- The Galactic Capitol and the Special Forces -
With Spire City Beta built, it was time to build the next tanking location, the planet of Losuobi in cluster 2, only two jumps from Beta, which had a most wonderful property apart from its closeness: the extreme closeness of the AI entry wormhole to one edge of the map, allowing the placing of the military station immediately opposite and resulting in the longest firing range yet, taking up fully 832 of 882 possible mines to lay a three-broad track of death from the wormhole to the cluster of flak and lightning turrets.
With gravity 2 and 3 turrets in support all down the road, sniper and spider turrets, and all the mark two and three forts in support (they did have the range to cover the entire distance, if only barely), it was as beautiful a road of death as you can imagine:
Or at least as beautiful as it gets without trader toys or champion modforts. The thought of adding a Radar Jammer II to that setup, which, all by itself would ensuring that anything flying down the central avenue would not have the range to shoot the gravity turrets, thus winning extra time from the AI diverting ships to fly out to kill them, of Orbital Mass Drivers killing off incoming starships, and so on and so forth. But that's wishful thinking. Given the tools available, it was just about as beautiful as I could make it.
The Vorticular Cutlass Fabricator was not long for the world, but then, I didn't really have a need for such a close range weapon in the first place, which is why I didn't hack it.
Once this was set up it was time to sterilize Samuus in cluster 4, the planet adjacent to Beta, and the origin of the beta waves, and following that beta was completed to specifications, making Alpha and Beta full habitation/reactor cities, and Gamma and Delta full habitation/shipyard cities.
The next shard turned up on Rinyae in the depths of cluster 1, a planet that had also been the site of an earlier shard, and it was easily recovered.
Exowaves were becoming fairly large, as an example the one at 36:06:04 had 69 massive ships with 40,318S (whatever that means), but fairly easily handled so long as the fleet was in support of the fixed defenses at Beta.
Not What You ThinkSo, having recovered the fifth shard, did I immediately go ahead and build Spire City Epsilon? No, I did not. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake and I should just have gone right ahead, or, perhaps better, have glassed a handful of planets to be able to perform the first major unlock, but under the circumstances of my knowledge at the time, it made excellent sense.
The journal entries and my own experiences had made clear the ever increasing AI response to Spire Cities, and the journal entry I got after Beta, the fourth city, told me that the fifth would unlock larger hulls and advanced technology if I had the knowledge to make use of it, and that I'd have reached a level where the AI would be really, truly, pissed off. Also, I knew from the spire hub construction menu, that five cities would give me access to a Galactic Capitol, which would piss the AI off even more.
What was not clear, and understandably so as this was a warning, not a roadmap to victory, was how soon I'd need the benefits granted from that tech: How much would the AI aggressiveness increase? Would it do something really special to compensate for the human gaining this potential access? Not knowing, I decided to play it safe by accumulating knowledge beforehand, but how much?
I set myself a goal of 30,000 knowledge, which I expected to be more than enough, and began my eradication campaign.
I did not want to eradicate any planet with a design backup I might potentially want to eliminate, and as I was close to yet another AI ship unlock AIP threshold, I kept a close eye on the design backup map as I soon crossed that threshold.
The Special Forces Captain got Autocannons, which being short ranged sounded great to me, and the Mad Bomber got Protector starships.
Since the Mad Bomber almost always sent bomber waves, I did not consider this a dangerous unlock for the AI or the hybrids, but I did consider it a good unlock
for me. I had negligible experience with it in actual play, but starting a quick test game with Protectors as the ship of choice and immediately investing knowledge to unlock up to mark 3 revealed that it was a fun toy.
I wanted it!
I downloaded it!
I immediately invested knowledge in unlocking to mark 3, this adding another two planets to the total that needed to be wiped out before building my fifth spire city, and adding marks 1-4 of protector starships to my navy, configured to countering the Mad Bomber's damage types in order, on the rational grounds that the Mad Bomber was way more dangerous than the Special Forces Captain on the offensive.
