Soooo.... this is what we do. Names hidden to protect the guilty.
I'm purple. Red is my husband, blue is a friend of ours, all computers in the same room. This was an 80 planet map, 8 difficulty, simple style, double resources. Purple's on turtle duty, red's on raid/strike duty, blue's on planetary mop-up duty. At this point, we'd taken about 65 planets in an 80 planet map. We won this map yesterday. This is, I think, the fourth or fifth map we've actually finished, though we've started a lot more. We'll be moving up to difficulty 9 or even 10 soon.
I'm always sad dismantling a beautiful omni-defense after it outlives its usefulness. Other sniper turret arrangements in this game included a storm cloud and a clown face with fortresses as the eyes, nose, and cheeks. I know, I know, we're so mature.
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Here's some feedback on the Children of Neinzul expansion beta. This is from our other difficulty 8 game. Not sure what the AI types are since the save's on my husband's computer.
New mines are awesome, mainly because I don't have to ctrl+shift+click a bajillion times anymore.
I like the counterattack guard posts, which add a very interesting new dimension to the game.
X-shape is a very interesting layout. Warp jammers are very useful on those maps.
I'm not sure I see the point of military command stations... If an enemy even gets to my command station I've done something horribly wrong. However, logistics stations are awesome.
Speed boosters are almost game-breakingly good. I noticed them and immediately started reclaiming them. We'd send them to twiddle their thumbs in the corner of the current battleground planet. This made our ships zip around at mach 8, which essentially neutralized long-range threats like ion cannons and fortresses along with counterattacks.
The new siege starships are very interesting. A bit expensive in the knowledge, maybe. Nice to have a heavy killer that specifically ignores little ships.
Neinzul vultures -- these could probably use individual beefing up and halving of their numbers, or... something. Maybe they're a threat to a player that doesn't turret the heck out of planets like we do. However, whenever we got hit by waves, the game would completely freeze for about 3 seconds as the 2000 vultures poured through the wormhole and were obliterated instantly by flak turrets.
Speaking of which, flak turrets are great. Great wormhole defense.
Cockroaches are scary, but in a good way. We were laughing for like ten minutes after we broke the Neinzul guardpost.
The new homeworld guard posts are really neat, although I kind of miss the crazy intimidating looking pipe-thing that was the AI's previous home station.
Translocators are annoying to own. I started banishing reclaimed ones to the other side of the galaxy and I have a little clump of them there now. This is mainly because when I'm fighting, I want the enemy ships to stay put and die, not get carted off to the other side of the map to start pew-pewing at the my ships that were stranded by enemy translocators.
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And some general feedback....
The hardest map by far that we've actually finished was the 10 planet snake, 2 people on difficulty 8. Fun, but so painful. It wasn't really any shorter than an 80 planet map, either. It was almost like playing a completely different game.
Transports are great, but it's a bit of a pain to load a big army into transports. It'd be great and a lot less micro-managey to have a "load all ships on this planet into available transports" button, or to make spillover units seek out another nearby transport, if they won't fit in the one they're told to go in.
Astro trains are more of an annoyance than anything. We've had them turned off since after the first two maps we played, since they trip an instinctive OCD urge of "must obliterate everything". Not sure we'll turn them back on unless they change significantly.
Much <3 to autocannon minipods and leech starships.
Why does the special forces guard post have 4 million hit points now?
The scoring system seems a bit wacky overall. Seems like whoever has the most turrets or who LOSES the most guys is going to get the biggest score by far.
The most hilarious homeworld takeover that we've done is sneaking about 30 mobile builders into the planet, then building about 200 sniper turrets, all the tiers of fortresses (so nine total), several beam cannons, force fields, and a bunch of other stuff, all while the enemy's still raging at us and pouring ships through our wormhole.
This is purely cathartic, but after you "win" the game it would be nice to have a way to be able to seal those two exo-galaxy wormholes. Perhaps a technology unlocked on your second homeplanet blown up that lets you make a wormhole sealer. Then all could truly be peaceful in the galaxy...
My AI wars playtime according to steam is up to about 140 hours now.... I love this game.
