Schooled by LotS

[Zhaine]

I love games where it's fun to lose!  

Just fired up LotS for the first time (this is coming straight from 4.021) to see what new tricks the AI could throw at me.

This was 7/7, random easier (which gave me turtle and vanilla), dyson, trader, roaming enclaves, forget what else.

I pick blade spawners as my starting bonus wishing to try out the exciting new toys, and my home is a nice backwater planet with two gates, one a dead end and one branching off to the rest of the galaxy.

The minute I start scouting I realise things are going to get ugly. The dead end has very little of note. . . except of course a Mk III fort! In the other direction the closest planet is nothing too nasty, but adjacent to that is a fairly full looking planet with an Eye AND a Spec Forces Alarm Post (I've never dealt with one of these before but it sounds hideous, and I've read much about the beefed up Eyes). Behind that is a mk IV planet with an ARS (and another eye). To say this could be a challenge is a mild understatement.

But challenge is what I'm here for, so I vow to press on and give it my best shot. I devise the following strategy for taking the fort planet:

- sit as many bombers as I can build on top of the fort (which is right by the command station) and pew pew it to pieces
- to cover the bombers and stop them being eroded by the fleet ships in the system (the AI has acid sprayers), I'll sit several blade spawners well out of the fort's range and their blades can take out anything that has the audacity to touch my pretty bombers.

Bombers kill forts rather well and spawners kill all else while evading retaliation from the fort: nothing can go wrong, right?

Wrong! The spawner bit works well but it turns out mk 1 bombers take rather a long time to kill a mk 3 fort. . . Worrying that waves are coming soonish, I unlock Mk 2 bombers and set my factory to churn out nothing but. With the fort still on about 330mil health (out of 360mil) the first wave gets announced: 170 odd cloaked ships (plus starship). Wonderful. I don't even know what I'm facing!

I decide it can't be that bad, cloaked ships are all naff, they can just hide to make up for it, right?

Wrong! It all seems fine as my mixed mk 1 fleet (triangle ships and spawners) deals with the siege starship and trickle of non-cloakers that come with the wave. Then 170 etherjet tractors uncloak off my command station and proceed to steal half of my fleet. . . Ah  

What happens next was a bit of a panicked haze. I attempt to pull my bombers and spawners back from the fort planet to deal with this 'situation', but they arrive too late to have much impact. It's then that I realise the tractors have pulled my poor confused fleed back as far as the mk 4 planet, and I'm of course gathering large amounts of threat from mk 4 ships. Giving up on taking anything for now, I try to churn out the ships necessary to deal with this, instantly crashing my fragile economy.  

I grin as mk 4 vampires take out my power plants, bombers whittle down my home forcefield and everything else anihilitates my one and only command station. I think it's safe to say: pwned. Awesome!

Now to plot my revenge. . .  

Edit: what would have happened if I'd killed the command center on the fort planet and tried to build my own command center without killing the fort?

[keith.lamothe]

Then 170 etherjet tractors uncloak off my command station and proceed to steal half of my fleet

I think the AI just put that one on the refrigerator door

But yea, you could conceivably have disabled that fort by killing all AI command stations within 1 hop of it, thus cutting off supply.

[Zhaine]

Then 170 etherjet tractors uncloak off my command station and proceed to steal half of my fleet

I think the AI just put that one on the refrigerator door

But yea, you could conceivably have disabled that fort by killing all AI command stations within 1 hop of it, thus cutting off supply.

Ah, of course, and in this case that would only be the single command station on that planet as the only one adjacent is my home planet. . . Oh well, live and learn

[Red Spot]

A very general piece of advice that will be of some use in most games. Try to get, say, 4 caps of fleetship up by the time the gameclock hits 10-12minutes. Thats roughly when the first wave will be announced, and leaves enough time to build 1 or 2 more caps if needed, or turrets, or FFs. Basicly it allows for any tweak as you already have your general purpose fleet.

[Zhaine]

A very general piece of advice that will be of some use in most games. Try to get, say, 4 caps of fleetship up by the time the gameclock hits 10-12minutes. Thats roughly when the first wave will be announced, and leaves enough time to build 1 or 2 more caps if needed, or turrets, or FFs. Basicly it allows for any tweak as you already have your general purpose fleet.

