Let's Play a Little Game

[dotjd]

I've tried my hand at the 10/10 challenge recently.

Settings:
50-planet realistic map, 29394838 seed
10/10 tank AIs, no handicaps
only Zenith expansion enabled
minor factions: colony rebellions, resistance fighters, marauders, zenith traders, zenith devourer, broken golems hard
ai plots: 2xAvengers (I am almost certainly going to regret this; my last game had them on and I didn't check before I started this one)
Disabled ship types: teleporters, parasites
Default AI Progress increase is 1 AIP/hr.  Game's gonna be long and grindy, I'd rather not get stomped too badly.



I picked munitions boosters as starting ship because, while they may not be my favorite bonus ship, they're probably the best, at least in the base game + zenith expansion.  Being able to literally double your attack power right off the bat for 2.5k knowledge is amazing.  The map itself is pretty good too.  Homeworld is easy to defend, and you only need to take one planet before the map opens up and you have a choice of routes out (or planets to knowledge raid)

I picked Tank AIs because I was reading the wiki and stumbled across a very interesting set of numbers.  If I'm reading the numbers correctly, Tank AIs send half-strength waves and reinforce only 30% as much as other AIs.  I'm not sure whether that page is still accurate, or what the rationale is for tank being so easy, but I went with it because hell, the challenge is to beat 10/10 with AIs that send waves. >_>

A bunch of other people are playing these games, so as a rough comparison: at beginning AIP waves hit the min cap sometimes or were generally < 90 ships.  At 30-50 they ranged from low 200s to 300s, and now that I'm up around 80 I'm getting high 500s.  If this is half as hard as it should be… oh well.



So I've taken the first couple planet.  Priest's Pity was mk. iii or iv, can't remember.  Munitions boosters made it not hard.  There was a fort, but it did me the favor of killing all the munitions boosters I sent down with my bombers… except for one, so my bombers still had 1.7x attack.  Take that.

The next planet, Pontifex' Seclusion?  Had an ARS.  No idea how to use Vampire Claws though.  They just seem to die.  This seed was exceptionally kind to me, as Brennan's Triumph held a second ARS.  But I won't get to that one for a while.  The problem I ran into is that I started trying to knowledge raid immediately.  On difficulty 10 that is rather hard, as many people have discovered.  It turns out that the game spawns (difficulty*numberOfResearchStations) ships every (11-difficulty) seconds.  And the spawns are 1 higher than the default tech level, which is already II…

I replayed the beginning of this map several times, actually, trying different combinations of knowledge unlocks.  Do I want fortresses?  How many?  Is Mk. I sufficient, or do I go up to II?  Do I want Engineers Mk. III?  Can I get any fleet ships besides munitions boosters up to II?  How the hell am I supposed to power multiple fortresses off of 3 planets' worth of reactors and still have a fleet?

Tips on Knowledge Raiding on 10/10, trial-and-error edition

At first, I tried just dropping two forts and 50 snipers.  Forts are powerful, surely they can do the job?  Then I got my engies to work on two research stations and sat back and watched.  Wow, that's a lot of ships.  But look at my forts go.  These ships are gonna… wait?  They take multiple hits to kill?  but but butttt---

And that was where I learned that the spawn rate is proportional to the number of research stations you set up.  Tip #1: only put up one station.  Then I tried three forts.  I had to power off my fleet to have the energy, and I had almost no turrets as a result.  That went better, but I still lost.

In the end, I took a fourth planet.  Family Rhonkar had A: a data center, and B: a black widow golem.  For the resources to build the fortresses at all, I hit up Mk. III Economic stations and plunked those down.

Black widows are really good now.  The paralyzing tractor is perfect for this kind of thing.  The range on those is huge, around like 12k, so you grab and paralyze the ships just as they get in range of your turrets, but before (most of) them are close enough to fire.  The final setup was: max cap of basic turrets mk. ii + 50 missile turrets mk. i + near-max cap of snipers + 2 forts + black widow.  Also typically threw in some more turrets, was about 50 lasers at first but 5.25 got released and so I switched to hbcs mk. I later.  The turrets were all at +100% attack courtesy of some munitions boosters, although the golem and forts are immune afaict.  I'm positive this was somewhat overkill, but I couldn't say how much or what the actual minimum is.  The fortresses actually seemed to be doing less damage than everything else, although they probably get a lot more vital when you don't have a black widow handy 3 systems out.

