Well, I finally finished the game.
It took another 6 hours, which was longer than I had hoped for, but all ended well. Ending time was 16:37.
Three hops from the first AI homeworld was the Dyson Sphere. I freed the Dyson hoping it would clear an area for me which I could use as a staging point for my attack on the homeworld. Unfortunately the AI had paralyzers and the Dysons are not immune and thus they were easily defeated. I took a fleet and help clear the Dysons world to allow it some time to build up and get it's footing. I claimed the nearby planets and the Dyson helped me defend them.
I had a really hard time with the Shield Ninny homeworld because it had a shield inhibitor. I had unlocked space tanks from another ARS, and that inhibitor really ruined my day. After about 3 failed attempts with my strongest ships I realized the problem was I didn't have a large enough number of ships. Fortunately the AI had no lightning turrets that I needed to worry about, so I filled a fleet with mark 1 and mark 2 ships - ignoring mark 3 and mark 4 completely. Surprisingly it worked, the mark 1 ships by far outperformed there higher level counterparts in this case. AIP was about 700 after first homeworld fell.
A couple of tricks I learned:
1) The Dyson spawns Gatlings every 20 seconds. If you need to claim something from the Dyson world (I wanted a Cursed Golem) wait until a friendly spawn, and then immediately build your command station and then scrap it. If you can finish within 20 seconds the evil Gatlings will never spawn. Obviously engineer assistance is needed. One last note on this; after this trick the Dyson became very defensive as you can see in the picture I posted. Over 250 Gatlings just sitting there.
2) Speaking of Cursed Golems. They are cursed. I estimated based on what my economy was showing at the time that it would take 500 metal and crystal per second just to keep its health even. I attempted to use this Golem in an attack on the Shield Ninny homeworld but the extra AI reinforcements it caused resulting it disaster. I'm think I'll pass on the Cursed Golem next time. It's nice that it only requires 200,000 energy, but it really doesn't have any use. For every ship it kills the AI gets 3 as reinforcement thanks to the Golems penalties.
3) I mentioned this earlier, but I'll say it again. Blade ships are great at killing guard posts, especially vampires with their high speed. They were very helpful during my initial attacks on the AI homeworld, I would have the vampires fly around and pick off every guard post and they had no trouble doing it. The AI had much fewer reinforcement next time I came.
I was somewhat impatient for the 2nd AI and just cut a bloody path to it's doorstep. I killed 5 AI command stations in about 5 minutes and just let the ships to free to die against my turret defenses. This brought the AIP from about 700 to 800. I flew in my transports half way, then used a colony ship on board to claim the system and thus repair my transports. I launch my final attack from this position and won using 2 waves. The first preparatory attack killed all guard posts and shields. The 2nd attack killed the AI command station, and I won.
I had a real scare just after I killed the first AI homeworld. A 3,500 CPA occurred and my defenses near my homeworld were almost breached. The AI was about to bust through when it became preoccupied with killing my -- ah, what are they called? -- asteroid gun thingy... You know, the one good at killing starships? Anyways, the AI always gets stuck on these and ignores more important targets and it really saved my butt this time.
I'll probably post other games. Let me know if you enjoy reading through them. Part of the reason I do it is to encourage myself to finish games. I'm somewhat obsessive and love to start over on things until I can get it perfect from the start, but posting helps me to finish what I start.
