The sheer adrenaline of praying that the Shard gets past my Fortress planet in time before that Storm hits, trying to defend the shard from the ongoing Ai frenzy that comes with retriving one and defending my Fotress was awesome.
I'm glad you enjoyed that; the FS stuff can be quite intense on its own, adding on all the other stuff probably felt like getting hit with a hurricane
Currently I'm holding 40 planets (80 planet hub map) with 20 left for the ai and 20 unoccupied but neuted.
Wow, I'm very surprised you've survived. That explains the AIP
In an 80 planet game I'd say destroying the AI command station on 20 planets would be well on the high end of what's wise. 40 is really, really asking for it. And if by those 20 "unoccupied but neutered" you mean you've destroyed the command station (instead of just the guard posts), then that would mean 60 planets' worth of AIP. But even 40 is way, way past what you're supposed to do, and it basically makes the AI kill you. If you can pull this off then, hey, you won
But if you wind up losing I very much suggest going for fewer planets in future games. Or a somewhat lower difficulty if you want to play take-on-the-galaxy. Of course, if you do the Fallen-Spire stuff you get to the point where you have a much better chance at a frontal-attack mentality. Assuming you don't get smashed before you get there
And nukes are really last-ditch and risky, if you're going to go the warhead route I suggest EMPs for stunning stuff and using your normal attack ships to take stuff down.
(could i succeed in totally nuking the remaining planets on one side of my fortress so i can retrive the shards in relative safety and only have to worry against one side?
I don't think that would be a good idea. If you're talking about nuking 18 planets that's another 900 AIP which would put you in the 2000 AIP range, meaning that instead of 300ish Spire Stealth Battleships in a wave you'd be dealing with about 550-650.
On the other hand, if you really nuke _every_ AI planet except the AI homeworlds (and the planets bordering them, iirc), I think the shard spawning algorithm actually defaults to just spawning the shards on your homeworld, because it can't find an eligible AI planet (only the very last shard is allowed to spawn on an AI homeworld or core planet). That would make those recoveries trivial. But it'd be very much a race against time to get your FS stuff built and capable of dealing with those massive waves and the FS-related dangers. If you had an insane enough metal+crystal output you might just be able to pull it off.
But I'd advise against nuking all that stuff unless the shard recoveries become simply impossible.
Oh, and have you gotten the knowledge off all the non-AI planets? Every bit helps there, and you also need something like 40k to fully exploit the high-end Fallen Spire stuff.
x
|
|
H--F-----B
x attack vecort the Ai always sends the hell waves trough that link
F fortress with the black hole generator
H my backyard with my planets
B mostly unoccupied planets and 90% of the remaining ai's planets as well as some frontier outposts with 1-2 fortresses and currently the bigger part of my fleet to advance
That is a very good position. One thing you can use nukes for is "wiping" the "x" planet of anything lower than mkV, though it's probably better to use EMPs+normal-attacks. You could also use an EMP to split up an attack that has both emp-immune and non-emp-immune ships, etc.
Oh did I mention that the Advanced Research gave me 2x Neinzul units? How I had wished for Zenith bombers or something stronger than the Neinzul, or am I just using them in a wrong way and they are strong somehow?
Well, Zenith bombers come in very small numbers, so the actual dps you can get out of a cap of neinzul can actually be higher, it depends. And which neinzul ships are we talking about? Nanoswarms, properly used, can immobilze and generally frustrate the daylights out of an enemy force. Tigers pack a significant punch against a lot of important targets and make wonderful guard-post-assassins (the sheer speed and expendability lets them just ignore the defenders and kill whatever it is, if they're not piled on too heavily). Commandos also have respectable dps but against other types. Weasels and Vultures are somewhat less useful in the pure damage role, though vultures can be quite effective against the last half of a forcefield, iirc, and that kind of thing. They should all be able to contribute decent damage in a general engagement. One key is making sure your space yards are churning out replacements as fast as they die in battle. Keeping a standing force of them is more complicated, but you can put them in low power mode to stop the decay, then reactivate them when you need them to fight.
