Beginner----which homeworld should I attack first?

[Martyn van Buren]

I'm just playing my first campaign, and I'm starting to think about going after the homeworlds.  It happens that I have them in very different places---I'm playing a 40-planet map, and I have a little clump of 8-10 planets I captured at the beginning, which has two only exits, and from one of them an every-other-planet chain going across the other half of the galaxy towards one of the cores.  Unhappily, the choke planet for this one is right next to my homeworld.  The other exit leads straight into the other core, which is in a dead end.  So I'm wondering which one I should strike first?  If go after the one near my clump, I assume it's going to be a lot harder for me to cross the galaxy to the other one----and harder for me to hold my waypoint-planets, and presumably I'm also going to have lots of nasty core ships going to threat and poring right into my hideout----but then I'm afraid that if I kill the distant one first, I'm going to be fighting a much tougher and higher-stakes battle on my own doorstep.   My guess is the far one, especially as I have a lot more worlds buffering my home on the side with the close homeworld, but I'd be glad to hear anyone's thoughts on the situation.  And then I'd appreciate any advice about killing homeworlds, too.

One more thing---am I right to think that when you kill one AI all of its ships become free?  I have a semi-neutered AI world in amongst mine, and I wonder if I need to finish the job before killing its master?

[Martyn van Buren]

One follow-up: assuming I do kill the distant homeworld first, is there any reason not to abandon my outer planets so I can move their turrets and garrison ships to more needed places?  I think my economy can take the hit----they're all in fairly tough places, so they have military command stations, and I've been finding I have more trouble with the ship caps than resources.  I'll be giving up a Bomber Starship fabricator, but nothing else special.  Sorry if this seems trivial; I haven't played an RTS since I was about twelve, and I don't have any instinct for them.

[BobTheJanitor]

Killing an AI won't actually do too much to its other ships in the galaxy. If there are any ships left on the homeworld, they might break free. But the rest of the galaxy actually continues to work just about the same. You're probably safe to go ahead and attack whichever world is more convenient. On abandoning outer planets, if it's taking more work to keep them than they're worth it's surely a good idea to let them go. For a planet with a fab though, I would probably gate raid any nearby planets and then just leave the constructor looping and build a warp gate of your own to get those ships back to your territory. You can leave a skeleton defense there if you want in case of border aggression, and just mentally write it off as a loss. It will probably still last a while on its own if the AI can't send any waves there. It will take a while before the reinforcements on nearby worlds will get big enough that they'll consider attacking it. If you go neuter the guard posts as well, it could be safe for the rest of the game.

[Martyn van Buren]

Oh, cool.  That's simpler than I expected.

[Martyn van Buren]

Done, I hit the distant one first.  You're right, at least on difficulty five it wasn't as consequential as I thought.  I was expecting to have CPAs coming out of my ears after that.  Thanks!

[BobTheJanitor]

Yeah, it kind of seems like blowing up their world should really upset the AI and you'd be buried under attacks. But from a gameplay perspective that would kind of make killing the second AI impossible. The +100 AIP is already there to represent that you upset them. But outside of that there's no immediate reprisal, unless you have the avenger AI plot turned on. Remember that in story terms, the AI units aren't a galaxy-spanning interconnected mind that sees everything in the game at once, they're all individuals. So just because you do something like blow up their homeworld, the individual ships aren't necessarily going to know about it and come after you immediately. Which is good, because the game would be impossible to win otherwise.