Decided I would start posting my games and strats in hope of helping other and perhaps someone can give me some tips. First let me explain how I arrange my games. In short I play "random everything", random starting ship, random map, "Random All" AI's at difficulty 7.6. I don't save scrum, ever. I don't like to update during my games, I like the rules to be the same in the beginning and the end.
I will try to post the progress of my games every 2 game hours. I will provide a screenshot for quick viewing and a save for those who wish to inspect further.
I'm using my usual strategy in this game which is to pick 7 to 13 planets which will be easy to defend using choke points; in this game I found 9 planets which can be defended by fortifying just two planets.
I first captured the planet south of my homeworld (I will be using names in future posts, but don't have them in my current screenshot), and decided to use this as the deliberate entry point for AI waves and also one of the 2 choke points; I built about 80 of both basic and MLRS turrets, and 100 sniper turrets. While these turrets were slowly building I went to the planet north of me and destroyed the command station to let ships into my homeworld where they would be easier to kill. I then destroyed the two warp gates adjacent to the northern planet before capturing it. Upon capturing the northern planet, I build 30 basic turrets and 30 MLRS turrets - this being my standard defense compliment.
The only major setback came when taking the southern planet which had a mark 3 fortress and a shield booster. I sent in about 160 bombers, a mix of mark 1 and mark 2, and tried to rush them to the fortress using a carrier. The carrier died about half way there but I continued the attack. In the end I only managed to get about 20 percent off the mark 3 fortress, and then decided to retreat; I lost 100 bombers. I rebuilt and tried using only mark 2 bombers. Because the fortress takes forever to kill even a mark 1 bomber I had plenty of time to attack it - all the other AI ships were just hanging out at their local guard posts doing nothing. Most of my shots were deflected by the fortresses 3x boosted shields, thanks to the shield booster. I finally killed the fortress after about 2 minutes of focus fire.
Oh, and I failed to mention the most important point of all. The second thing I unlocked was mark 3 command stations, so now I have 2 mark 3 stations and my home station. I've also build mark 1 and mark 2 reactors on all 3 planets.
With good resource income from my mark 3 command stations, and with adequate energy I prepared another fleet of bombers and some of my mark 1 vampire claws - my special ship for the game. This fleet went on a transport tour and killed 5 AI command stations, and a fortress, in about 10 minutes. The vampires were good at distracting the AI, and I learned that vampires can attack special forces guard posts which they were particularly effective at thanks to the vampirism ability. With all, except one, AI command stations gone the cleanup of the remaining turrets was easy because they were disabled.
I'm currently in the middle of clearing all the 5 planets I "command station sniped." Once that's done I'll capture that mark 3 planet which will be the second planet in the choke point. After I have it, I will then get around to capturing the remaining planets, all of which will have already been cleared. My resources are quickly exceeding my limited energy supply, I may have to build a mark 3 reactor which I normally avoid.
Current AIP: 202
