Another game of blitzing; just scaled up

[chemical_art]

I know if I don't post of these up I'll never stick with a game for more then a hour, so I'll do it despite as incomplete it will start as.

Map: Maze A Easy
AI: 7 Feeding Parasite
     7 Special Forces Captain w/ hybrids


Caps: Normal
Player has two homeworlds, both nenzul, and a 100% resource handicap

Minor factions:
Resistance Fighters
Golems- Hard
Spirecraft - Hard
Spire Story
[something else I think]




Goal: A simple slugfest with the goal being to see if I can break my cpu with double caps for everything. Hybrids are thrown in for kicks. The maze format shall concentrate the fighting and hopefully let me spend more time in game and less time paused while laying out strategy.

Will post pics as game advances.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, if your goal is to break the cpu... basically what you're going for is ship count, and particularly actively-moving-around ship count.  Though it might be tricky to break your cpu before you break the memory limit because ship count nails that too.  Are you playing with high cap scale?

1) Special Forces Captain AIs are great for maintaining a huge active ship count.

2) For your own ships, Zenith Viral Shredders could be good, building up a big blob on each planet (part of their scaling-down-on-reproduction-speed is based on the number of shredders on that specific planet).

3) You'll also want to keep a lot of AI planets on alert because if any one of them piles up too big a stack it just goes into carriers and barracks.

4) Also on the AI planets, it helps to have actual military ships of yours on that planet so that the AI ships don't just stay in cold storage but have to periodically do weapons-range checks and whatnot.  I forget if it short-circuits out cloaked military but I don't think it can do that completely.  You could also sneak a pair of FF-generators and some engies off into a corner if they can hold off the AI long enough, etc.

5) On your own planets, you could use the redirection rally posts to set up a perpetual patrol loop for a metric ton of your ships.  Transitioning from one planet to another is probably a ship's most cpu-intense action because it has to be removed from all kinds of rollup lists on the old planet and added to all kinds of rollup lists on the new planet.  So maybe some situation with a redirector on both sides of a wormhole both pointing at the other side could keep it pretty much perpetually going back and forth between those planets.  That should fix your cpu good

[Martyn van Buren]

Thanks for the last batch; I tried using some of those tactics, and I'm liking them a lot.  I'm about an hour into a game and I've already rolled over about six planets, half of them mark III, with no military unlocks besides youngling commandos II.  Nice change of pace.

[chemical_art]

Well by breaking the CPU i meant breaking it without going *too* far out of my way to do so, and I want to break it while having fun rather then just breaking it for the sake of doing so. If I wanted to do it right, I would get 100 worlds on Defender mode and just watch the steam radiate out of my cpu over 5 minutes.


I'm not too worried about it, I'm already occasionally getting slow downs as my 1k ships engage waves of 2k against the AI two hours in. I'm having a blast with the high cap action going on. It is just so much fun being able to pump out 600 nenzul in 60 seconds to help blunt waves.


Nenzul + high resource generation + nenzul carriers = many many units

[chemical_art]

Thanks for the last batch; I tried using some of those tactics, and I'm liking them a lot.  I'm about an hour into a game and I've already rolled over about six planets, half of them mark III, with no military unlocks besides youngling commandos II.  Nice change of pace.

I keep trying new tactics, but I just keep falling back to nenzul units for my start up unit. The combo of very cheap, relatively durable, and very fast makes them easy to use in my opinion. Just throw them into the fight, no matter where and what kind of fight there is!

[Martyn van Buren]

Yeah, I'm a fan.  They're like TV dinners --- you send a couple caps into a nasty world, and you have a new fleet ready to defend by the time you get home.  Just got weasels from the first ARS, so I'm very happy.   

[chemical_art]

then another



then another




Current tactics: I am trying to keep a faster pace then last game. nenzul tactics as always are in full force. Break onto to-be-captured worlds with caps of MK I and II nenzul. The 700ish fleet rapidly removes potential threat and AI posts. Spire fleets then mob up any resistance as necessary.

My fronts are currently not consolidated. Eventually I will have to, but for now speed dictates I move from one shard to another while I still have excess energy and shards that are pulled from the other side of the galaxy.

I was pleasantly surprised to see spire ships caps be doubled. Now that I am seeing these exo-grouips I am glad I have those extra ships.

So far the AI hasn't done anything particularly clever. The parasite waves were initially tricky but now nenzul and spire ships can clean out those waves easy since they cannot be reclaimed.

[chemical_art]

After 4 shards



and now with 5 and a spire capital!





5 shards and a capital in less then 12 hours...I'm liking this pace. What I am not liking so much is the terrible reporting up to this point. For the next hour I'll take some notes and post another pic, by then my end game strategy will be fully developed.

[keith.lamothe]

12 hours to 5+capitol?  Impressive   Are any of the exo waves even causing much of a dent?

