I believe he means that there was an artillery golem attacking his homeworld during an exo.
That's lucky though. Artillery golems aren't to hard to deal with. I had to savescum a couple of times, because a single Hunter/Killer would just rampage through my homeworld whenever I didn't have my fleet there. I guess that's just my punishment for playing high AIP games 
Correct. It was an artillery golem leading up the exo-wave. However, in a higher AIP game I'd have more buffer. This dude just rammed right into the homeworld and started pounding out the pain from the furthest wormhole. Depending on chosen target, it will die before you finish response, they take forever to splatter with a MK II max fleet.
Also, NOOOOO don't give up now! You're nearly there!
What gave you the impression I was nearly there? I have a minimum of five more worlds I have to take before I can even damage a homeworld guardpost, 4 CSGs and a Rebel Colony to save.
From the looks of it, you should be able to handle those waves from the Core Raid Engines. I only had 1 Core Raid Engine (and an AI eye), but it was giving 700-800 mk IV ship waves due to my high AIP.
It's not a question of can I handle it; it's a question of do I want to. I can see laid out before me an epic 36 hour game that will not be fun, but will be an eternal stumble and slag through countless Raid Engine waves. Assuming a linear base for increases, and an average of 150 ships per engine at 25 AIP, 5 planets will cost me ~100 AIP. That's 5x the value. I'm not sure why you were only seeing 700-800 MK IV ships but I'm expecting to see that at 125 AIP per Raid Engine. Each. That's waves of 2100 ships at MK IV every four minutes I'm operating anywhere near that homeworld. Even worse, now that I remember, I still needed to take one more ARS too, so it's 6 planets.
You should certainly be able to handle these. I forgot if you play with spirecraft but martyrs work wonders.
I don't. Really Spirecraft should be called 'Play with martyrs and some additional random stuff'. I'm not a fan of the capital ships you can build from it.
Warp jammer on the coreworld + turretball on the wormhole (Heavy beam cannons, lightning turrets, gravity turrets and tractor turrets) and using your fleet to finish up will work as well. You just need to make sure you retreat your Armored golem / part of fleet in time from the homeworld to deal with another bunch of raid engine waves.
Really, at that point why bother with the Warp Jammer. I'd WANT normal waves to hit where I had to move the turretball, as I've done in the nine through ten game. The problem is I have no control over the rear planets while all that's going on, nearly my entire fleet would be dedicated to raid engine stoppage. The idea of slipping the arty golem over the edge, popping a few things, and retreating sounds like it could be fun but there's a lot of things immune to artillery golems afaik, and this isn't the point where I really want to experiment with it.
The armored golem may not be very good in crowd control, but it is certainly capable of luring small pieces of threat back to your fleet, slowly killing guard posts one at a time.
Agreed. I just don't want to spend hour upon hour upon hour just banging my head on the wall.
See, here's how I can picture this campaign actually going down:
Hit Northwest 7 with the fleet and soak the MK IV raid while I'm in there popping the Orbital Mass Driver and two of 3 Ion Cannons. Once the Raids hit the fleet ends up destroyed. If I'm LUCKY I can get the Armored Golem out, but really for survivability I'll leave it at home.
Recover from taking out 3 guardposts on a coreworld and hopefully having popped the majority of the Ion Cannon concerns. Rebuild the entire fleet, which will take about 20-30 minutes.
Return to Northwest 7 with the armored golem and the main fleet. Cleanup anything close and retreat to the nearest system, to hopefully spread the raid engine attack out a bit and to take them on away from their support network.
Rebuild again from the defenses. Another hour because I'll have lost a system or two.
Retreat to the homeworld. Get the other CSGs, save the Rebel Colony, figure out a way to get more power (need to take a Zgennie and defend it), use about half my research on new turrets and the rest trying to bring up a MK III for MK IVs since I have to take the Fact IV. Begin assaults into the Southeast (with no expectation of new golems except the artillery one which is on a CSG planet) and neuter everything but the homeworld, to keep AIP down.
This will take about 3-4 hours barring significant mis-steps.
Defend from whatever exo is going to pop up around this time.
In the middle of all this, more and more of my fleet is going to be relegated to wave defenses, as I can't whipping boy and they are barely holding as they are in the 25-45 AIP range because they're spread out so far. So I'll be working with half-fleets, and needing to micro the defenses.
All of that's doable.
Then, I head back to start conquering North 1. With half or more of my fleet on response for the worlds keeping the rest active, and having NO TURRETS to work with, I'll be fighting against Raid Engine Spawns trying to kill the main fleet who are actively in the Homeworld system trying to clean up. However, there's that AI Eye, which I never bothered mentioning has 3 FFs over it. Artillery golem needs time to work. With my Raptors in 3 other coreworlds cloaked in corners trying to soak the Raids off into the Aether and leave the main fleet alone, they might buy me the time I need.
About that time, say 1/5 of the MK IV raids I've loosed hit the homeworld.
Then another 1/5
then another. Defense fleet is in ruins. Warning are going off everywhere and I'm still trying to kill some blasted Beam Guardpost with most of the fleet in ruins and two golems on kiting duty running for their lives.
Nah, thanks. I'll pass. I don't have the turret power to defend the systems I've got from significant assaults and I don't have the firepower to handle a triple Raid Engine with the expected amount of ship dump they'll deliver. The Center Crosshatch start has really got me fouled up here. I can either defend from the waves or defend from the Raid Engines, but I don't see a serious way to defend from both that doesn't require me moving so slowly as to be simply frustrating instead of a pleasurable game.