So how did this go?  pretty badly.  You may remember that I had marauders and resistance fighters on.  That was a very bad decision.



You are looking at 3 -- yes, three -- resistance fighter spawns.  Initially this appears to be a good thing!  Appearances are deceiving.  Their presence draws enemy ships away from your turret ball, lowering your dps.  They do not do nearly enough damage to compensate.  And when they kill your fighters?  You get hit with 2-300 extra ships that you can't handle.  gg.



Marauders, meanwhile, just spawn behind you and wreck everything.  I did some heavy savescumming to try to manipulate the spawn away (since it takes half an hour of sitting around doing nothing to gather the resources for two forts, and the turrets are practically worth another fort by themselves), but it didn't work.  Ended up having to wait to initiate the raiding until after my fleet butchered them.  And then of course when I hit 2k knowledge from that planet, they spawned again.  Thankfully I capped it out before they wrecked me.  They do seriously insane damage to forts…



In the end, I let the AI spawns deal with them.  When the AI looked to have an overwhelming advantage, I stuck my black widow's head back in the system and gathered up 200 ships and brought them back out to my waiting fleet.  Dragging that fight out was fun.



Here's what the map looked like three hours in.  P9s are ARSs (three within 4 hops is really nice, thanks rng).  The P5s are planets with something interesting, but I ended up not taking either.  Note: that 503 wave is actually a really really small CPA.  That more than anything else makes me think using Tank AIs is cheating and doesn't count. =<

To control reinforcements, I spent a lot of time neutering every system connected to one of mine.  Well, it was a lot of time before I got the black widow golem.  With a little bit of micro, the widow can take on whole systems by itself rather easily.  Ultimately, its main danger was from Raider Guardians.  They do 1-2% hp of damage each salvo, and repairing the golem is expensive.  And they have radar damping, so they always get at least one salvo off.  And the golem has a long reload time, and it always seems to fire its salvo at everything besides the raider just before the raider gets in range.  So the raiders get 2-3 salvos each.

I'm bitter.

The second ARS gave me zenith bombards, hell yeah.  I also captured an ion v in the system, so I spent some time fortifying it to make it a kinda lame whipping boy.  I haven't gate-raided all game to save the AIP, instead just figuring that I won't mind losing any system besides the one guarding my homeworld.  But the ion v is a good enough asset that it's worth defending.

And that planet's only been hit by a wave once so far. =(



At around the 4 hr mark a broken golems exowave hits.  Yeah, the same exowave that dropped everything to dance around after a lone scout in an enemy system.  The wave was small in terms of numbers, only about 100 ships, but it had an artillery golem (the new ones are lovably scary, 1hko a starship every 8 seconds), a bunch of high-level starships, and fleet ships of assorted marks.  A lot harder than the exos I'm used to seeing on diff 7.  I end up chasing it into its planet and lose 3/4s of my 500+ ship fleet (for something that people keep saying is squishy, that golem took a solid minute of focus fire; probably should've taken out its fleet first), but I pull out with the win.

Taking the next ARS planet (the P9 that isn't mine) was time-consuming, since I had to neuter 4 planets (that planet itself and the 3 connections) before finally popping the command station.  But when you have a ship with 200 paralyzing tractors, its gonna get done.  I got snipers for my effort.  hell yeah, another good unit.  I grouped the snipers and bombards together and used them as a mobile turret collection back in my home column.

Knowledge unlocks up to this point:

Mk. 2 Scouts, Fighters, Bombers, Missile Frigs, Munitions Boosters
Mk. 2/3 Engineers
Mk. 2/3 Economic Command Stations
Basic Turrets Mk. 2
Heavy Beam Cannons Mk. 1
Fortresses Mk. 1
Gravity Turrets

I'm loath to spend 2250 knowledge on scouts when I have perfectly good mk. ii scouts lying around, but getting them any further is going to require more micro than I feel like using.  So at this point, the only thing to do is carve out some tachyons.  That reveals two more ARSs, a superterminal, a couple other golems and the remaining datacenters.

