Low progress game, mad bomber + parasite feeder (8.3) [done]

[Kjara]

Here's the starting map

Notable settings are:
Realistic hubs - 80 planets
No Astrotrains
1 Ai progress per 5 mins
Fast and dangerious
Mad bomber + parasite feeder
8.3 diff
Starting ship: Munitions booster

Whats going to be different from what you might expect:
Not going to kill a single warp gate.
Probably not going to take more than 8 or 9 total planets.
Should be able to keep the ai progress <100(ideally <50) up to the point where I am within striking distance of both ai homeworlds.

Decided to try something new this game, mass snipers turrets at the start supported by munition boosters.  Also going to mostly use my munition boosters mk 1's for defense(boosting turrets).


Launched my first attack at about the 30 minute mark with about 80 each of mkII fighters/bombers/cruisers, but all this attack had to acomplish was to secure the area around the wormhole of an adjacent planet.


Once I secured that area, I built what I've come to term as a "turret ball"(actually a picture of the 2nd one I built and I don't have the missile turrets up in the picture yet):

I generally place them at about this distance from the wormhole to my planet.

I generally try to put them on tier I or II enemy planets, and they usually consist of about the following:
10 laser mk 2's
10 mrls mk 1's
10 basic mk 1's
10 missile mk 1's
1 counter sniper
1 mk II energy plant
1 mk I engineer
1 mobile construction
(and 1 sci vessel until I have all the knowledge for the planet)

The advantages of these are many fold.
1: They allow me to build a mkII power plant on the planet, meaning if I have enough of these, all of my energy generation is at the most efficient rate.--Will occasionally lose one or two, but just need to keep a few extra on low power mode for these times.
2: They keep the wormhole cleared, so when I want to travel through it in the future, I don't have to lose troops there.
3: They bleed ai troops(both wandering troops that venture into the system and any troops that the ai spawns on the wormhole).
4: They act as a first defense against cross planet waves(as the wave generally attacks the turret ball before heading into the planet, both wasting a good number of ai troops and gaining me time if I need it).


By about the 1:20 mark, I've knowledge raided(mostly) and turret balled the 4 adjacent planets and scouted enough to find an advanced factory and an advanced lab.  The lab is about 4 hops away, and will be my 2nd planet.  I still need to build up my defenses a bit more(have weathered about 3 raids so far--300 mkII units at ai progress 22 is nasty), but my attack force is ready to go.

Here's what I've managed to scout by this point(P0 means I'll prob ignore unless I want to take that P1 planet at the top for knowledge reasons--P2 means I have a turret ball up, P9 is adv research, P7 is advanced factory):


Knowledge wise: I've unlocked tier 2 fighters, bombers and cruisers, mk I and II laser's, missile mk I's and mk II engineers.
Current KTL: 768%--partially due to the fact that one of the ai's has infiltrators which die like crazy to snipers
Save is attached if you want to check anything out.

Edit: Feel free to ask questions/make comments if my reasoning for actions isn't clear.

[Kjara]

Heres a minor update:



Pushed through to taking the first lab at around the 2 hour mark, netting myself spider's.

I was able to a good bit of scouting to my south, but havn't found anything interesting down there(besides one data center that was next to the advanced lab that let me push the ai progress back down to ~30).

Finally caved in, and combined my knowledge raid on the mk IV planet to the nw of my first lab with some wormhole clearing to get scouts past and discovered my 2nd advanced research facility.

The plan is to rebuild(lost most of my fighters and bombers on the IV planet) then jump those 3 hops to take that planet next.

I've been using my mkII's offensively(and some mkI munitions), and a good chunk of my mk I ships at my homeworld for defense.

Knowledge wise I've unlocked flagships, mkIII fighters and mkIII cruisers.  Sitting on 5.5k knowledge, but will prob unlock basic turret mk II's and MLRS mk II's soon, what else will prob depend on the next new unit.  Munitions mk 2 will prob appear soon though for traveling with the fleet as my mk 1's start getting tied up for defensive duty.

KTL is still at 771%, it was up to >900% at one point, but dropped due to losses on the mk IV planet.

Edit: Save attached again.

[RCIX]

With your knowledge i'd opt for MLRS MkII's and Raid Starships. Properly healed bettween raids, those suckers can take out an entire planet with minimal resistance. Plus, they're great against turrets and forcefields (unlike flagships).

[Kjara]

Yeah, I usually grab raids right at the start.  I find they don't scale quite as well to the end game(but they do make the early-mid game quite a bit easier).  I want spires/zeniths for the end game so the flagships are a choice that is somewhat useful now(but less so than raids), but mainly a jumping off point for later and since knowledge is likely to be tight, I'm probably be skipping raids this game.
The other point is I feel they deserve at least a minor hit with the nerf bat, so I try not to use them every game .

Edit: If I get a really poor mix of unique units, I'll prob end up grabbing raids anyhow.

Heck, mabee I'll even go dreadnoughts at some point(haven't built one of them in 5 or 6 games), should be at least semi-useful against the bomber starships.

What I'm leaning towards right now is munitions II + mk II MLRS.

[Kjara]

5:30 mark:

Heres what the galaxy looks like at this point:



I've taken 2 more advanced research labs(unlocking eyebots and bulletproof fighters) and discovered one more.  I probably could take out one ai homeworld now, but going to avoid doing so for progress reasons at least till I find the other one.

