The cool thing about references is how they totally destroy the original meanings of stuff!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemuria_%28continent%29The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Lemuria (besides "lost continent") is an underwhelming album from Therion. I don't think I got up to Lemuria in Golden Sun.
As for the other homeworld, I had my suspicions, which turned out to be well founded. Take a wild guess, I bet you'll get it. Spoilers below!
ANYWHO
So the fleet and I were just sitting there in our stable little rut, wondering what we could possibly do next. I was getting worried about the AI's perception of us. I called for a scout report showing a map of all the AI processing centers we'd found. The report looked like this:
Well. I fired those scouts (into a MK IV planet filled with tachyon guardians) and sent some new ones out. A lot. And killed tachyon guardians. A lot. Built transports. Quite a few. Nearly 2 hours later (Hence the lack of hourly updates; some games are just slow) I found a single data center! It was on Braxis in the right cluster, past Horus which had an ARS on it. I set up shop on Horus and whacked the data center. With a planet I had a reason to take and some AIP reduction to offset it, I finally had a foothold in another quadrant. I set about grinding more scouts into neutron dust.
This quadrant was actually populated with 2 or 3 Data centers! I wanted to take the ARS on Tenebrae, back near my home quadrant, but I noticed that another ARS planet, Elysium, all the way in the upper right, was actually only 4 hops from Horus, so I was able to take it with just minimal fuss from a nearby raid engine. From Elysium I was able to complete scouting the galaxy. 3 more Data centers were on Fermat, Tatlin, and Faust, and the last 3 co-processors were also in this upper area. Also found a Zenith V cache that I broke open, heedless of AIP.
Oh, while this was going on, waves continued to hit whipping boy Mithos, and Horus which was surrounded by 4 warp gates - too many to justify gate raids, especially when I have so many turrets not anywhere near cap. Between the remaining turrets and my fleet, Horus was very secure. I don't know if it was the work of the planetary armor inhibitor or what, but I found I could just ignore any waves that went to Mithos, even when the AIP was above 200. Even the bomber waves. The last thing I had built there was 2 force fields over the incoming wave wormhole, so the ships couldn't escape after spawning. They never broke out.
Here is a list of Mithos' defenses: Basic Turret: 10. Flak Turret: 49. Lightning Turret: 49. Grav turret: Basically 3. Heavy Beam: 7. Laser Turret: 30. Missile Turret: 20. MLRS: 25. Sniper Turret: 15. Spider Turret: 25. Tractor Beam: 34. Force Field I: 2. Hardened Force Field: 1. Fortress: 1. And of course, Planetary Armor Inhibitor: 1.
These defenses seem kind of paltry for the sort of waves I had been getting, but they did the trick every time. I don't know if the P. Armor inhibitor helped that much, or maybe... I hate to say this... maybe certain turrets deal too much damage when under force fields. ButICouldBeWrongItsOnly7.6DifficultyDontNerfMyTurretsPlz!!
Ahem, where was I?
I was able to handle a CPA on the western front by using residual forces and mercs that had built up in concert with stolen Engie IIIs constructing and saving emergency turrets. After that I upgraded to Raid IIs and killed all the data centers and coprocessors in the galaxy, landing me at a sweet 119 AIP. This freed another 1500~ish ships that I was basically able to ignore as half of them obligingly filed into my defenses, and the other half came one by one to dance with the entire patrolling fleet. Oh, they destroyed Elysium and I didn't bother to rebuild it.
ARSs yielded Munitions Boosters! and Acid Sprayers
and Bulletproof Fighters. It seems that all business is taken care of and... ah, a human colony rebellion. Right at Strife, on my doorstep. Ok, I can spare 20 AIP to connect my worlds and gain some serious firepower! (I should be kinder to the Acid Sprayers. They are fast, and thus good at scaring enemy Bombards away.)
So now I have taken 12 entire planets. All the CSGs are gone, except D. The CSG-Ds are on planets with Factory-IVs, which I haven't taken. One of these is on Jung, just two hops from the upper right homeworld! I would prefer to take out the left homeworld first, as the low AIP would help deal with the AI Eye, but it might be tough without the factory. I'll also probably have to do some K-raiding to get my fleet up to snuff - a lot of my fleet ships are very low mark. Munitions-boosted Bombards have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but they may not cut it for homeworlds.
This game has gone out of its way to make this easy for me... I'm starting to get a little paranoid... Or maybe it's mocking me for turning off the hybrids. That's probably it.