Since I've passed the halfway mark in terms of planets I've scouted and portions of the galaxy I'm essentially done messing around in, I ignore the ARSs for now and head off for a planet with a cursed golem and a shield generator.  It can't resist a black widow and my fleet.  Of course, my fleet has to immediately run back to stave off a wave, but it can't be helped.  I then build a spacedock over there that churns out only scouts, and once the cursed golem comes online I send them out to hit the datacenters and neuter some systems on the way.

In the process that carves more scout paths, which lets me fill in the map.  Yeah, I'm still missing one planet, but we all know what it has to be.



P9s are planets that have, or had, an ARS.  Yes, that last ARS is right next to a core world, ugh.  Amusingly, it has a broken botnet on it, which would have been really nice 3 hours ago.  The P8 is the superterminal.  I have the core shield gen overlay on, so planets with B-secondary shields have factory ivs (there's two, CS-B1).  P0s are the 4 co-processors.

Planets seem to be averaging around 200-300 ships or so right now.  That's pretty low, but AIP is low and I'm spending a great deal of time neutering any planet that goes on alert.  And there are a lot of those, which siphon reinforcements away from everything else.  That planet up at the top with 105 ships?  It's been at 105 ships for 2-3 hours, hasn't been reinforced once since I've had a scout there.  And I just blew up a bunch of guard posts in the top-left cluster.  Waves are getting troublesome; static defenses aren't up to holding off 600+ bombers, so my fleet ships are all back home fending stuff off.  I want that AIP further down, but I've already hit the data centers. =/

I'm nearing the end of the middle game, and most everything is scouted, so it's time to sit down and think about how to clear off these core shield gens and what remaining planets to get.

I've taken out the E network.  D is annoying; only two planets have it and neither of them are worth taking.  Gonna have to decide which to take soon.  The superterminal world has a C, so that's taken care of.  B is advanced factories… do I want one, or two?  And I only need one more A, so I could conceivably skip the core-world-adjacent ARS and its botnet if I wanted to.

The next thing to do is pretty clearly to get the non-core-world-adjacent ARS two systems away.  It also has an artillery golem on it, which I'll pretty much be relying on to solo the avengers with its ridiculous dps (why did I leave those on, argh).  After that, though?  I'll be at 100 AIP, so it's probably time to hit up the superterminal.  I don't know how bad the spawns will be unfortunately, so I'll have to go all-out and have a giant-ass turret ball, 2-3 forts, and a couple golems there.  Hopefully mark v ships can still be paralyze-tractored!  Will probably need to wait until the zenith power gen finishes building on my homeworld.  Silly traders didn't visit until like 3.5/4 hours in. =(

I also have to ask myself how far to go with the superterminal.  IDK if I'll be able to hold it forever, but hmm, what would be the optimal point to quit with it?  I'm looking at a minimum of 3 more planets taken, so that's 60.  I'll hit the bottom homeworld first, and that's about when I should get the last co-processors, so -60 for that.  The homeworld itself will be… +110 or so.  If I negate that and bring my AIP down to a saner level, which is probably -30 or so from the current baseline… I'll need about 140 aip reduced with the superterminal.  Which would put the floor up 14, which would leave me at around 40-50, where I want to be.

Except I don't know the spawn algorithm, and 140 seems… let's say a lot.  That would involve leaving it on for 35 minutes.  That turret ball is gonna have to be big.  I'll just go for as long as I can and see where I end up.

From there I knowledge raid some more.  How much?  idk.  I probably want mk. 3/4 bombers at least, but if I want mk. 3/4 everything that's gonna take a while. =/

And then beat the game.  It sounds so simple when you write it out like that.

Hopefully I'll have this game done in the next 2-3 days.  I'm cautiously optimistic.

Lingering thoughts:

This was funny.

The bottom homeworld went on alert for a bit right after I initially scouted it, and I have no idea why.  I only sent scouts, no transports or anything.  Could resistance fighters have spawned in response to my scouts dying or something?

The names of the two AI homeworlds: Patriarch's Keep and Perpetual Sin.

