The leech fleet

[Srogg]

1st post, so "Hello" to everyone

I got AI Wars via Steam recently as a relaxing "after-work-late-night-gaming-rts-experiance" and I really like it.

So I've started a campaign on difficulty 7, 2 AIs, 60 planets and some extra options after I completed the tutorial.
Things went fairy bad from the start, I have completely messed up the economy by building the big energy reactors right from the start, and from there with a very low resource income things went to worse. My home planet got surprised by a swarm of marauders after I lost "another" fleet by attempting to crack an AI planet and a few minutes later my base went "poooooof".
Ah well, bad luck... start over.

Ok, back to basics... start things slow (and READ the tooltips of economic structures and of all the units in general).

After pondering a bit I started a new game, this time on difficulty 6 to match my noob-ness.

This time, things went a lot better, I picked a starting position in the middle of a handful systems that were connected to the rest by a single node. I thought "perfect defense position".

This was my "plan"(TM):
I have invested some research points in shields and mostly starships, starting with the leech ships. Once I got a small fleet of mixed basic units and some leech ships, I went on a raiding tour through the adjacent planets.
The leech ships turned out to be pretty awesome and fun. The "usual" approach to crack a system went like this:
Send my "support group", consisting of shields, mobile repair units, science labs, mobile builder through the hole, then my fleet consisting of as many leechers as i could build and various other starships and a healthy mix of basic units.

The planets around my home system werent very fortified, and with each one my fleet grew by a considerable amount of units, as kinda everything I touched with the leechers joined my ranks. I stopped building the basic units and extended my energy reserves to supply all the converted units.

This worked almost too well, I entered each system, waited a bit around the hole, set up some counter-sniper turrets, leeched the incoming ships and knowledge from the system.

Once I researched the raid ships, things went even faster. Just hop in, raid the important structures, get back, wait for the fleets to get closer, move the converted units under the shield to repair, chase the others around the shield, all in all fun stuff. This way I have meanwhile collected an impressive fleet of ~1500 mixed units of all kinds, sure, mostly cannon fodder but still.
I usually used those units for defense and use my leech-fleet to amass more units.

I had no trouble with the resources either (maxed at 600k each), as repairing the units seemed to be a lot cheaper then the build them.

I still couldnt find any of the AI homeworlds, I have around 10 planets, AI progress is slowly growing and I already repelled some bigger cross-planet raids of 1000+ ships.
One raid I intercepted with the fleet actually got me ~80 IV Bombers, so far I am fairly confident that this will work out.

To be continued...

[RCIX]

Glad to have you as part of the community! Interesting AAR and i hope to see more
Yep if you use leech starships you instantly have a self-regenerating fleet and if you apply the latest patch then MRS's work out of supply allowing you to have a deep-raiding fleet capable of destroying planet after planet! Out of curiosity, do you own the expansion yet?

[Srogg]

Just a little update as not much happened recently due to limited playtime...

I dont have the expansion yet.

Here is a pic of the current game, about 9 hours. I started in the top left corner, took the handful systems, moved to the middle and got me an ARS and a factory from the top right systems.

There are 2 really massive fleets of each 2000+ ships, both growing that are starting to worry me, so i started to fortify the 2 systems.
I changed tactics a bit, the leech ships I mostly use for defense now to "autobuild" a defense fleet of mixed ships (whatever the AI is sending me) and I invested more research into starships.
When taking systems I mostly do hit&runs with a group of 6 raid ships, while the other starships and dreadnoughts clear the hole and try to hold it as long as possible. If things look close, I retreat or swap forcefields ( I have a backup one on the other side of the hole with an engineer, so i can swap and repair quickly).
The systems are starting to get hard to take, and there is still no sign of the home planets. I should have scouted ahead a lot earlier in the early stages of the game, by now even 4 scout starships have trouble to get through some systems.

(fingers crossed that the pic is working)...

[RCIX]

What you might want to do is do some knowledge raiding (if possible) and research the Fortress. Those things are pretty hefty beasts and can deal quite a bit of damage on a defense! combine two or 3 of them with your fleet and leech starships sitting at a wormhole, and you just might (no guarantees) be able to absorb the contents of a planet like the ones you're concerned about!