The first ordinary wave greater than 10,000 ships came at 36:57:27, when the Special Forces Captain sent in a wave of mark 3 ships (766 AIP) that rather worried me until I realized that it primarily consisted of Autocannons. Considering the firing lane facing them, they didn't stand a chance.
The next event of any greater interest was my destruction of Harbi, a planet that I had failed to duly acknowledge the importance to the AI of. It contained a Planetary Armor booster, and I was merrily slaughtering its guardposts when the special forces began warping in in ever increasing numbers. I got out of there in a hurry.
Based on this experience, it seems that the special forces cap for 822 AIP on difficulty 9 is at least 112,000 ships.
To cut a long story short, I continued my extermination campaign, defeating ever larger AI waves that now reached sizes that mandated the return of my fleet to the tanking planet whenever two waves synchronized, the defenses being unable to cope alone with the 12-14k ships of marks 3-4 they faced in those situations, though fortunately still able to deal with single individual waves.
And then there was a CPA synchronizing with FS exo, but by then, it was old hat. Been there, done that, fried the T-shirt.
The Last Steps on the Road to Spire Hub EpsilonBy 37:47:30, as my fleet was out of position due to glassing a planet, and I was being assailed by enemies on all sides due to a CPA, and had to defend Beta and Losuobi at the same time, and as the special forces were becoming every more annoying to dodge due to the decreasing area they had to protect, I decided that I'd had just about enough, even if I was still 1,250 knowledge short of the 30,000.
It was time to break out the lightning on two planets at once to get the situation under control.
And then I said to myself, that wasn't so bad, was it now? Not knowing just what the hell would happen once I got started on the fifth city, perhaps I should go hack that Medic Frigate V now, that I'd been considering on and off for the longest time? It was only 149 ai response, so it should be doable without any sort of beachheading so long as I parked a spire destroyer or two on top of the hacker to shield it. It would take ten minutes tops to pull off and return.
So I went and did that, and my fleet sported Medic Frigates V soon enough, assisting the Protector and Riot Starships in keeping the rest of the fleet shipshape.
Which is how I was reminded that there was also a Needler Turret V on the planet, so my one hacked count as two, and the total HaP I had spent on fabricator hacking skyrocketed, but at least I could now add Needler V turrets to my tanking hotspot. Having now spent a grand total of 894,24 HaP out of 1343, all the hacks under 7.034-35 being moderate until now (and my increase in firepower between each hack more than making up for the increase in difficulty from the hack floor rising), the curve had finally caught up with me.
If I performed another hack at this point, I'd face a 405 ai response. NOT BLOODY LIKELY. On the positive side, given that ai response now decreased linearly in HaP gained, I was not cut off from hacking for the rest of the game: All I had to do to bring this down to tolerable levels for one more hack would be to destroy another 5-10 planets. Sure, a stiff price to pay, but those are the breaks. Nobody said it had to be easy – only possible – and I'd been hacking quite a lot.
Of particular interest is that it was at this time, at 977 AIP, that I finally accepted that my fixed defenses were no longer sufficient to defeat solo Mad Bomber waves. It was no longer the exception but the rule that I had to bring my fleet back help deal with those 10,000 ship waves of mark 3-4 ships, even when not synchronized with a Special Forces Captain wave. I had nearly every defensive tool available in the base game on that planet set up in a fairly strong defensive position, something that was utterly impossible to replicate on any other planet due to galactic caps, and even that wasn't enough. I could move the six mark 1 forts and the human modfort that I used in support of Beta to the planet, but at best that would give me a grace period that would all too soon be eroded by increasing AIP.
BE THAT AS IT MAY, by 39:08:49, after the defeat of the next synchronized CPA and exo, and with the regular waves recently defeated, I did at long last build Spire Hub Epsilon back in cluster 1, and was told to build a Galactic Capitol, the building I'd been waiting for every since I first saw it listed in the spire hub construction list.