There have been a few annoying cross planets attacks or raids that have taken out a turret ball(or usually what happens is they take out the power plant, the counter-sniper, the engineer and the mobile builder and most of the short range + MLRS turrets, leaving before they kill many of the missile turrets or lasers.  Its a simple matter of slipping a mobile builder back up there and replacing the losses, usually don't even have to involve any of my fleet.

I've had horrible luck keeping my advanced research stations alive(big fan of this semi-recent change).  While building up my defenses on the latest planet I managed to lose both of my most recent ones to a pair of starships that slipped by me, a zenith and a bomber mk III.  Ah well, at least they distracted the starships long enough for my fighters to wear them down and I didn't lose my recently built command center.  Its easy enough to raid with a goodly number of normal sci's anyhow.

Knowledge wise I've unlocked MLRS, munitions II, and both levels of eyebots as I needed more scouting and decided to use them for some datacenter raiding near the ai homeworld

My plans are to finish knowledge raiding around the two labs I just took and then to move into the lab to the sw, while scouting and raiding with my eyebots.

[laxrulz777]

Eyebot datacenter raiding... I had NOT considerd that.

[Velox]

     It works pretty well except for the cloaking booster thing - try it, you'll like it!

[Kjara]

Actually, I managed to raid a IV planet with tier I-III eyebots and not only kill command center, but also run around and clean up all the guardposts and wormholes after all the defenders streamed off to die to my turrets, data center raiding with eyebots is very feasible (haven't managed to get a colony ship there yet though .  If you can get at least 100 or so of them to a datacenter it dies in about 2 volleys(or about 6 seconds), so your losses are mainly from wormhole stealth detectors or guardposts you run too close too(or microfighters, scouting against an ai with microfighters is a pain).

Onto the update(just shy of the 7 hour mark):

Finished my knowledge raiding up in the nw while I used my eyebots to clear most of the data centers up there. Then I moved on to the other lab over there(middle left).  Left one data center alive as I managed to lose my eyebot fleet when it was at ~20% and it didn't seem worth the losses to get them back up there, I'll clean it up later if needed.  Also explored enough of the sw to know that the 2nd ai homeworld is there, the p5 world down there has 5 data centers, and thus must be next to a an ai homeworld unless x has changed the formlas on me recently.  As I mentioned earlier, I also sent the eye bots to the se corner, cleaned up a data center or 2 and an entire tier IV world that had an advanced lab.

Ship unlock from the lab I took to the west was infiltrators.  As much as I love them, there goes my KTD ratio(well the eyebots are already killing it .  Its down to about 600%.

On the plus side I'm not sure exactly what my ai progress value is, but its somewhere around -50(well its showing up as 30 since thats the current min, but the real value is ~-50). From the last time, when my progress was sitting at 31 I've killed 2 command centers(+20), 1.5 hours(~+20) and 6 data centers(-120) = -50.

Knowledge wise I've unlocked Tier 2-3 bulletproofs and infiltrators + short range mk II and missile turret mk II

[Kjara]

And for the finale:



The last hour was pretty much cleanup.  I went after the bottom ai first, and took out about 5 or so data centers enroute.  After killing it I rebuilt for about 10 mins, then rushed the top one.  I had prepped the top one by clearing the route(guard posts and ion cannons on planets to it, and the ion cannon on it were dead). 

Final KTD was 422%

Sadly, my modified score(in the high scores table) is lower then it was at the 5 hour mark(even with the win since my ktd at that point was 895%.

Number of ai command centers killed 5 + 2
Number of command centers built 4(Never did get around to taking that last advanced lab)
Number of warp gates killed: 0
Final ai progress(I think it was about 50-60, showed up as 80 so I think I pushed the unmodified slightly over 350)

And heres my total tech unlocks:


This was actually my first successful 8.3 level game that I've played to the end.  Also the first game I've raided quite so extensively with just eye-bots.  Questions and/or comments are very welcome.  Save is again attached(though my infrastructure has taken a beating, I stopped rebuilding things once I saw that I would have no problems winning).

[laxrulz777]

Would this strategy have been possible without the deep data center raiding you were able to do with the eye-bots?

[Kjara]

Yeah, though it would have make the game take at least 1-2 hours longer.  The 4 data centers I took out next to the nw ai homeworld with my eyebots were only 3-4 hops away from one of my planets, so I could have gotten in and hit them with my main force.  My losses would have been higher(since they were both tier IV planets with ion cannons), but I had mk III cruisers/fighters, mk II bombers/munitions and enough knowledge for 2 more mk II/III units(so unless I had gotten completely useless units from all 3-4 labs(cough vampires , I would have had at least 2 more mk II/III units by that point).  That was close to the force that I hit the homeworlds with(mk III infiltrators + mkIII bulletproof fighters), since the eyebots are not that useful for the actual assault on the core planet(esp with infiltrators to take down shields).

The 1-2 data centers in the se I would not have killed unless I wanted to divert even more time(and I would have done so had I really needed that 5th lab), and I would have had to waste at least 1k more knowledge on mkII scouts(and possbily on mkIII), but it would have been doable.