Which Golem is better for this situation?

[Coppermantis]

Hey all,

I've been playing AI war for some time but just recently picked up The Zenith Remnant, and as such have no experience with Golems, so I'd like to ask you who are more familiar with these things for some help.  On the game I'm currently playing, I've got a pretty heavily reinforced planet adjacent to my rather small empire and need some way to deal with it. It specifically has a Mk. III and Mk. I fortress along with a Mk. IV Ion cannon, making it so that even raids with the bulk of my fleet don't succeed against it. So, I decided to do some scouting and find some golems. There are two nearby, a Cursed Golem and a Regenerator Golem. My question is this: which of them should I attempt to repair? It seems like the Cursed's high range and firepower would be good at taking down fortresses, but it's lower health and higher self-attrition rate make it seem like it wouldn't last long. Meanwhile, the having the ability to respawn my fleet ships is also an attractive option. Or should I attempt to get both? I have two Zenith Power Generators, but is it worth the increase in AIP to get both of the Golems?

[x4000]

I'd go for the regenerator, personally -- it sounds like you're in for a longish battle on that planet no matter how you cut it, and this basically lets you concentrate "multiple waves" of your own ships into one self-renewing attack.

[chemical_art]

I'd go for the regenerator.

The cursed golem's strength is to provide very long range fire support. This is great on defense, but of more limited use on offense.

The regenerator is helpful for keeping fleets (offense or defense) at full strength for longer. Since fleets are your primary offense tool right now it will make a big impact.

[Coppermantis]

Alrighty, thanks. Although, is it worth getting both? I have over 800000 Energy thanks to the Zenith generators, but is the +50 AIP worth the firepower?

[x4000]

My general advice on golems: wait until you need them.  The longer you can delay AIP, the better, and the longer you wait with a golem, the more likely it isn't dead when you actually need it later.

[Coppermantis]

Okay, that makes sense. I'll try out the regenerator and see how it works out. Thanks for your time people.

[x4000]

You bet!

[Coppermantis]

So the regenerator turned out to be the right choice, as it totally saved my skin but not in the way I had anticipated. After I repaired it The AI sent a 3000 strong wave at me followed by a 3500 strong CPA. I survived thanks to the golem, but it died in the process. Oh well.

[Lemon]

I haven't been playing that long, but frankly I have to disagree with the Regenerator golem over the Cursed golem.

The regenerator costs a TON to use and operate, so while it can help you fight better in a straight up slug fest it will run you dry quickly. A Mk I fighter costs 100/100 to build. A regenerator golem losing 81k of health to save a Mk I fighter costs (81,200 health of fighter / 200,000,000 health of golem *  60,000,000 price of golem / 4 repair coefficient) =  6090/6090 resources to repair! This is for a simple Mk I fighter! (if this isn't the correct math then please go ahead and correct me). I would much rather build a few temporary space docks right beside the enemy wormhole, line up 10 engineers and just spit out my fighters who are rallied to the next system over almost as fast as they can be destroyed. Your manufacturing facilities can be relocated on a whim anywhere in the galaxy in about 30s at negligible cost, do that and you have 90% of what a Regenerator is already. In the end all a Regenerator is is a manufacturing facility with a 0 build time but a price premium that will make you fondly remember that the Merc Dock only has a 10x increase in price. This also means that if you aren't capped on Mercs, you are better off spending cash on them before on the Regenerator.

The cursed golem, on the other hand, shouldn't cost you much at all. You put it next to the wormhole while your forces are dukeing it out, it shreds things to pieces. This thing is simply the mobile gun platform of your dreams. Mk I/II/III/IV/V? We don't care, 10 of them die every second as long as this thing is in the system, and when its done you plink plink at the fortress and laugh.  The "increased attrition rate" really means nothing, attrition is really slow anyways and Cursed Golems are several times cheaper to repair than the Regenerator Golem.  This thing should never ever be at risk of dying, you can always run away through the wormhole it should be sitting next to the entire fight!

At best, if all you care about is a single decisive fight I *might* agree that the Regenerator is better (though IMO it should only seriously be used to keep irreplaceable things like spirecraft and other golems alive), but you WILL be run dry. You will certainly Curse (see what I did there?) the amount of resources you need to spend to get a Regenerator back in working condition after a big battle, and on Medium Golems the AIP increase will always hound you to the point where I think the Regenerator just isn't worth it. The Cursed Golem on the other hand is keeping your ships alive by killing your enemies, and its doing it without jacking up the replacement costs as much as 60 fold. Even in the rare case of the Regenerator winning a fight that the Cursed Golem lost, I'll simply pull out the Cursed Golem sitting right next to the wormhole, wait 3 mins while my fleet replenishes (thanks to all the money I saved by NOT using a Regenerator!), then go in and mop up the enemy force that is only half as strong as it was before. In the end, I still won using less resources and I'll be ready to fight again quicker since I won't need to completely repair that Regenerator.