Cool, I think I was a bit over eager. . . and was still expecting 4.0 size waves

[TechSY730]

A very general piece of advice that will be of some use in most games. Try to get, say, 4 caps of fleetship up by the time the gameclock hits 10-12minutes. Thats roughly when the first wave will be announced, and leaves enough time to build 1 or 2 more caps if needed, or turrets, or FFs. Basicly it allows for any tweak as you already have your general purpose fleet.

Cool, I think I was a bit over eager. . . and was still expecting 4.0 size waves

Didn't the first stable version of 4.0 have a bug where wave size factors were being squared by accident? This was leading to stupidly small waves in the early game, but VERY quickly grew out of control once you hit the mid game.

[BobTheJanitor]

Edit: what would have happened if I'd killed the command center on the fort planet and tried to build my own command center without killing the fort?

Without cutting off supply on adjacent planets, as mentioned, the fort would still be up and angry. All the guard posts would disappear though, so there's that at least. And if you play with auto-FRD military on, all your weak ships would go sacrifice themselves to the fort. I ran into a similar problem in a game last night. Finally I just had everything but bombers head back to the world next door so they'd stop charging at the fort and getting vaporized.

[superking]

the new super high HP forts are every kind of tedious to deal with.. I find myself popping command stations everywhere to take them out of supply because I dont have the patience to take them down

[danando]

i got flanked by 200 etherjet in 4 directs with a starship:/ the AI is ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE INDEED

[Zhaine]

the new super high HP forts are every kind of tedious to deal with.. I find myself popping command stations everywhere to take them out of supply because I dont have the patience to take them down

While the Fort III next door to my home was a bit extreme, I'm quite enjoying beefed up forts. Like the Eye they really make you approach the planet very differently to a 'normal' one (if there is such thing).

[TechSY730]

the new super high HP forts are every kind of tedious to deal with.. I find myself popping command stations everywhere to take them out of supply because I dont have the patience to take them down

While the Fort III next door to my home was a bit extreme, I'm quite enjoying beefed up forts. Like the Eye they really make you approach the planet very differently to a 'normal' one (if there is such thing).

I like the new AI eyes as well. It was fun trying to figure out what ships to bring into the system, given I could not take in my whole "blob", and manage them accordingly. There was a Spire shield guard post, and that was a little annoying, but nothing I couldn't handle. It was actually interesting to see if my few remaining starships could take it out while the few remaining Mk. III ships trying to take them out. (The post did die in that run, but my starships were pretty beaten up by the time it went down).

So yes, a somewhat annoying but mostly nice change of pace.

As for the AI Fortress Mk. IIIs, yes, they are a little absurd, but isn't the fortress line of ships supposed to be absurd?

[Solarity]

In my current game I started with a MKII fort next door along with an AI Eye and 3 raid engines on adjacent planets.  Needless to say it took a while and many waves before I manage to take the 3 planets.  Thats what I get for thinking that the cluster of 6 planets around my home planet will be easy to take and provide a safe(ish) haven...

[Sunshine!]

the new super high HP forts are every kind of tedious to deal with.. I find myself popping command stations everywhere to take them out of supply because I dont have the patience to take them down

Implosion artillery.  Use them.

Alternatively, there are a lot of forts you can just ignore because their ranges don't cover the entire planet anymore.  If you're lucky, the wormholes you want to use will be free.  Past that, if you want to be able to clear a planet with a fortress in range of the wormholes, use radar dampened ships - planes, raids (not too good at this), stealth battleships, and siege towers all work well.  Especially the siege towers.

Of course, the above is assuming you play with spirecraft.  If not, you are kind of stuck.  On the other hand, you could try building a cap of missile turrets (mobile builder) in range of the fortress, and let them clear the planet for you.

[Solarity]

Yes, sadly I forgot to turn spirecraft on in my current game and only realised once I had made a decent enough start into it   Cheats are off too so I couldn't just turn them on either

[Shrugging Khan]

Since forts have a very negative damage multiplier against bombers, you could've just cleaned out everything (Guard posts especially) outside the fortresses range with bombers first, effectively neutering the planet, and then set a little space dock with no engineer assistance to send a continuous stream of mkI bombers in FRD into the fortified system, ensuring a prepetual bomber presence to slowly gnaw at the fortress while all other ships (except for maybe a blade spawner and a small mixed escort) stay at home to provide a defence against waves.