What determines the AI floor normally?  Is it 1/10th of total positive progress or something?

And most importantly of all, I thought Mk. 3 Engies teleported?  Why aren't mine teleporting =((  oh wait I turned teleport units off, hahahahahahaha awesome.  I bet the botnet wouldn't actually reclaim ships even if I did grab it, then, since I also turned parasites off.  get punked.  yeah, I'm skipping that ARS.

[Hearteater]

Very nice!  I anticipate two things from this:

1) Next Patch: Floor for AI Type wave modifiers added, probably 0.75 at least.  Although the Tank and Core seem oddly low so they might get buffed generally.

2) Keith will remember this:

Tractors on non-scaling ships do need to be made to scale with unit caps, but we don't have time to implement that just yet. Bear in mind that when that scaling comes, the current number of tractors will be the _highest_ value: corresponding to "high" caps, because that's what the caps were before scaling was added (when the tractor numbers were established to begin with), so it won't make them any better. For now, enjoy

[keith.lamothe]

A very enjoyable read   Even with the tank AI think, that's pretty good play.

1) Next Patch: Floor for AI Type wave modifiers added, probably 0.75 at least.  Although the Tank and Core seem oddly low so they might get buffed generally.

I'll probably just set The Tank to 1.0 instead of 0.5, since I can't for the life of me figure out why it would be 0.5 on purpose.

The Core?  Hah.  Just try 10/10 against two The Core's.  I dare you.  Which would you rather face in waves: MkI with 1.0 multiplier, or MkV with 0.5 multiplier?  Granted, MkV waves have another <1 multiplier to bring their numbers down, but they're 5x as strong as MkIs.

2) Keith will remember this:

Tractors on non-scaling ships do need to be made to scale with unit caps, but we don't have time to implement that just yet. Bear in mind that when that scaling comes, the current number of tractors will be the _highest_ value: corresponding to "high" caps, because that's what the caps were before scaling was added (when the tractor numbers were established to begin with), so it won't make them any better. For now, enjoy

Maybe.  I don't think the black widow was giving an undue advantage.  Just the kind of this-is-a-really-awesome-unit-that-can-change-the-game-if-used-right effect we're looking for.  Is there a German word for that? 

And the resulting exos would probably be giving him a harder time if they weren't so fixated on scouts/whatever

[Hearteater]

Wow, I completely forgot Core's were Mark V.  That certainly explains the 0.5.

[keith.lamothe]

Wow, I completely forgot Core's were Mark V.  That certainly explains the 0.5.

Yea   There's a lot of AI Types so I might be wrong, but I think The Core could be the hardest to actually beat.  Obviously two scorched-earth AIs is potentially harder since you only get your starting worlds, but I was thinking of non-cheesy combos

[Wanderer]

Very impressive.  I have a feeling the Tank AI types are making all the difference here, but impressive none-the-less.  Looking forward to your continuation.  I've also realized I may be playing on too large a map.

[dotjd]

re Tank AIs; while they probably do need to be rebalanced I wouldn't be averse to making them have, say, a .75 wave modifier and .75 reinforcement modifier. >_>  I dunno, I've got nothing against an explicitly easy AI type.  While they seem comparatively tame, I should also note that their bonus ship types are guaranteed to give you grief.  Space Tanks are basically a way for the AI to send bomber waves more often than usual, and Armor Ships?  They have a 4x bonus against structural, meaning force fields.  And they have enough armor and hp and come in large enough waves that killing them all is hard, esp. if you don't want them to flee. 

I think I should have taken the trouble to set up a proper whipping boy though.  I had decided that killing the warp gates wouldn't be worth the AIP, which was kinda true, but not really.  And then when I got a golem I was all hey, my fleet can be in two places at once, meaning I can use it to defend against waves, which was also kinda true!  But it made other things a lot harder.

Resigning yourself to losing unimportant command stations sounds trivial before you create a new game, but when you depend on economics stations mk. 3 for income to repair your golems or do, well, anything, that decision loses its luster.  If I were to start the game over again, I'd take a slower, more cautious approach, spend the time/aip/knowledge to set up a whipping boy, and consequently knowledge raid a lot more afterwards to make up for it.