The Galactic CapitolI built the Galactic Capitol in Spire City Beta and got a very durable seat of government with one monster of a gun attached – or perhaps it is a monster of a gun with a durable seat of government wrapped around – opinions differ.
There was so many interesting options to unlock, considerably more than I expected. I immediately unlocked:
- 12k Dreadnoughts.
- 5k Battleships.
- 3k Shields Mk. IV
- 3k HBC Mk. IV
- 3k Lasers Mk. IV
And had 1750 left over, missing the unlocks for Colony ships, Rail Cannon IV, and Plasma Siege Cannon III (for which I also lacked the prerequisite tech). Thus the 30,000 knowledge I had expected to be ample and of which I'd collected 28,750 before calling it a day turned out not to be enough in the end, 36,000 being required to unlock everything.
Though why on earth anybody would unlock the Plasma Siege Cannon is beyond me. There's no way anybody would be firing at the armour types it has multipliers for often enough that it is worth using over the HBC IV. Theoretically I guess you could use it for taking down force fields with the x10 multiplier, if you were okay with using a main weapon slot for something only rarely useful, but given its short range, by the time you'd be in range with a Spire fleet to use that weapon to take down the force field with its awesome 120,000 damage/8s, your host of Spire Frigates would be in range to range it down with their main beam weapon doing 40,000 damage/8s per frigate. Sure, it could spread 6.25% damage to each of up to 25 targets under the forcefield, but compared to the damage the HBC IV would deal in all situations? Choosing the PSC would be madness.
So either I'm missing something obvious or the Plasma Siege Cannon module is utterly worthless in all of its variants, and having an unlockable mark III only adds spite to injury.
Be that as it may, my first task was to upgrade the lasers and shields on all frontline shard reactors and habitation centres, the second to reorganize the fleet, and the third to knock over an extra planet to get the knowledge to unlock Colony Ships.
With the sheer numbers of spire ships in the fleet, the old designs for destroyers and cruisers that mixed beams, lasers, and rail cannon was passé.
Since fighting in close was so terribly dangerous given the numbers of quality enemy ships I was facing, and since I'd been doing quite a bit of kiting/strafing with my fleet to deal with the larger assaults, and since furthermore the enemy had started fielding both snipers and sniper frigates in the hundreds, I'd build the fleet to focus on that by a massive expansion of my own sniping capabilities, while still maintaining enough close range firepower to deal with emergencies, and with an overall focus on strafing alongside an enemy wave headed for a command station, just beyond missile frigate range (due to the Mad Bomber typically sending one to two thousand missile frigates with each wave).
The new model fleet would be a specialized one:
- Every ship to have a single shield, the largest that fit (same as the old model fleet)
- Destroyers to become long range platforms. That meant 2xRail Cannon I, 2xLaser II,
- Cruisers likewise to become long range platforms, with 2xRail Cannon II, 4xRail Cannon I, 2xLaser II.
- Battleships to become short range platforms, equipped with 2xHBC III, 2xHBC II, 2xLaser III, 2xLaser IV. (Total beams: 36)
- Dreadnoughts likewise to become short range platforms, equipped with 3xHBC IV, 4xHBC3, 2xLaser IV. (Total beams: 156)
What Next?I now had two different ways to win, according to the final journal entries:
- Continue building a larger spire fleet and eventually taking the fight to the AI.
- Get a final shard – which scanning revealed to be on a core world - and build a building that would make the spire win it for me by contracting all the spire fleets in different galaxies. (This would be the Transceiver victory mentioned in several recent threads.)
Naturally, I decided that I'd try doing things my own way first rather than calling in help. I had lots of room in cluster 2 to build more cities and having a larger spire fleet would be fun!
I estimated that by the time it reached 2-3 times the current size, it would probably make sense to strip all Battleships and Dreadnoughts of all HBCs of mark 1-3 and replacing them with the highest mark Rail Cannons available, leaving only the HBCIV toting Dreadnoughts beam-capable.
