I took the hive, and cursed golem, a couple more planets and finally found some datacenters. I have been going on a campaign to keep the special forces captain from getting too powerful. Interesting strategy I came up with to deal with planets holding many many thousands of enemy ships is to enter with the armored and cursed golems and send them under cloaking starships to opposite ends of the gravity well. It takes a little bit of of time but I found myself killing about 400 ships per minute, mk III engineers have made the strategy sustainable.
I agree with you on the importance of turrets, I put a beachhead on the central planet of the map and have basically cut off the AI from each other, and have been able to majorly slow down incomming exo's and CPA's.
I agree with you on the Spire Cities drastically increasing the difficulty of HW assaults, I was playing a 7.8/7.8 game and with 5 cities tried to assault an AI HW, the Mothership and her swarm of HK's wiped out my fleet and every city on the path to my HW.
I think I may just go for the win as quickly as possible on this game but keep a save from this point so I can play with putting spire cities on Nomads.
I never realized that you could build spirecraft on planets owned by the AI, part of the reason I don't use them as much as I would like was because I didn't want to have the AIP increase just to gain access to a few 'roids. I will have to integrate them more heavily into my strategy.
Thanks for the feedback, I think I may be able to tackle this one.