Anyways, I played a lot more today.  Let's continue!



So I grabbed the last required ARS (at the selected P9 planet).  I got deflector drones for my trouble.  Hmm.  DPS looks not terrible, decent range, bonus to artillery is rare-ish, and the laser reduction bonus is great if for no other reason than to stop Laser Guardians chewing through my fleet like a hot knife through butter.  I can work with these.  Pop the core gen on the planet, and the A network comes crumbling down.

As you can see, I also finally managed to fill in the second homeworld.  It doesn't have a core raid engine or core cockroach post (now that I think about it, the latter might be Neinzul expansion only), so I'm free to ignore it for now.  The other scouting-related thing I did was get a scout on that core planet.  And 800 ships.  Why.

I've been noticing the core planets/homeworld spontaneously alerting themselves, and I have no idea why.  It's annoying as hell.  I'm not sending anything down there or molesting them or anything, but nope.jpg.  AI Alerted - Reinforcement is likely.  Sigh.

Waves are getting pretty bad now.  I keep getting 700 bomber, or 700 space tank, or 700 armor ship waves.  They chew through force fields like that, and when I gather all my fleet ships or both my golems to confront them, they break and scatter through various other systems.  I thought they were supposed to stay in a system for a minimum of 30 seconds after warping in. =(  But yeah, the situation is rapidly getting untenable.  I already have 108 AIP and that's only going to get worse.

So let's hit up that superterminal.



This is the setup.  Not pictured: full caps of munitions boosted mk. i/ii snipers and bombards, and a set of 50 sniper turrets.  The spawns get a fraction of a second to fire a shot before they get grabbed by the paralysis tractors.  I could do this all day.  No, really.  I started out with 108 AIP and the floor was... I think 49ish.  It started by spawning mk. iiis, I believe, either them or ii.  After I sit there for a few minutes, floor and effective AIP meet at 5...9?

And then I sit there some more.  Spawns eventually make their way up to 40-50 mk. v ships, which still don't stand a snowball's chance in hell.  I eventually quit after banking 60 free AIP, leaving the floor at 75.  I would have run it up a little further (although it turns out that would've been suboptimal), but there was an exowave at 97% and dealing with this at the same time was probably not a good idea.



This is the exowave.  The golem got an upgrade; it's an armored one this time.  Thankfully I have an artillery golem of my own.  Now I just sit back and see where they're going and.... hey.  They're dancing again.  You don't mean to tell me... yeah, they locked onto a scout again.  Awesome!

On the previous exowave, I just scuttled the scout.  The wave still hadn't done shit a minute after, so I ended up just dumping my fleet into its system at a disadvantage, and getting chewed apart.  This time, instead of scuttling the poor thing, I ran it back to the system that my artillery golem was idling in and kept it a fair ways away from my command station.  And yep, after a period of time, I see the exowave trundling along the same route the scout took.



They don't even break away from it when they enter the system and things start shooting at them.  They kept trying to hump the scout, and as a result my artillery golem got free license to snipe (armored golem: dead in 3 hits.  starships: dead in 1), and my ion v and cursed golem took out everything else.  It was a... remarkable battle.

AIP is low enough for now that I can split my fleet ships up and use only half for defense, which gives me 3 main fleets.  The two golems and both halves of my fleet ships.  The two golems I send off knowledge raiding again.  Getting mk. iii of the triangle ships and riot mk. iis was going to take 3 additional planets' worth of knowledge.

(can you see the error?  hint: i was already going to have to take 3 additional planets.  so not only was the raiding unnecessary, since I had everything I really wanted in the palm of my hand, but I also completely forgot to get the knowledge off of the next planets I was going to take.  unforced errors are often amazing like that)



Don't even need to bother with forts this time; two golems, snipers/bombards, m boosters, and a bunch of turrets are sufficient.


These raids are really photogenic.  A: finally, someone else gets wrecked by marauders, and B: that's a lot of resistance fighters.  I actually had some left over!