I projected that by that time the main beams from the spire fleet would be so many and so frequent that they would by far dominate the total close range damage output of the entire fleet (spire ships, fleetships, and starships taken together), and that moreover, with increased fleet-ball size spire ships on the far side of the fleet ball from the enemy would have a harder time keeping the enemy in range of beams unless I let my fleet fly dangerously close to the enemy, which taken together would make getting additional long range Rail Cannon capabilities a substantial improvement over marginal close range improvements. The sole exception being the HBCIV because of its huge qualitative dps improvement and ability to pick off many weakened ships with minimum or no overkill.
I know that not everybody would reason like that, and an argument can surely be made for maximizing the kiting/strafing and close range power by maximizing beams in the fleet, but I have always been a great believer in diversifying my strategic capabilities rather than focusing on single powerful approaches, and it has overall stood me well in most strategy games.
First Major Dreadnought TestBuilding the major ships took some time, but they were definitely worth it, as I learned how to perfectly strafe the incoming waves by moving back and forth along a line parallel to the road of death outside the range of most AI ship and how to kite pursuing ships slowly enough that they faced the brunt of rearwards firing spire beams.
At this point, 977 AIP, the Mad Bomber's waves typically consisted of 8-9k ships, roughly evenly divided by marks 3 and 4, so the added firepower was greatly appreciated. The Special Forces Captain was more modest, only throwing 4k waves at me, but it typically included 200-300 Snipers and Sentinel Frigates amongst its fun toys. In lieu of perfect anti-sniper coverage, I approached this issue by having all my own Sentinel Frigates, Spire Destroyers and Cruisers, and all seven forts on the tanking planet open fire on the enemy long range units the moment they spawned, this resulting in a rapid decrease in their appalling numbers.
Great fun was had for several waves until it became routine. This screenshot is from the last routine wave, where some 9,200 ships had been whittled significantly down before ever reaching the flak/lightning defenses – and the last screenshot I have from before the game turned decidedly weird.
Special Forces WTF?
This section contains AI behaviour that I do just not understand.
I
thought I had understood the rules governing the Special Forces – moving back and forth between various AI planets by shortest-path routes that tried to avoid heavily defended human planets as default behaviour, and moving in to support critical AI planets whenever human forces were present.
The problem is that what happened next fit none of those two patterns.
As I was completing the defeat of the major wave shown in the last screenshot, I noticed on the galaxy map that the special forces were entering cluster 3, all 146,000 of them (or so). Well, they'd done that before, but most of the time they stayed in clusters 4 and 5 (perhaps not surprising, as that's where the majority of AI planets were by the time).
Anyhow, I continued killing the remaining four thousand ships or so in Losuobi, and three minutes later when checking the galaxy map, I noticed that the special forces were now in Mictinhas, just one warp away, a planet with no special buildings whatsoever, and zooming in to take a closer look to see what it was doing there, I could see that it was moving towards Losuobi.
And they did invade, and once they arrived, they proceeded directly towards the command station, just like all the regular waves had done, the primary differences being:
- That there were ten times as many enemies present as I'd ever faced at once before.
- That the framerate took a significant beating.
I fought them for two minutes, strafing the formation just as I'd done all other waves, but it was clear that nothing I had could stop them or even seriously inconvenience them. This much threat (1,7 million after I'd killed the first four thousand ships) would roll over all of my defenses and my fleet as well if I tried to stop it.
All I could do was harrass the special forces, but would that even matter?
If the special forces could, for whatever reason, choose to just go attack a planet of mine for the fun of it, then all my defenses were pretty much meaningless. Lightning or armoured warheads were capable of killing off a few thousand ships, and my fleet backed by fixed defenses would never be able to kill anything but a fraction, should that many enemy ships push an assault.
All was not lost as I had one final weapon my arsenal:
Nuclear warheads.
