Ok, so 1.5 month break later, i'm back in this game. I had been burned out on the micro and knowledge raids so had to put the game away for a while but i wanted to try to finish it before the xp comes out, so here i am again!
I finished off all the guard posts within 2 hops of my planets, took out all inconvenient fortresses, finished all available knowledge raids, unlocked my end game science picks, improved my defenses, rebuilt and recaptured from my expensive losses, and cleared the planets next to the first ai homeworld.
It was pretty weird when i cleaned up one of the homeworld neighbours of guard posts, the ai ships just stayed there instead of becoming free, and when i saved at the end of that session and reloaded later to continue my game, they did become free and combined with another wave to form a large wave (around 2500 ships, about half core bombers / raiders / vampires). A couple hundred scattered around to my other planets, but close to 2000 ships went for my planet close to the ai homeworld, which had a good portion of my fleet on standby for the coming invasion. That was a good fight, it went really well, my defenses held up very well with the help of the fleet, but i wanted to try again for more fun and to see if i could do better by maneuvering differently. Big mistake. When i reloaded for that fight a speed train rerouted through that system and this time i lost a lot more stuff, good thing i kept a save of the first result! (edit: i think i kept my third try in the end, i reaallyy wanted to capture those core vampires and didn't get any on my first try!)
I included the save for that fight if you want to try it out, it's pretty fun! Little warning, that save is missing the extra beam mk2 i added in the 2 minutes before the wave hits. With the extra speed train and without the extra beamer the fight really doesnt go as well.
For the knowledge raids, my setup was to use 10 missiles mk2, 10 lasers mk2, 10 mlrs mk2, 4 beams mk2, 1 fortress mk1, 1 cloaker, 10 engineers mk2, 5 mobile builders, 1 rally post, 5 remains rebuilders and 20 cleanup drones. The remains and cleanups were moved outside of range of the cloaker to make sure the mobile builders got cloaked, but i still had to bring a bunch of them because ion cannons always caught a couple. I used the transport to tank most of the bad guys while building up and once the initial wave was taken care of and the base was built i'd add the science mk3. Total costs were ~200k of each resource and ~40k energy.
Towards the end another mining golem popped up and this time it's in an inconvenient place. I'll almost certainly have to take a planet to take it down, so the 20 aip seems unavoidable. I should be at the progress floor till the end of the game but it's still gonna bring it up more, and every point matters in this game.
So, before i play again i'll have to decide on 1 of 2 end game plans. My initial plan is the one i'm currently ready for. All i need to start executing it is wait until i've got 500k+ of each resource. What i would do is settle the neighbour of the first ai homeworld and build a base on the homeworld without taking down it's command station. Then i would do the same for the other homeworld, and then take down both command stations at the same time so i would win the game and not have to fight the avengers. That should take me 3-4 hours of game time (so 4-5h of real time).
The other option would be to take a planet close to the mining golem with an advanced research on it, beat up the golem, knowledge raid the new area, enslave both ai homeworlds as in the first plan but also knowledge raid their surroundings, build a super massive fleet, and then destroy both stations and face the 2 avengers at once. That really sounds super exciting but my big issue is i estimate it would take me roughly 6 hours of game time, which means ~8 hours of real time.
There's also the issue on the second option of spreading my defenses thinner than i'd like and increasing the chance of an unexpected bad event, but mostly, the time commitments are really getting to me so while i'd like to go for the super finish i'm just not sure i have it in me to do it.
20:46 - Planets: 5 AI Progress: 34 Kills: 111,142 Deaths: 6,396 Reclaimed: 13,407 Scrapped: 7,925