If you'll look back to my previous post, there was a CSG-D planet in the middle of my systems.  My defense fleet popped it in the meantime.  Imagine my surprise when A: the alarm post on the planet didn't self-destruct, or get captured, or anything like that, B: it remained under the control of the AI, and still acted as a warp gate, C: it counted as an enemy and prevented the extractors from auto-building, and D: damn thing costs 5 AIP to kill.  That was a nasty surprise.  Knowing all this, I probably still would have taken that planet instead of the out-of-the-way one since this one gives my defense fleet a nice double-speed zone to move around and defend with, but still.

I chose to take the bottom homeworld first, since there was a CO Processor on it.  As such, my attack fleet went and took the factory iv in the bottom-left of the map.  Speed-build a bunch of space docks, plunk down 20 engineers and some intra-galactic warp gates for fabs and stuff, and hey, new base.  Drop a fortress for defense, pop the final CSG (all networks are now down)... and then the choice.  This system is 3 hops away from the homeworld.  Adjacent to me, and along that path, is a world with another broken black widow.  It is, of course, next to a core world.  Do I activate it?

Yes.  Yes, I do.  The core world is up to 900 ships by now, I want more firepower, and it seems to be alerting itself regardless of what I do.   Plus the fact iv needs time to pump out mark iv triangle ships.

This is all happening simultaneously, by the way.  Knowledge raids + csg-d capture + nabbing the factory iv.  The AI isn't sending very hard waves right now, as you can tell.  At one point it even sent no less than 72 mk. ii electric shuttles to a world with a fortress.  Scary!!!!  !! !! .

In the end, everything finishes, and I'm sitting on the doorstep of the core world with 2 black widow golems, 1 cursed golem, 1 artillery golem, and 1200 various fleet ships, along with 300 fleet ships hanging off back near my homeworld.  The core world has 1100 mk. v ships.  It's now or never.  Let's pop these bastards.

There are 200-400 ships hanging out on the other side of the wormhole.  First order of business is to have the widows crack the door open and poke their heads in.  They fill their tractors and immediately jump back in the wormhole, bringing the AI down however many ships, and leaving the gates wide open.  I flood in.

It's over quickly.  I neuter the planet, spend a few minutes repairing the golems.  While I'm doing this, I send my raid starships out on a suicidal mission to hit the AI CO processors.  One of them I hit with the golems while they made their way over to the staging area.  One of them is on the AI homeworld.  The other two are 3 and 5 hops deep.  Thankfully, I cleared out a lot of the cruft in the systems with my golems while carving scout paths (and even neutered a couple, while I thought I was going to capture the adv. factory up there), so my poor little unupgraded mk. i raid starships are up to the task. 



Success!



The assault on the AI homeworld is extremely chaotic.  Reinforcements happen often, there's (thankfully lower-level) ions everywhere, I keep hearing this weird sound effect that I don't recognize (an orbital mass driver I flat-out missed for a couple minutes...), and I don't recognize the guardposts, so I have to pause a lot and decide whether to send the golems or the fleet after them.  Thankfully, I have enough powerful long-range attacks in the form of the golems that staying on the planet is more a battle of attrition than a battle for my life.



The artillery golem is thankfully very good at taking down core force fields.  And, when my golems trundle over to the vulnerable AI home command station and fill it with lead, it's good at taking out the Avenger too.



I get about 500 fleet ships out intact before the avenger pops.  Displaying my AIP numbers here for a lark.  That's a lot of progress and reduction.

From here on out, the AI decides to get really nasty.  The remaining three waves are a giant pain in the ass.  This first one shown here thankfully targeted my factory iv planet, which is producing lots of replacement ships and has my intact ships heading towards it already.  The next wave is 700+ armor ships, which hit just after the CPA and wrecked three planets that I was depending on for funds to repair my golems and bring my new one online.  Seriously, armor ships are tough little buggers.

Oh yeah, since it was on the way to the final homeworld, I also took the planet with the second remaining black widow golem, and bring it online as I repair my other ones.  That brings my total up to 3 black widows.  And they cost a lot of cash!

Taking that world bumped my AIP up to 138.  That turned out to be very bad.  Handling the CPA, bringing my golems back online and replacing my fleet depleted all of my m+c reserves, so right when I'm sitting on the second core world's doorstep I get a new message.



