Hey guys, I had previously asked for some tips on picking the right difficulty that would be fun and challenging for my second game (my first was 6/6 and felt way too easy), and decided I might as well post some of my newbish exploits and mistakes here.
I'm playing 7/7 against random easier AI, they ended up being a sledgehammer and a tank. As far as ship unlocks for them, I've seen teleport raiders, tank, munitions boaster, armor boaster, and space tanks.
I started with raptors - I love those little guys.
I have avenger and astrotrains enabled. Medium spirecraft, Hard golems, rebels, human colonies, and Dyson Spheres all on. Though as of yet, I've seen no sign of Dyson Spheres, or any other humans.
I'm two hours into the game, and only just saw a comment about an Exogalatic force at 50% strength coming in. Which I'm going to defend, then strike out against a few juicy planets I've picked out. As you can see, I've explored my entire side of the galaxy, there was only one ARS (Lancpeboat), which also had an armored golem as well as some asteroids on it. Naturally I went out to claim it, and ended up getting spire gravity ships as my unlock. I'll use the mark 1 ships in place of having to unlock the gravity turrets, which seems nice. I've not seen how they fare in combat, so that should be interesting to see. I already fixed up my golem there, and once I strip-mine all the asteroids (making some penetrators there at the moment) I'm going to completely pull back and let the AI just have it, not worth defending really.
The P1 level planets both had data processors, which I took out already. The P7 planets both have data processors which I'll take down, but other than that there's nothing on the right side of the map worth taking. I haven't taken down the warp gates on Tiza, or Nowanwep yet, I'll do that so any hits against my homeworld have to go through Iusvo, which happens to have a mark IV ion cannon defending it.
In terms of other unlocks, I'm Mark 2 in my fleet ships, my raptors, and my spire gravity ships. I have Mark 3 scouts, and mark 3 crystal/metal harvesters. I've been building econ-stations, but I'll likely replace them with logistics when I have more planets.
Once I do set out to attack, I'll be claiming the P8 planets, which have fabricators. Netho has Mark IV blade spawners, Raenei has Mark IV Star bombers and a regenerator golem, and Owsuo has Star Warbirds, and an experimental translocator. I will take Netho and Raenel, Owsuo I'll save for later if I decide I need the help. I'll probably just take those two planets, then scout out further rather than developing a big secondary core of planets. Though I'm toying with the idea of taking the whole area, as it will probably be easier to defend - I doubt its worth the AIP to do. We'll see.
First, I'm going to concentrate on defending this exogalatic strike force, building up defenses, and warp gate raiding so my home base is safer. And this post is getting a little more long-winded then I intended, so I'll cut this post off for now. I'm sure I'm missing something, oh well!
The post where I asked for advice on what difficulty to play, and initial "how my game went" is right over here:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,10323.0.htmlEdit: I called the data processors AI-cores. Fixed now, but oops! My bad on any confusion there.