Starting spot is in arm of X again, 2 wormholes connected to home. Plan is simple, capture both surrounding planets as quickly as possible and build turretball of doom on the planet that connects me to the rest of the galaxy and use fleet to hybrid-neuter my pocket and take what i need from there.
Harvesters MK II , HBC, basic turret MK II , grav turrets and raiders MK II unlcoked at start. Both planets fall fast. All HBC, MRLS, MK2 basicturrets, and some of the other turrets built to protect me from the hybrids. Leech starships, fighters, raiders, bombers, raid starships maxed. ARS spotted 1hop away from my new borders. Tractor platform as default, great, i take the system and start building some platforms. Hybrids start amassing similiarly to the previous game. There is no way i can hold versus all those hybrids if they all attack at once but luckily they seem happy just amassing there.
Scouting around and destroying hybrid facilities with raid starships are my main goals for a while. I get plenty of attacks from neinzuls, and marauders and my defenses in both ends take them in easily. Regular waves in my turret ball get zapped in matter of seconds. HBCs are pretty amazing.
First hybrid attack on my turret ball, and it falls. I sent my fleets in and start building fleetships there , but the planet falls. It seems the hybrids don't want to use all their might at once , this attack only had about 50hybrids in it and i purge the system and rebuild. Turretball +fighters/bombers isn't enough, so i reinforce with 2 ranks of Raiders and add some more turrets.
Shortly after i do this hybrids attack my other planet and destroy it . Ugh, rebuild.
I research MK raid star ships, there are just too many blackhole generators and too much stuff to destroy.
Hybrids kill a command station again, rebuild.
At 1hour mark i get super hybrid alert. Oh already? uhoh.
I've killed 20-30 hybrid facilities at my pocket of galaxy . And most of the brances have just straggler facilities, one has more and i spot ARS there 2hops away so i decide to take most of my fleet and take it out and clear it out. While i do it hybrids attack. Apparently around 30 hybrids were refilling somewhere in my space and decided to attack while i was away. Main fleet is attacking a planet with black hole generator so i can't pull back. I pull fleet from turretball and.. well hybrids attack there. Just about every ship i have is dead , save scum time.
I advance slower this time around, with just raid ships and leeches after defenses are cleared. Hybrids attack my turretball and those 30 hybrids come at the same time to other end. Resistance fighters jump in the non-turretball end and manage to save it . Turret ball's fleet support survived mostly , but command station got destroyed, again.
I get military station MK II upgrade to help with defenses, never upgraded stations before as i didn't think them worth the K. Works pretty well, even alone MK II can take out pretty good amount of fleet ships. Only problem is that it translocates things so very efficiently, and my fleet in FDR goes all over the place trying to catch them. Of course i realise this in middle of hybrid strike and i lose the station yet again.
Around 1:30 i've almost taken the 2nd ARS(shield bearers as default, no need to hack) and suddenly i notice an alert about hybrids building something. Thats pretty fast!. I've never seen the results of this so i kinda start to panic. After 15minutes of scouting i havent found the darn thing so i buy the mark IV scout starship and quickly find the super hybrid.
Only problem is the hybrid army standing between me and it...