I can't handle that.  My defense fleet is ~300 ships.  That world is very far away from my assembled mass; in fact, it's the buffer zone, one hop away from my homeworld!  I've been relying on the fort there for defense, but of course it can't touch anything polycrystal.  This is very bad.  I don't even have time to send ships back if I wanted to.

hey ai, go eff yourself.  I'll kill you first!  The only thing I can do to defend is spend the last 1500 knowledge I have on basic turrets mk. iii, drop a ton of gravity turrets and tractors down (but not too many, because I have no cash), and go fast.



I've got 254 ships.  Can they do it?!



In an extremely surprising turn of events (I didn't even savescum), it turns out the answer is yes, they can.  After killing the command station, the bombers spent all their time shooting down rebuilding turrets, instead of my fleet.  So... my defenses actually stood up.  The AI fumbled, but can I seal the deal back at its homeworld?



My golems get dangerously low on health (I keep not noticing orbital mass drivers, and they weren't at max when heading in to begin with), but after a pitched battle, massive long-range damage won out over 500 mark v ships, leaving the homeworld mostly clear. 



But my artillery golem wasn't in the right hotkey, so I left it two hops back!  Now it's gotta trundle all the way to the homeworld at 38 speed by itself.  In the meantime, everything worth it on the homeworld is under core force fields.



It's almost there, but 4 golems can still do a lot of damage to ffs, even if they aren't doing 100 mil a shot.



It arrives as the last core post is about to explode.  Just in time to bring the command station's shields down.



so clooooooose



DONE



I pop the avenger again, since I can.  Oh, and apparently a rebel colony wants my help now.  Do they really need any more than what I just did?



The game win song is sweet, and totally worth it.  Final state of the galaxy: battered, but still standing.

I think I'll try going for the GUDare game (8 hw fallen spire achievement) next, although idk if I'll post an action report about it.  I mostly just wanna see what hunter-killers and motherships do; haven't seen one of those yet.  I'm also not sure if I actually completed the 10/10 challenge or not, achievements notwithstanding.  Maybe I'll try a similar game to this with different AIs, to see how much worse it gets.  2000 bomber waves are gonna suuuuuuck.  That's what whipping boys are for I guess.

But yeah, thanks for reading =)

[Wanderer]

*claps* Congratulations!  Nicely done.

A word about the 8* HW game.  You want a Maze C type map with all 8 of them in a corner, or no waves (Shield Ninny, etc).  You literally will NOT have time to consolidate your worlds before you get zinged in an 8* game if you don't.

You can probably pull it off on an X or Tree map, as well.  Just make sure your back is to a wall if you go with waves.  And for the love of the holy, go Low Caps as a minimum, the new Ultra-Low is handy too if you're not taking super low cap fleet ships.  Your CPU will die a horrible death if you don't.

[Hearteater]

Epic!  Very nicely done.  So, I take it you like the new Black Widows?  And Artillery for that matter.

[keith.lamothe]

Bravo!

*stamps "bug report: somebody beat 10/10" on a piece of paper and puts it on the todo list

I've already closed the The_Tank 0.5 wave multiplier loophole; it is an easier type but mainly through the fact that it has a 0.3 reinforcement multiplier; you would have had to pile through a lot more AI ships otherwise.

Also fixed the exos trying to be too clever.  With player golems being stronger (it does my heart good to see them so valued) I may need to crank up the broken-golems-hard exo budgets, say, 15%.

If you do try the 8HW 10/10 thing; first have your CPU write a will, but then tell us how it went even if only briefly

[dotjd]

I did try booting up an 8HW game (after spending 1 hour looking for a combination of 7 units on the map select screen -_-).  Got into exactly one pitched battle on 8 HW and went "yeah, no".  As it turns out, it takes a while for an AI eye to churn through 1700 ships when 40 of those ships are riot controls.  The lag reminded me of trying to play homeworld on a 200 mhz celeron back in 2000.  And yes, low caps were on =p

re: the tank, so the low wave mult was unintentional and/or overlooked but the reinforcement mult wasn't?  Huh.  That makes a certain amount of sense, but I'd never have guessed it.