At a cost of 50 AIP and rendering a planet unusable per pop, they'd be able to kill all but the mark 5 ships.
Thus, if the special forces continued pushing the assault after their soon-to-be-completed utter destruction of all my fixed defenses in Losuobi rather than return to their old habits, I did retain a chance for victory, if a slim one, so long as I was willing to move swiftly for that shard/transceiver and build up a stock of nuclear warheads
With this in mind I decided that since all was not necessarily lost, though admittedly the situation looked dire, I'd begin building up nuclear warhead stocks immediately while proceeding on the assumption that the game was still winnable. I had an incoming CPA 8 minutes away and the Fallen Spire exo charged to 54%. Of more immediate concern, having just defeated a Mad Bomber wave, I was undoubtedly due a Special Forces Captain wave (err, one of his REGULAR waves
), and the one warp-border I had with the AI was minutes from being overrun, with no realistic chance of being rebuilt so long as any AI ships remained.
A new location for tanking was urgently needed, and under the circumstances, I couldn't think of a better time to test a theory of mine – that while there was a global cap of only one spire colony frigate at a time, that probably meant that unlike the first five cities, I didn't have to build a hub to level 2 before building the next hub.
I immediately set out for the closest planet I could reach in cluster 3 with an adjacent enemy warp gate, which was three jumps away Beta, the planet of Gorgar. Not that there were any enemy planets closer than that available in cluster t3, mind you; Only in cluster 4 were there any enemy planets closer than 3 from beta still in AI hands due to the peculiar geography of Beta's warp lanes and my extensive eradication efforts when accumulating knowledge.
Gorgar was the planet where I'd in what now felt like the distant past downloaded the Flagship and Youngling Vulture plans, and four minutes after deciding to break off my futile defense in Losuobi, with another four minutes to go for the CPA, I was beginning building basic defenses with my fleet in support, greatly aided in my swift movement to the planet by the protected logistic stations set up earlier during the eradication campaigns in the bottom half of the cluster.
The one AI planet bordering Gorgar had an Advanced Factory, so was one of the planets the special forces really cared about, but under the circumstances, why care? The only important thing was getting a planet for the AI to set waves to.
Now, I had had a lot of resources to start out with, but with the destruction of the Losuobi military station, the flow of salvage had dried up, and I had an urgent need of resources. Building full caps of turrets and marks 2 and 3 of forts doesn't come cheap! At CPA +3.22, I was down to 6 million metal with only one mark 3 fort near completion and the remaining forts merely started, so I popped the distribution node in Gorgar.
Which is why, for the first time in the game, I found a
real need for distribution nodes! I hastily popped the other seven distribution nodes in areas under my control, gaining enough metal for another one and a half mark three for for the paltry price of 8 AIP.
Gorgar was now strong enough to deter or at least slow down any incidental push from the threat fleet and any wave spawning in the immediate future would have it as a target, so it was time to return my fleet to Beta to find out just what the special forces had in mind.
If the special forces did not continue pushing their assault and returned to something like business as usual, the rest of the forts would just have to be built as resources allowed, and in this situation, I'd also build my sixth spire hub directly in Gorgar on top of the command station, to provide additional firepower.
If they
did push the attack, it would be time to nuke them till they glowed, then shoot them in the dark, and then pursue a campaign of desperation to finish the game as swiftly as possible, nuking any obstacle that couldn't be immediately rolled over and
truly burning the bridges in case of temporary setbacks.
They didn't push.
After completing the utter destruction of all defenses in Losuobi, they returned to Mictinhas, the planet they came from, and began patrolling back and forth in AI territory as usual, going first for Zinglaos in cluster 4 (a frequent choice).
I have not yet found found out what the hell made them decide to go attack a planet that had been mine for over two hours.
