Falling into things (but not falling apart!)

[Diazo]

Thank you for the vote of confidence.....

It wasn't meant as an insult. I'm just saying that I would have restarted given those circumstances, and would be impressed if you won. The third shard in particular will be brutal.

Bleh, no biggie.

Forum needs a /sacarstic tag is all.

Anyways, the major reason I did not restart was I do feel I went easy on myself in terms of the other game settings.

Adding in the Scorched Earth makes for a very challenging game that I feel I still have a chance (while quite small) of winning.

(Next game session is not until I get home from work.)

D.

[Diazo]

Okay.

Well, still have not returned the shard, I have not even captured the system with the shard in it.

However, I have made the decision that will win or lose the game for me tonight, not that I will know either way for quite a while.

You know my clever solution to keeping both AIP and threat down by building beachheads in the Scorched Earth AI systems and not destroying their command station?

Did not work. Mepar and Aschr in the bottom left were regularly being raided by threat that was escaping from those systems (that are now white) on the left edge of the map.

I am not running any sort of energy buffer so every time Aschr's Energy Collector got destroyed my empire was blacking out.

So, I have cleared out half the Scorched Earth AI systems in my cluster, the ones down the left side of the map.

Destroying those AI command stations incurs the usual AIP penalty, but I can't get resources or knowledge out of the system so it's doubly painful.

So ya, I'm incurring a lot of AIP for no gain, this is probably going to come back to bite me later and if I lose, this is the point where I lost.



Now, plans.

Well, I have gate raided everything except one warp gate into my homeworld and Urnashwi in the middle left.

Dindicvin was fun. (The Mk IV on the bottom right of my empire.) In addition to a warp gate it had both a Nuclear Eye and a Warp Gate Guardian. I gate-raided it though and got it done.

Next up is actually capturing Ulkilxi (top left of my empire) as that is where the 3rd shard is.

After that, finish scouting. I still have not decided where my 5 cities are going to go as those 5 unscouted systems in the top left of the map could still screw me over for spire city placement.

After that, return the 3rd shard and then with the additional spire ships that gets me, knowledge raid as many Scorched Earth systems as I can before destroying them.

I'm hoping to be able to k-raid 4, but I'm realistically expecting to hit the wall sometime during the 3rd system and only get part of it's 3k knowledge.

After that, eat the AIP and destroy the rest of the scorched earth in my cluster and then setup my 2 chokepoints. One is going to be FUmu in the center, the other will be Sojer or Dindicvin.

Depends on spire city placement as both chokepoints will be getting a spire city for defensive purposes.

Anyways, AIP is going to hurt.

Only destroyed 2 datacenters so far and I'm looking at another 200 AIP to finished clearing out my side of the map. Considering I am at gametime 08:15:00 and AIP 213 that is getting high.

Even if there's another data center or two in the top area I have not scouted, that is still going to be an AIP of 400 by the time I'm setting the chokepoints up.

Considering the last game I won I finished with an AIP of 260 (including the 100 aip for each AI Home Commmand), this is probably going to be the highest I've ever pushed AIP, and by a lot too.

Anyways, it is actually pretty straight forward for now, the crunch is going to come when I k-raid. I really need that knowledge.

D.

[Diazo]

Okay.

Apparently the second shard being so easy was just the AI baiting me.

I've now failed 3 attempts at the 3rd shard recovery.

Stupid Spirecraft Siege Towers.

Because my homeworld has so many wormholes, I went with a long range defense built around fortresses and missile turrets, with grav turrets to lengthen the engagement time.

Siege Towers have radar dampening, on the first attempt the angle of the warp point it entered from, and the relatively short range radar dampening, meant it reached my home command FFs without even being engaged by the forts I'd place there to prevent that.

Having said that, I may have to K-raid before returning the 3rd shard if this keeps up.

The siege towers are annoying, but I'm simply being swamped with ships. I'm not sure exactly, but it's in the 1500 to 2000 Mk IV fleet ships being spawned during this shard return.

