So I just pulled of a Godlike win against the AI. Steam stats record this as my first victory (some of my other ingame achievements steam hasn't picked up yet, as I had to add the game to steam then migrate the data files).
But I digress.
I pulled of an AI 10 Turtle + AI 1 Turtle on a 10 planet map by owning 8 homeworlds.
The AI 10 was taken out first, requiring some 6000 ships in transports--to avoid the 400 permamines guarding the wormhole--and another 3000 waiting on the safe side of the wormhole to catch retaliation. After that cooled off* I rebuilt my fleet and assaulted the AI 1 with 4000 ships in transports (I'd scrapped my previous 30 transports to cut energy costs) and sent another 3000 through the wormhole (most of those died within minutes). In both cases the Core Force Field Generator was blown to pieces (ok, 10% health remaining) from the first salvo. From there it was a long haul of "seconds per frame" as the ships reloaded and fired as fast as they could.
By the end of the game I'd built 14,224 ships, lost 10177, and killed 5725 and unlocked First Victory, Paragon, Turtle Soup (bronze, silver, gold), Godlike, and Win a 10 Planet Map.
Owning 80% of a map at game start is really really powerful.
*It took me three tries to get this far. First attempt was 4k ships and did 41% of the damage required to kill the force fields and the core station (retaliation killed my command stations). Second attempt used EMP bombs on the system prior to the assault in an attempt to disable as much as possible, unfortunately this awoke the six golems the AI had control of, which more or less rendered my 6000 strong assault not strong enough (and I died to the retaliation of having killed the core).
