Fallen spire, 8.3/8.3, first city exowave woes

[Peter Ebbesen]

namely that of inflicting attrition casualties on an enemy that is passing through the system and too strong for him to stop

I'd say use "Kahuna-style defense" but add a couple of beachheads/"buffer planets" in front of it. Especially now that turrets have per planet caps. Fleet can be used for attritioning too.

Any proper use of defence in depth gets my support, whether it is made using forward or interior defences, or indeed made using both, and using mobile forces for attrition purposes is pretty much a given.

The one thing I insist on in AI War is not placing the command station complete with a defensive setup directly on an exit-wormwhole, unless one expects to be able to stop the enemy cold in that system. Basically, don't ever set up a block unless it is imperative that the enemy be blocked in that location and you have the force to ensure it works, as it severely limits your own scope for action when you do so.

[Kahuna]

The one thing I insist on in AI War is not placing the command station complete with a defensive setup directly on an exit-wormwhole, unless one expects to be able to stop the enemy cold in that system.

I've known this for a long time. Just haven't had the time nor the energy to really test stuff and update my strategy guide.
I think it would be better to "move the super cat defenses" so that the tractors/flaks/lightnings/forcefields are on top of the exit-wormhole. I've had this in my mind for a long time. There's always room for improvement in everything.
Arf.

[Zincat]

Hmm, thinking about Zincat's bad position, I got do wondering, what exactly does the Fallen Spire intensity do?

The obvious guess would the that at the very least it scales AI reponse exos, but is that all? Does it, for instance, scale the number of spire ships supported by each spire shipyard or scale the ships' stats? Scale the metal income come spire habitation centres? Scale how far away from the homeworld the shards will spawn for the shard chases? Something else? In other words, does playing with a different FS intensity result in a somewhat different challenge, or is it all about ever larger exowaves?

I can tell you that spire shipyards do not support more ships, nor metal income is increased in any way. Not sure about shard distance.

The one thing I certainly noticed is that the waves were bigger. Like, a lot bigger. Shard chases too, I had to try them SO many times, because they would destroy the shard. That said, I *might* have noticed another thing. I think, though I'm not sure, that the waves charge quicker at intensity 6. I certainly do not recall the waves being so often in my other game 6-7 months ago, and I finished that fallen spire game.
But this might also be due to the recent buff to exowaves, so I'm not sure

Regarding the brick wall defense (Kahuna trademarked ) as you might imagine I gave it quite a bit of thought lately, due to being screwed over by the ai so many times in this game. I can think of 3 situations where they are still perfectly valid.

- In games where there are exowaves, but they are not too extreme. In such games, you are generally able to stop the enemy in one system with a brick wall defense, and you should do so! Having defenses over multiple systems is very good for attritioning, but result in more energy spent, and generally the possibility of range resulting in losing something important if some enemy ship slips through.
- In games with no exowaves. In these games, unless difficulty is extreme (10/10?), or unless you let ai progress go up too much, you should be also able to stop enemies cold in some chockpoints. Once again, if you can you should do so, same reasons as above.
- In games with fallen spire, where you have a Spire City. You WILL use a spire city to block a wormhole. You want to, to avoid the exowaves going through. Spire cities, at least those at the frontline, are generally in critical places. Unless you use a Black Hole machine, but that's dangerous because the exowave might have units which ignreo forcefield, or use energy bombs. And if your Black Hole machine goes poof, then you're generally in a very bad position.


In games with strong exowaves instead, or in system before/behind a spire city, then I find that the attrition soft block defenses of Logistic station, sniper/spider/missile turrets, mine, grav turrets etc are better, and you don't want to put the station on the wormhole. It would get burned toooo fast.

[Peter Ebbesen]

- In games with fallen spire, where you have a Spire City. You WILL use a spire city to block a wormhole. You want to, to avoid the exowaves going through. Spire cities, at least those at the frontline, are generally in critical places. Unless you use a Black Hole machine, but that's dangerous because the exowave might have units which ignreo forcefield, or use energy bombs. And if your Black Hole machine goes poof, then you're generally in a very bad position.

I strongly disagree with this one as a general principle, though it might end up being relevant in a specific situation depending on map setup.

The more open the map, the more tempting it will be with hard stops, but so long as you can pretty much predict the route an exowave will move once it passes through a system, it is possible to take advantage of that knowledge.

I took ruthless advantage of this in my Ride the Lightning game. I had the significant advantage over your game here that I played on a much more closed map and could ensure that every exowave passed through a single chokepoint where I built a spire city (spire city beta), that led to my interior systems, but I most certainly did not use my spire city to block any of the exit wormholes deeper into my territory. Why would I do that? Any part of the exowave that managed to pass through would continue directly towards its goal (another spire city or the homeworld), taking potshots at anything that got within its shooting range but otherwise leaving everything in the systems it passed through alone. So long as the attritional damage they take on the way is large enough when combined with whatever is their ultimate destination to kill them off and so long as there is no irreplaceable building that is in range of the line of flight between wormholes traversed, that's fine with me.

As far as I am concerned, the danger of not blocking a wormhole comes from regular threat rather than from exowaves, for exowaves are much easier predictable than threat behaviour, and anything predictable can be anticipated and planned against.

(And, of course, anything that one considers truly irreplaceable that the AI can get at on a shortest-path route to one's homeworld should probably be hacked rather than merely controlled, such that one doesn't maneuver oneself into the position of feeling forced to defend on the border when one has defensive depth to take advantage of.)