I have Missile Turrets Mk II, Fortress Mk I, Mini-Forts, Fighters Mk II and Acid Sprayers Mk II unlocked and only 3,250 free knowledge left over.

I'm not sure if I even have enough units to place down to survive this, even if I could place them all at a single chokepoint.

As it is, I'm having to split between two chokepoints and it is not going well.

I'm still going to keep trying, I have a few tricks left to try. Notably mines and warheads.

I think I can move a fortress to my homeworld and replace the defenses in that system with mines.

That fortress was setup to delay pursuit, but there are only two warp points in that system, so I know for sure the path the AI ships will take so mines should work there.

As for warheads, AIP is pretty much a non-issue for me this game. I'm going to hit 400 AIP around the time my second Spire City goes up so 5 or 10 aip from warheads is not a big deal.

We'll see if I can get over this hurdle on the weekend, with shifting my units around I'm going back 20 minutes or so of gametime every save-scum I do.

D.

[Aeson]

I would suggest moving every scrap of static defense you can to your homeworld. Set up minefields to damage and delay shard pursuers, and tell your fleet to either group-move with the shard or control it so that it follows the shard. Losing other worlds probably won't matter since your fleet will evaporate rather rapidly, so you won't need to worry so much about a brown-out or black-out, and you likely don't have the military strength to prevent one, either. Other than minefields and minifortresses, forget about the other worlds you have. If your homeworld survives the recovery operation, you can rebuild them, and if your homeworld falls they don't matter.

If you are concerned about the energy supply for the recovery operation, I'd suggest building a bunch of Matter Converters on the Homeworld to use for the duration of the shard recovery.

For the fleet, I'd recommend getting as many of your starships and standard fleet ships built as possible, and I might recommend unlocking Bomber IIs, or taking a world with an ARS for the extra ships.

A note about the response forces - they pick a target, and don't divert from their course until they reach and destroy that target. Thus if you have long-ranged ships, you can sit them to one side of the likely path for the response force and bombard as the fleet passes by. Ships which cause engine damage might be useful in this role, but I can't remember if engine damage affects the speed of ships in the response force before you kill the leader or not. While this won't help against ships with radar dampening, it will at least let you park a bunch of ships at long range and damage or destroy some of the other ships in the response group (and with Plasma Siege Starships, the splash damage might affect the radar dampened ships).

Edit:
One more thing - if you didn't already know, response forces only have the high group speed for as long as the lead ship is alive. If you can destroy the leader of each group (or of a few of the groups, since your fleet won't last that long destroying lead ships of response forces), you'll give yourself a little more breathing room because the ships in the response will spread out. Destroying even more warp gates than you already have will also help, since it pushes the response spawns further away, but it depends on how tolerable you find the AI progress increase from doing that.

[Dichotomy]

Okay.

Apparently the second shard being so easy was just the AI baiting me.

I've now failed 3 attempts at the 3rd shard recovery.

Precisely. The easiest recovery is immediately followed by the hardest.

The siege towers are annoying, but I'm simply being swamped with ships. I'm not sure exactly, but it's in the 1500 to 2000 Mk IV fleet ships being spawned during this shard return

Well, if their not mkV, then a couple EMPs will really ease the recovery. Riot IIIs are also awesome.

One more thing - if you didn't already know, response forces only have the high group speed for as long as the lead ship is alive. If you can destroy the leader of each group (or of a few of the groups, since your fleet won't last that long destroying lead ships of response forces), you'll give yourself a little more breathing room because the ships in the response will spread out. Destroying even more warp gates than you already have will also help, since it pushes the response spawns further away, but it depends on how tolerable you find the AI progress increase from doing that.

Killing the lead ship also cause the exo to become threatfleet. This can be good or very, very, bad.

You might also want spider turrets.

[Diazo]

All good suggestions.

