Center of the Universe

[Nemo]

 I'm playing my first spoke galaxy right now (#1597656251, spokes, 80 planets) with a starting location with 15 wormholes. Since this planet is the exact middle of the whole spoke wormhole network that means I get a lot of unannounced traffic coming through my home system that aren't waves or CPAs because of the special guard posts (and train stations) spread across all corners of the galaxy.

I'm playing against a grav drill AI (and a Zenith AI) and noticed that its ships seem significantly faster than mine. I first noticed the speed difference when some of these ships entered the system and ran past my defenders to start killing my resources. Whenever I'm attacking the AI's systems I don't really see this speed difference as much because they stick around guard posts and the stations.

Once I got control of my home system I invested in building a Zenith Space/Time Manipulator, a Mark II Radar Jammer, an Advanced Warp Sensor, one or two exo-forcefields for the more vulnerable resources, 3 mark 1 forcefields for the command station and all 5 of the fortresses. The Manipulator will help my forces keep up with the Grav Drill AI's ships that come to raid my resources. I may build a second one to create a speed advantage if I think I can handle the 4x wave penalty. The Mark II Radar Jammer is there to buy me more time to catch up and to give me a range advantage. At least thats what I hope it will do. The Advanced Warp Sensor is priceless here because I can't build defenses on each wormhole and must rely more on mobile defenses.

I may restart another game here later but my current strategy has been to empty out some of the smaller dead end chains of 2-4 planets by blowing up the stations early with my full caps of Infiltrators. The AI then zerg my home planet and get greeted by my mobile forces and 5 fortresses, leaving my infiltrators to rush up the chain to pop the next one. Once all of the turrets are out of supply I turn back and start mopping up and killing all the left over guard posts and train stations. I'm not sure what I'll do next but since the AI homeworlds are only four hops away at most I think uberdefenses at home are a good move.

[x4000]

Probably the speed boost of the AI ships is based on Booster Trains, rather than the grav drillers directly.  It could also be that one of the AI types is a Speed Racer, or something along those lines.  Sounds like a really challenging scenario, but like you've got a pretty good handle on it so far.  Good luck with it -- and welcome to the forums!

[Nemo]

I hadn't heard about speed boosting trains yet but with the number of trains going through that must be it. I'd played against Grav Drill AI's before and thought maybe this was a new feature. The other AI is a Zenith Descendant.

I have complete visibility turned on and noticed a planetary cloaker a few hops away from me. How do I handle it? And what should I be able to see if I had Partial Fog of War turned on instead? If its cloaked do you need tachyon sensors to find it or is it immune to those? I have no clue how many ships are in there so I'm not sure what to do. It'd be interesting to capture because I'm curious if it would cloak a golem but since its not in the direction of the front lines I guess it won't matter.

[x4000]

The planetary cloaker itself is visible and something you can kill directly just by flying over to it... if you can make it there.  It perma-cloaks ALL of the other ships on the planet, and they can even fire while cloaked, etc.  So you can't capture it because you can't kill the command station (or anything else there) while it is on.  Best thing is to go in with transports, most likely, and try to bum rush it.  Then you can take out the rest of the planet like normal.  You'll take a lot of fire from invisible sources in the meantime while rushing it, though, so whatever can let you kill it as quickly as possible is good.  The fog of war settings doesn't affect cloakers at all.

[Nemo]

I know that with complete visibility turned on things will be different but I hadn't expected to be able to see cloaked units. I've attached a screenshot showing what I'm seeing. If there is a command station in that system somewhere it is cloaked but all the other units don't seem to be. Using latest beta.

[Nemo]

I may return to that game but I decided to try a new game with 40 planet and multiple homeworlds. I am 8 hours in and I've noticed that the Dyson Sphere Gattlings are just sitting on their homeworld doing nothing. There are 500 or more of them now and while they were a big help earlier they seem to have adopted an isolationist policy now that every hostile planet 3 hops away from them has been cleared. Seems to have happened some time after I got close to 500 freedom fighters to show up, but now that they're all dead I've finally noticed the Dysons aren't moving around anymore.

