be too hard on new players.  I'm not sure if CPAs are really part of that problem or not, yet.

Of course, a separate question is whether the presence of superweapons should increase CPA (and wave, etc) size, but that's at a more hypothetical stage.


16.57: Worked like a charm. Two Mk. III lightning warheads take out 3,000 tigers. At no AIP cost to myself. This has to be one of my favourite new cheeses.
A well-aged Neinzul Roquefort.

Yea, I kinda do need to fix that, don't I ;)  Ran low on time for 7.025.


And the long overdue hunter fleet royal rumblewarheading is definitely on the cards.
Fixed that for you.
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: Mal May 22, 2014, 07:30:29 PM
C'mon Rocky! I have been waiting over a week for you to finish this amazing amazing action report! :)
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst August 18, 2014, 04:31:39 PM
Oh, hi!

So, what happened? The usual, unfortunately. I burnt out on the game.

This happens with every single game I ever play, and it's a testament to AI War that it's one of the very, very few I end up coming back to. So, I got about another hour and a half into the game and in the face of probably an 80% certainty of winning just couldn't bring myself to put in another 4-8 hours of grinding. Not after the 10/10/10 game at least.

However, now a few months have passed and an interesting AI War expansion is out for me to play with. So, while I may not AAR them (boy does writing this stuff up take a while - I really shouldn't go into so much details), rest assured that I'm out there trying to find the perfect way to cook the AI's goose.

(Hint: It normally involves Limburger brûlée. Applied with a nuclear blowtorch)

p.p.s: I take great pride in getting 33 patch note mentions in 2 months - Not sure quite what my favourite was. Using neinzul rocketry lightning warheads as defensive weapons? The charismatic golem? The 'move along, please' threat logic? The null pointing nuclear train? The instant infinite knowledge extractors? All I know is I look forward to breaking the new toys just as much :D
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: keith.lamothe August 18, 2014, 04:38:07 PM
Welcome back :)

I very much understand on the burnout; honestly I wonder how folks can log hundreds or thousands of hours in this game and keep at it.  Nothing against the game in specific, just... well, any game wears on a person after a while.  That's one of the big motivations for me for making other games, so you have multiple options for your self-immolation needs ;)
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: Alex Heartnet August 20, 2014, 03:20:57 PM
Can I have the save file?   :)
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: RockyBst August 20, 2014, 03:53:02 PM
Sure, why not. The attached file is the one I saved at 17 hours, so you can continue the AAR in the comfort of your own home :p
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: Zair August 20, 2014, 08:32:21 PM
I haven't smiled this much at a forum thread anywhere in a long time. Simple yet effective storytelling and it gets all the pertinent info across.

I admit a game on this scale would have me cowering behind a planetoid in the next galaxy over, you are a brave person indeed to play a round this insane. :p
: Re: All Creatures Great and Small
: Alex Heartnet August 21, 2014, 08:31:48 PM
so you can continue the AAR in the comfort of your own home :p

Good grief.  No, just no, sorry can't continue this AAR.   :(  No wonder you burnt out