Vs 10 Techno ParaRaiders

[Fruden]

 Well, waves are all pretty large now, so having clean planets will probably never happen.

 Anyway, i colonized my 8th planet, finally built my first bombers now that i've researched them, cleaned up the second ai homeworld and occupied it, went and recaptured my lost ai ships, and cleaned up and researched my new area. A useful trick i keep using is using decoys to draw the ai on one side while doing something on the other, like popping a command center or building a base. Usually i'll use a transport for that job, possibly with a cloaker if i want to avoid losing it once the enemies catch up to it.

 Next time i probably won't really play for 1-2 hours to troop up and gather lots of resources for the final fight.

24:45 - Planets: 8 AI Progress: 65 Kills: 143,667 Deaths: 7,547 Reclaimed: 13,980 Scrapped: 8,977

[Fruden]

 This felt like it took forever, plus the game is running pretty slowly now on my computer. Anyway, i made lots of ships, moved my defenses around, saved some resources, and now i'm taking down the ai stations and avengers.

 The plan is to use my ships to take down the stations, then retreat to my systems for repairs and to let the snipers destroy the avenger modules. Once the avengers get to my systems, i'll hit them with everything and block them in with force fields. Without their beams they won't be able to get through so it will only be a matter of time.

26:23 - Planets: 8 AI Progress: 66 Kills: 158,979 Deaths: 7,802 Reclaimed: 13,993 Scrapped: 9,379

 I couldnt shoot down both ai homerworld stations between 2 reinforcement cycles, so i hid my bombers while my raid ships kept them from repairing, and once my other defenses took care of the reinforcements, i finished both stations at about the same time. It took around 5 mins.

 The plan for the avengers mostly worked, but there was an unexpected wave of 5000 ships that made things more complicated. I had forgotten that even if the game was won and the timer stopped there were still waves, but my defenses managed to hold up. The sniper plan to remove the avenger modules worked almost perfectly (for a minute or 2 my snipers were shooting besides the avenger causing no damage, never saw such a thing before and then it went back to normal), and the plan to lock them in with force fields worked fine too (without their beams they didn't cause enough damage to eat through multi layered force fields supported by a mobile repair) but... my computer slowed to a crawl with the couple extra thousand ships laying around my planets. After 45 minutes of game time, and around 2h30 hours of real time, i decided to give up with one avenger around half done (and getting shot by snipers and fortresses while stuck on force fields), and the other one had stopped moving after i abandoned one of my outposts. With my low income mounting missions to destroy the stuck avenger would have taken me a couple game time hours (and many more real hours), and i've had enough, i'm done with this game now.

[Fruden]

 Conclusion

 This was fun but was really way too long, i'll probably need to upgrade to a faster computer before trying another challenge game. Before the giant wave at the end each game second was taking around 2 real seconds, and after the wave it was 3-4 real seconds for each game second.

 Regarding the game proper, the beginning was by far the most difficult. Until i had enough income, knowledge and energy, it was a real struggle. After i did though, it felt like the win was inevitable. I really wanted to take down both the avengers but the giant revenge wave and its giant slowdown forced me to reconsider, i really dont have the kind of time for this anymore.

 Oh, and i still think the speed trains are one of the biggest challenges of level 10 games. I havent tried them yet, but the new logistics stations with their planet wide slow might be a good answer to them, but sadly that would have crippled my economy. Anyway, i'll have to look at all the new stuff sometime.

 My only really big wish would be to have the option to see actual damage multipliers on ships and turrets (an option or control node) rather than what's there now, and more importantly, an in game reference with all the hidden numbers included in it.