I'm also starting to get some pretty hefty lag because I have close to 10,000 ships, the AI has about 6,000, and I have close to 1000 turrets and tractor beams built in my main home world. I may try to conquer the galaxy because I already own all but 10 worlds. The wave sizes were betweeen 1000 and 2000 because I had two zenith time manipulators going at my front door because of booster trains but I managed to reduce the wave sizes a bit by destroying 4x data centers, all 4 coprocessors, and by using the super terminal for total AIP reduction of 508. I would have held onto the terminal longer but it started spitting out core ships every 15 seconds so I chickened out and blew it up early. Incidentally that is where I got my ~200 sentinel frigates and a number of other goodies, though I had to offline my 75 captured Z Electric bombers because of energy problems despite having built all 6 Zenith Generators.

I still <3 parasites though.  

[ShadowOTE]

Ah, well you see, it turns out the dyson worker's union is on strike this week, so you're S.O.L. at the moment

[Giegue]

lol, really? what was that put in on purpose? or was the AI of the dysons just broken?

[Nemo]

Ya, I have no clue whether or not the dysons are supposed to take a break like that. I'm thinking it had something to do with whether or not they detected any fighting but they've made it into my system before and I still have a few hostile wormholes (3 out of 15 left) so I'm not sure its that.

[DakaSha]

I think its because they only attack out to a certain range. Otherwise they would just destroy everything for you. Wiki talks about them

[Nemo]

My game has close to a 1000 Dysons now. Its a shame its not more in between me and the AI home worlds in case something goes wrong.

I've reached the end phase I believe and I base this on how much waiting is involved. I own all but 5-8 planets in the galaxy and decided it was time to make a move on one of the AI despite hoarding my knowledge for the 50K award. I tried four times with a mostly mark 1 fleet of close to 10,000 ships and nearly lost the entire fleet because a single ion cannon and a ton of core tractor beams. Took out the ion at the cost of all 75 of my captured Z Electric bombers but experimenting with lightning warheads bumped up the AIP and the tech level of my waves to mark 2, which I had been careful the entire game to keep low with data center raids and the superterminal. I reloaded an older save because it became apparent that I had tried too early and the alerted Core world was reinforcing with core ships at an ugly rate.

After achieving the 50K award, I reloaded the game. My new plan is to max caps of raiders, bombers, dreadnaughts, and the spire line but this is going to take a very long time. My defenses are however stable enough that I don't have to watch my home system during cpa's or waves under a 3,000. It was at this point I realized I wasn't playing the game because I spent most of the time checking build times or being tabbed out surfing the internet while I waited. Each Mark of dreadnaughts allows for 30 ships for a grand total of 90 but they will take a long time to build. I upgraded raiders and bombers to mark 3 and so with advanced factories going I should be able to get a fleet of mark 1-4's. However running all of this at once is giving me resource problems despite having 6 Zenith Power Generators, 3-4 gravity drills I made sure to capture, and owning 30 fully developed planets. I went with raiders since they have immunity to tractor beams and are strong against frigates (the ai is reinforcing with tons of Core frigates). The bombers will be needed against the Core Shield but I will need to find a way to get them around the tractor beams.

I have access to four different golems but I don't think they would help solve my problems since what I really need to do is upgrade my fleet of spaceships, even though I could activate one rather quickly. While I appreciate the recent changes to golems, I don't think I'm all that tempted to try one yet. Reinforcements trigged by the presence of a Golem reflect the tech level of the planet you are invading so I think a Golem's usefulness will drop off proportionally along with how high the tech level is.

I'm not sure what all I should be doing right now or could have done differently but I have a lot of waiting to do in this game now and the change of pace from what I was enjoying earlier is a bit annoying. I could have been building mark 2s and 3s sooner but thats all I can really think of.

[RCIX]

What i'd do to speed up is build about 5 or 10 of each kind of dock and assign them all to building ships. That should speed stuff up a lot.

[Nemo]

I'm already running 6 spaceship factories, 6 advanced factories, 4 starship constructors, and a few fabricators and so my economy is pretty poor right now. I produce over 2000 metal and crystal but my constructers take almost twice that.

Edit
I am also using 100 mark 1 engineers to speed things along.

[ShadowOTE]

I am also using 100 mark 1 engineers to speed things along.

Yeah, that would do it... wait, WHAT?!?! Did the shipcap triple in the last 2 days or something?

[Nemo]

Multiplanet start increases the caps by a lot. 

I'm also planning on building full caps of Dreadnaughts and each mark has a cap of 30. I may not need that many but since I did so poorly with my last attacks I think I might need at least some of them.