[chemical_art]

12 hours to 5+capitol?  Impressive   Are any of the exo waves even causing much of a dent?

Not really. Not all mechanisms of the game I see double when you get two homeworlds. I just got a CPA for 3k ships...I think I noticed the CPA after the fact.

The shards were difficult until I got access to destroyers, and after then I have simply been swarming. If I had normal resources it would be a real drag because it would take forever to use my high spire caps though. I would hate to have to rebuild a 150 spire fleet without that boost I'm still taking multiple worlds at a time when I need to, and hope to maybe wrap this up before 20 hours, maybe under 15.

I haven't really used any golems yet and I have yet to use a single asteroid yet though despite paying for their waves.
My ARS have been kind though:
Microfighters (swarmers. yay!)
Infiltrators (swarmers, yay!)
Bombards (good anti-golem ship)
Spire Battleships (good all round craft)

[keith.lamothe]

Not really. Not all mechanisms of the game I see double when you get two homeworlds. I just got a CPA for 3k ships...I think I noticed the CPA after the fact.

I'm pretty sure the CPAs do scale with number of homeworlds and number of players.

Exos do, for sure,  Diff 7 exos on two-homeworlds are the same budget as Diff 9 exos on one-homeworld.  The hybrids also get stronger though you only have them on one player and hybrids just get roflstomped by spire capitol ships.

[chemical_art]

The fact I went from a 8.3 game to a 7.0 game combined with 100% resources I think has made things easier for me overall despite the doubling AI response. Since my back is not against the wall I am (counter?)intuitively trying to push the AI against their wall resulting in much faster speeds. It's not that my tactics aren't really better (I am actually messier in my tactics this game) its just that since the waves come slower I have time to perhaps grab another shard or stomp another two AI worlds before I go back into a defensive routine. My AIP at this point has skyrocketed compared to last game.

[chemical_art]

After an hour



and another hour



Now the exo waves are causing delays in my offenses.

Over two hours my borders haven't changed any. I have been performing defense routines as I work to maintain my borders as I build up my spire fleet. My inner core is fine but the outer core is being harassed. The fleets need to still get ready and another final city may be built next door to the enemy core planet and shard at bonushio.

I am confined in my current game because an enemy homeworld blocks 25 worlds. I'll wait for the spire to come punch through that blockade themselves rather then try myself. I'll do a few knowledge grabs and maybe really push the AIP close to mk III before using a super terminal.

Energy is getting scarce at times, I am not even able to use dreadnoughts at the moment.

[keith.lamothe]

Energy is getting scarce at times, I am not even able to use dreadnoughts at the moment.

You could just glass the Savha-Kinnowlo-Tetherpluhas-Tinmar-Bomir-Barkslov chain and not have any increased first-line surface area. and build reactors on those.

Well, really, you could glass that entire side of the maze and defend everything from Aufi.  I'm basically certain that the second AI homeworld is on Bingne.

AIP?  What's that?

Of course, with the Spirecraft-hard and golems-hard exos, can't totally ignore AIP even with DNs.  And that much glassing takes time where you wouldn't have all your spire fleet available for defense, etc.

[chemical_art]

So I decided to annihilate...everything. Rather then call the spire to cleanse this galaxy, I would do so myself.



Taking a whole galaxy does slow one's pace though. Multiple sweeps are needed to remove cloaked units and to build up cities and reactors.





Once I managed to get the fighting down to one front a very long process of utilizing all of my massive resources onto one point. I was also bringing down AIP via a super terminal. I will say there was a glitch: The AIP progress floor did not raise at all while I hacked the AIP down from 950 to 400iish.




At 21:40 AI homeworld contact was meet. My 6k fleet, led by 8 Dreadnaughts, punched into the AI planet. Ai responded with 4 Motherships, 60ish golems, and 3k Mk V's. Quickly withdrew to a fort world and eventually contact was made in the trap. I absolutely thrashed that enemy fleet, but then again half the dreads had nothing but shields and plasma cannons.

Did I ever mention what cool toys stealing half the galaxy allows? My fort world where I trapped the motherships costed 1 mil in energy.I got Mk I - V weasels and I - IV commandos, bombards, bombers, fighters, microfighters, inflators, and 30 siege ships and 40 other shipyard craft. Spire blade spawners can be sort of cool when you got four MK V's. I supported over 300 spire frigates. 25 spire implosion cannons help. I had 50 rams in reserve but didn't need them.I simply had a lot of stuff.




After that initial withdrawal my fleets then pushed forward to knock each AI world without a pause. Reinforcement response was very stiff.The AI mustered two more motherships but they got swatted by wormhole camping dreads.





I've got to admit, this game did cause a ton of lag toward the end. But I had a blast. I may load up an identical seed with a much higher AI lvl .