I'm going to experiment tomorrow, but I'm probably going to start by unlocking Bomber Mk II and Basic Turrets Mk II, I think I have the knowledge for both.

I'll keep Spider Turrets in mind, but I'm not going with them on my first attempt because I have a warp gate adjacent to my homeworld and gravity turrets already unlocked for the slow-ships-down feature.

Also going to have to move 2 forts to different systems. That is going to kill my economy and eat up a lot of game time. 

D.

[Diazo]

Okay.

Ultimately it took tossing everything into my homeworld.

And I mean everything, took me 40minutes of game time for my economy to scrape enough resources together to rebuild everything I'd scrapped and moved to my homeworld.

However, I fought the wave off with minimal diffictulty with the concentration of force in my homeworld.

The issue was getting the shard to my homeworld. With the RNG's continuing hate I had this lovely message box:

Survey operation will complete in 01:55
1,200 Fighter to Ulkilxi in 2:10

And yes, Ulkilxi is the system that I am surveying for the 3rd shard....

Thanks to that, the shard warped into my homeworld with 8% health left, just a little close.

I just sacrificed 3 systems to do so, my economy is destroyed from matter converters until I get those 3 energy collectors back online.

Just have to clean out this lingering threat that is handing around, it's only 800 ships.

Now I have to rebuild and finish scouting, I have my first spire colony ship under construction and still have not finalized my spire city locations.

I'm not sure I have an economy at this point, it is more like a black hole really.

D.

[Aeson]

Good job recovering the shard. Have fun building the city, though. 30 minutes, minimum*, for hub construction, but once the rest of the city goes up the world is almost by definition a fortress world.

I'd suggest placing the city as close to a wormhole you don't want the AI to get through as possible, or as close as possible to something in-system you want to protect (like a Zenith generator or an Advanced Factory) - that will allow you up to six Spire City Shields on top of the wormhole, and all the weapons of the city are right there, too. Or you could try the 'kill on entry' approach, but even fully built Spire Cities don't have the firepower to kill exo-waves as soon as they come through the wormhole, and it makes it that much harder to get to a fully built Spire City.

*If you have an insanely powerful economy, you can cut this down. I don't think you have enough of an economy to do so, however. With the resources of 11 homeworlds and five average worlds, and the assistance of 100 mark I engineers, you can drop that to about 5 minutes, but even with that level of income you still run out of resources before construction completes, though there is enough income that the construction isn't seriously slowed. You might have enough of an economy to occasionally put one or two engineers on the job to speed things along a little, but it's probably a better bet to reserve any excess income and resources for maintaining your defenses than for speeding the construction of the city.

On the plus side, now that you have a Spire colony ship (or will shortly), you can begin considering whether or not the first city should have one habitat module and three reactors (larger Spire fleet once the second city goes up) or two habitat modules and two reactors (greater resource income from the city). This decision can also be changed later, if you're willing to spend the resources rebuilding a city module or two, and if you go for five cities it doesn't really matter because you can only get an extra shipyard every second city. Each habitat module provides 300 metal and 300 crystal per second, which from your last screenshot is about a third of your current net income.

[Diazo]

I am really looking forward to that resource income from the city, I need it badly.

I'm still a long way from getting it built however.

I'm actually not sure what is going on now.

I've got the spire colony ship started, I've destroyed the last of the Shard Chase ships and I've got most of my fleet rebuilt, but this means I've just been sitting back and waiting.

While I've been doing this, I've got about 200 ships being added to threat every 15 minutes that eventually just wipe me out via threatfleet behavior.

I assume it is the special forces, but I can't figure out why they would keep heading in my direction.

Currently stumped at the moment.

D.

edit: Okay, think I've got it.

Because a Scorched Earth planet is useless, even a command station I build there will not produce any resources, I have not bothered to actually build a command station in the destroyed systems down the left edge of the map.

Therefore, they were technically still AI controlled even though there was not a single AI unit left. Apparently one of them was flagged as a special forces route and so the special forces reserve was trying to reach the world, except mine was in the way so the special forces ships were 'encountering' human forces and being turned into threat at that point.