I have considered whether the AI had first been drawn at random to go to Mictinhas, then having reached that location, had decided that a shortest path to somewhere in cluster 4 would go through Beta, and then, having found itself in Losuobi, decided to take out all opposition before moving on to its target, but if that had been the case, why did it turn around after destroying Losuobi and return the way it had come?
Also, a weakness of this theory is that while cluster 4 is only four warp jumps away from Mictinhas via Beta, it is also possible to reach the same planet in cluster 4 via four warp jumps in cluster 3, all of which were under AI control at the time. Deliberately trying a shortest path going directly through two extremely heavily defended planetary systems? It is obviously strong enough to do it, but it is something I hadn't seen before. If it did that, why did it not react to my earlier moves in cluster 2 at the ARS planet after bottling up the cluster 2 entrance with Beta? Though considerably smaller at that time, the 50-60k special forces were surely as much stronger than the defenses and fleet as constituted at that time than the 147k special forces were stronger than my current defenses and fleet, so looking at proportional strength estimates, why act in one case and not the other?
So it remains a mystery, and one I would dearly love to know the answer to.
Extreme City BuildingBe that as it may, I had survived. Not knowing why the AI acted the way it did or whether it would do it again, it was unclear whether I'd be better off pursuing one victory type or the other, but it having been graphically illustrated that the only threats that really mattered in this game were the special forces and the frequent regular waves, the CPAs being more of an added annoyance on top of the infrequent exowaves, which by themselves, while nominally dangerous, were easily dealt with by having my entire fleet present when they showed up.
The one thing that was clear was that regardless of where I'd be going from here, I'd need more cities, and I'd need them quickly. I'd need resources first, as the construction of Gorgar had utterly drained reserves, but I'd use every resource from now on building building cities, one after the other, until I had enough force that... Well, that the special forces would still be able to roll over the fleet, if I am honest, but at least it would be able to give a better account of iself, should it come to that, or perhaps even be enough for a strike on the AIs home systems backed up by nuclear arms to deal with the special forces.
Gorgar, the tanking planet, became Spire City Zeta at 40:37, some 36 minutes after the invasion of Losuobi by the special forces started. Having an AI neighbour, it only became level 1, but as I had expected that did not prevent me from building another spire colony ship to start the next city. Zeta got three shard reactors, all in a long range configuration of shield and Rail Cannons in all other slots, and placed such that all three shields would overlap the military station on the planet. (Which amusingly enough was a military 2 station for the first hour or so of its life, as I'd been somewhat pressed during the initial construction and didn't spend time on reassigning one of my existing mil2's to mil3 – this only happened once things cooled down). 22 force shields – all mark 3, and all normal mark 2, and four out of six hardened mark 2 – defended the clump of gravity 1, lightning, and flak turrets that made up the penultimate defense.
Neama, the last open city spot in the home cluster, cluster 1, became Spire City Eta at 40:50, 13 minutes later, with an exo charge of 75%.
...both of course required significant resources to build up, but when they completed, my spire cities were:
Alpha, Beta: L2: habitation centre, 5 reactors (mixed armaments)
Gamma, Delta: L2: habitation centre, 5 shipyards (mixed armaments)
Epsilon: L2: habitation centre, 1 reactor, 4 shipyards (mixed armaments)
Eta: L2: 2 habitation centres, 2 reactors, 2 shipyards (mixed armaments)
Zeta: L1: 3 reactors (long range armaments)
for a total of 16 reactors and shipyards with one habitation centre slot free to be replaced with a shipyard once extra reactors became available, and a spire fleet of:
68 frigates, 16 destroyers, 8 cruisers, 4 battleships, and 2 Dreadnoughts.
Here is a smashing image of Gorgar at 40:56, just before it is hit by 18k ships in dual regular waves, both of which are destroyed at an entirely acceptable casualty rate by repeatedly flying back and forth on their flank alongside their line of advance.
The second Dreadnought completed construction back at the shipyards in Gamma during the battle and, sped on by the highway of logistics stations, arrived in time for the kill.
