I just lost a game in the best way yet.
It has reached my attention that the zenith mirror is insanely effective against just about everything, and always have ridiculously good kill/death ratios. They are even fairly effective against frigates, their counter.
SO, I started a new game, 80 planet, difficulty 8, zenith mirrors as bonus units.
Unlocked Zenith Mirror MKIII off the bat. Built almost nothing but zenith mirrors and flagships.
In the first two hours I neutered every planet within 4 jumps of my homeworld, mostly playing completely macro (ie, sending 500 mirrors onto a planet with FRD and then coming back 10 minutes later to move them onto another planet.
This was going very well indeed and I was showing a kill/death ratio of about 900%, when I suddenly received a taunt from the AI:
'Why do you throw your lives away?'Naturally, I lolled- 'What crap you talkin, son? I'mma kickin aaasss' and went to look for my vast fleet of Zenith Mirrors... only it wasn't there. or anywhere else. I franticallly checked the planet map, but my entire battlefleet had just.. dissappeared.
The last planet I had send it onto was an MKIII world that had about 100 defenders. My destroyed fleet was about 600 ships. I stared at the incomplete planet display of the MKIII world- I had no scouts on the planet- and ran my eye down the list of ships within... fighters... bombers... frigates... eyebots... viral shredders... not more than 20 of each. My brain continued to tick over without reaching any conclusions and shrugging, I went back to planet to rebuild my mega mirror fleet of doom.
two minutes later,
1400 MKII viral shredders blasted through a wormhole and onto my homeplanet and it all became terribly, terribly clear.
zenith mirrors have massive massive HP, and all units do 40x damage to zenith mirrors... thats
40x the multiplication speed of viral shredders. My vast fleet of zenith mirrors had successfully turned about 30 viral shredders into one and a half thousand thanks to my awe-inspiring attentiveness.
As an added bonus, my entire homeworld defence force consisted of... Zenith Mirrors. After a few minutes of battle, there were almost 1600 Viral shredders. I self destructed my last 200 zenith mirrors before they caused further spread, but that left 1600 MKII Viral shredders about a minutes distance from my completely undefended command center.
I managed to construct 40 MKI flak guns before they arrived, and about 80 fighters.
long story short it... it didn't work.
It was a great game, I felt thoughroughly outsmarted. I love the way that zenith shredders will target and chase mirrors in favour of any other kind of unit. I know its just the damage bonus at work but it gives a neat illusion of intelligence (and leads to horrendous disaster if you pro it up like me)