I've built a command station in every destroyed system and I'm not seeing threat from nowhere any more.

[Winge]

edit: Okay, think I've got it.

Because a Scorched Earth planet is useless, even a command station I build there will not produce any resources, I have not bothered to actually build a command station in the destroyed systems down the left edge of the map.

Therefore, they were technically still AI controlled even though there was not a single AI unit left. Apparently one of them was flagged as a special forces route and so the special forces reserve was trying to reach the world, except mine was in the way so the special forces ships were 'encountering' human forces and being turned into threat at that point.

I've built a command station in every destroyed system and I'm not seeing threat from nowhere any more.

Odd--I thought that Special Forces could not 'join' threat, even if the planet they were on is destroyed.  In any case, it'll be a bit more calm without that additional threat.

[keith.lamothe]

I believe special forces never pick a non-AI planet as their target, and try very hard to not path through a non-AI planet to get to their target, but if their target/path is set and then they get a path that later includes a non-AI world, ships already enroute may not "get the memo" until later.

[Diazo]

Le sigh.

If it's not thing, it's another.

I get my fleet 75-80% rebuilt and then I get hammered.

Leftover threat hanging aroung + AI wave +CPA = 4,000 ships.

I have 5 planets exposed to AI systems and only my homeworld has defenses worth noting as it has all my defenses.

The other 4 planets have just a pair of mini-forts each. The other defenses got wiped in the shard recovery and I rebuilt my homeworld first.

And because my economy is cratered from the rebuild in progress from the shard chase, I have do not anywhere close to enough resources to move any defenses of note out of my homeworld into other systems.

I have not totally given up yet, but this is looking bleak....

D.

[Diazo]

Hmm. Let's do this!

....

Game Over.

Alright, what about this?

....

Game Over.

Grrr, take that!

....

Game over.

Well, one last try.

....

Game over. (The AI really means it this time.....)

So ya.

Rolling a Scorched Earth on the random AI was just too much.

I simply fell behind the resource curve and never was able to dig myself out.

Here's where I ended up.



I left up the resource counter to show why I think I lost. Those P9 systems down the left side of the map are the scorched earth systems. I don't even get the resources from the command station I've built there. Note the white system in the top left of my empire, I never even get the chance to rebuild that from losing it during the 3rd shard return before I get hammered.

Anyways, economy. Thanks to the scorched earth,  I have 11 systems total and have a 19 metal and 15 crystal resource nodes total (including my homeworld).

Just in my captured systems, which there is 10, I have 22 resource nodes. That's only 2.2 nodes per system. If I remember the last time economy came up, the "average" nodes per system came out to 4. Also add in the loss of income from command stations which produce nothing in the nuked systems (I have 6 of those) which is a minimum of 24 of both metal and crystal (for a military station Mk I).

Those two factors combined mean I had at an absolute minimum 25% less resources incoming then I should have. More realistically I think it was closer to 35% less resources incoming but I'm not going to bother actually crunching the numbers.

I then tried to run a Fallen Spire game that demands a high resource income to get anywhere.

Ya, I was done as soon as the game started I think.

The only bright spot was the acid sprayer. I'm actually quite please with how that unit performed for me. Cheap and with a polycrystal attack bonus it was key in knocking out bombers before they could knock my stacks of FFs down. (I had 9 FFs, including 2 Mk II, over my home command. I was not losing it to a direct attack.)

Anyways, I still want to finish a Fallen Spire game, so time to go pick up the pieces.

D.

[Hearteater]

Maybe the scorched earth effect (same as the nuke?) shouldn't prevent CS resources from being produced.  It would still be massively brutal without that.

[keith.lamothe]

Good work sticking it out that far   Yea, Scorched Earth... I don't think it's really balanced in any circumstance (the disabledaitypes file is good for that), but particularly not for FS.