At 98 AIP I'm getting waves of 600-1200 ships. The 1250 ship ones bring carriers with them varying from 200-500 ships. I've needed to put 7 FF Is on the inbound wormhole to guard the tractor net and AoEs. I've also had to triple the Tractor Net, my first defense went poorly. The carrier tends to escape the AoE net and the secondary turrets deal with the leftovers for now.
Another increase will probably require a turret upgrade somewhere. In particular one of my issues is the mid-range turrets. Basic Turrets are your primary defense against Missile Frigates, and they are in range of said missile frigates. Either I need to FF them, removing their bonuses, or I need the Radar Jammer II from the traders, which I can ill afford to build right now.
I may play with FF positioning, see if I can force the spawn to the 'back' of the FFs, buying me some time. I'll bang around at this AIP for a few waves then goose it again. My team is currently eating the 'highway' on Cyborg so it's not wasted time, though I may savescum to back before the experiments when I'm done.
Edit 1: At ~100 AIP I'm having a hard time getting another max-time wave to hit me. At 3:00 a CPA of ~900 ships is spawning. Guess I'll find out if the back turrets can handle the CPA. The fleet is back to chilling on the homeworld to keep alerts down in places the scouts have to travel. I've found the remaining ARSs (Eridani, SolarMoon, and Argyle) so I'll know where to drag down an 'ARS Selection Team' and check that out. Haven't located my ST yet, wonder if it's on Riker again.
Edit 2: In the current configuration, no, the homeworld can't hold off the CPA with only the 'backup' turrets. At 800 ships or so the pressure is too great when the majority of the firepower is against the 'furthest' wormhole, and the closest one is the one invaded. Most of my firepower can't reach to defend me. I'd have a decent chance if I had alternated the wormhole to defend vs. not defend, as my firepower would be better concentrated for the two directions.
As it stands though, the Twycross wormhole, while being the closer one, will usually be better protected by fleet activities out in the wild. My real concern was reverse attacks from the Shawshank direction. While interesting from an academic standpoint for other games I don't consider this a valid concern for this game's strategies.
Edit 3: Something I hadn't ran into in earlier 10/10 games because I'd usually end up with a bit of overexpansion is power issues. If I lose one of my two satellite stations right now I've got serious power containment problems. The ghosts get out.
At 100 AIP waves average off at 300-700 a piece, with bursts to 1200. Average tandem comes in at around 1000. When they come in back to back though it's actually worse. The defenses took a bit of a beating and then the next wave comes in behind it. Add in a heavy reliance on blade spawners for that wave and they can tear down the ff protected turrets, including the grav. Homeworld can barely hold at this point against 1000-1200 ship waves. It doesn't get any turret boosts and I can't even toss a Mil I up next to the command center so this has to happen with no bonuses.
I did get a Radar Jammer II dropped off but it'll be awhile before it can build out.
This last wave nearly did me in. I turned on the Blade spawners to deal with some errant threat. A series of ships escaped the grav line and were beelining for the other wormhole. Then hung a right at Albequerque and went after the Command station from an odd angle. I'll be tossing up a few random Grav Is shortly.
I've only got 3250 in K right now because of the Scout IIs and Tach Turrets, but if I had 4k I'd probably invest in Counter Missile. With Counter Missile shutting down the destruction of the Laser and Basic Turrets (and basics are cheap to K up) my DoT wouldn't decrease quite so heavily and I could probably handle MUCH stronger waves.
On Schizo, fleet composition isn't as heterogeneous as I'd prefer. I'll get heavy frigate waves, heavy bomber waves, etc. When the bomber waves come they melt the ffs, and then a different 'heavy' wave will come in and chew up the AoE's they used to protect.
I've popped the second CoP and pushed AIP to 121. We'll see where this goes. Oh, yeah. And stuff like this is fun to me.
Edit 4: Letting the neutral Dyson try to dig its way out has been relatively useless. On one portal, there's an artillery guardian and enough blade spawners that it chews the one offs to pieces on entry. I can't see the other side (Dyson's about 8 worlds away, I'm not deepstriking that far) but they're not faring much better when I can slip the one/two scouts in for a moment before they die. I'd hoped to abuse the dyson's "on/off" switch without having to do much work but that doesn't appear to be a valid tactic.
In the meanwhile 121/122 AIP waves are unspectacular on average for difference. Waves average around 400-500 ships. I'm still waiting for the 'big one'. The 500 ship attacks are enough to nearly burn up the 6 FF Is and Basics/Lasers in range of the wormhole, but they don't get much further. Occassionally they'll blow the Grav Is and get up to the LRMs, and die there to the secondary turrets. My LRMs are placed for max effeciency against both wormholes and the Cmd Center, so they're at nearly max range.
Side Note: The reason I'm notating in chunks instead of one huge post is because I'll forget otherwise. I'll put up a 'new post' when I'm done with all of this experimentation. It's about 4:00 in the game right now, but this game is no longer about winning in 13:00.
Still waiting on a wave bigger than 500 or so at 4:30. The Dyson's finally begun to dig out of its hole. The problem is it's wrapped by a pair of MK IV worlds that been building for a while. Neither planet, even when scouted, shows as alerted, that seems odd to me if they're getting reinforcements. Do they still fall under standard reinforcement rules?
One of the biggest problems the Dysons seem to have is that they're heavies. That alone doesn't explain why an Artillery Guardian IV with an attack of ~1.2 mil and a x2 boost to Heavy insta-kills a Gatling that has 7.2 mill base hitpoints. The math doesn't seem right. The dyson pretty much only makes headway when the home system reinforces and it can bunch up 4/5 dysons as an attack group, then it stalls out again for a bit. This could be useful long term if it can ever dig its way free. Both of those Mk IV worlds are ~260 units at the moment.