TL;DR I'm disappointed in Regenerator Golems. Use them as a novelty to protect other golems/spirecraft in Hard or Easy Golems mode and on Normal where they give an AIP increase ignore them by all means.

[arcee]

playing with Medium Golems, I found a Cursed and Regenerator - the best use I had for the Regenerator was replacing the Cursed.

[chemical_art]

...

Much of what you say is true. But consider the situation described:

The OP needs to break out of a stalemate. A single, decisive battle to cause forward momentum. An offensive action which will likely center around the wormhole on the other side of the player's base.

You are right that regens are horribly inefficient. But the alternative is the cursed golem. That golem isn't cheap either due to it's very high attrition. That hurts as much as the much more effective armored golem. It's not that powerful as far as golems go. It shoots slowish projectiles at exterme ranges. It's frail.

This isn't going to be a fight where a strickle of firepower is best. You want a full strength assault for as long as possible. The regen allows that since it respawns instantly. The catch is having it bail before it is completely toast.

Both these golems are the least useful for me.  I love most of the others a lot more.

[Lemon]

The funny thing is, the Cursed Golem's attrition toll on your economy is actually half that of the Regenerator golem's. 120 min attrition time @ 60 million base cost > 40 min attrition time @ 10 million base cost. Also, you can send Golems into low power mode to eliminate their attrition rate, which makes them almost of negligible cost to keep active until they start taking direct damage.

As I already said, there is pretty much no reason to even begin using a Regenerator Golem before you are maxed on Mercs because even Mercs are more cost efficient. What would you rather pay for, a Merc Mk IV fighter that you start the battle with, or a Regenerator Golem's Mk IV fighter that costs 6x as much and only comes into the fight after half the fight is over? Everyone knows that 200 ships on your side at once is more powerful than 100 ships with another 100 ships coming to the fight later. After all, thats why we brought the Regenerator in the first place, to replace the 100 ships with another 100 ships quicker so they wouldn't have to be built and fly there! In this way, the Merc Space Dock is actually doing better than the Regenerator Golem is at giving you a better "decisive battle" chance because what the Regenerator provides later, the Merc Dock provides at the start, and it is at 1/6th the cost! Correcting for cost, we can have 700 merc ships at the beginning vs 100 at the beginning and 100 more as the first 100 slowly die off, clearly the Regenerator is absolutely blown away both in performance and efficiency.

I'm taking a shot in the dark that the OP almost certainly doesn't have a full force of Mercs ready. If he does... well if thats still not enough to break the system then I'm afraid you are beyond my help 

Frankly I find the Cursed Golem to be by far one of the most effective Golems. In general, having your fighters tank the damage is always going to be cheaper, so I prefer pure offensive capability. The Cursed Golem provides by far the highest sustained kill rate on anything short of Mk V ships, and against those it still leverages its massive range advantage along with its nearly top-notch kill rate. The only Golems I like more are the Hive Golems (Release Wasps, instantly win any battle) and the Botnet (for obvious reasons).

[zoutzakje]

In the above described situation I would personally not even consider using the regenerator. It takes way to much time + resources to repair it. Plus it's incapable of constantly hammering the enemy. I never use reg golem unless I can use it as support for another golem. Cursed golem has an incredibly fast kill rate + it can fire shots from any range and it costs nearly nothing in both time and resources. Have it destroy the enemy fleet (perhaps with support from a part of your fleet), then let it destroy the fortresses from a distance. Takes time but works great. And you got the rest of your fleet to attend to other matters (waves, CPA, conquering, etc).
Cursed and Botnet, defenitely my 2 favs and my highest priority when I find one of them.

[chemical_art]

After looking up my data rather then just speaking from hazy memory I must conclude that regenerators are by far the most inefficent golems by a very long margin. I thought at first they maybe were 3x the cost of cursed. Not 6x. Nope, that makes them simply wasteful.

I confess that in my usual games of golems - hard I want raw power over efficency. This is why I don't like the cursed. It is kinda efficent, but the other golems hit harder. The widow shoots 1.25ishx faster with shots that will neutralize every enemy. The armored and botnet simply steamroll everything except V. Hives give the human a "wave" feature of their own. Cursed fires a few shoots slow and regens I never activate at 60 mil.

But this is tit for tat. In AI war you only typically get access to a few golems at a time. I confess to taking them all because I prefer to play hard, so I can't really argue efficency compared to power / usefulness.

EDIT: Oh, just to make it explict: I was wrong in my post before this one 

[Coppermantis]

Oh geez, really? 6X more inefficent? Wow. Well, the Regenerator Golem did help me basically triple my fleet of Viral shredders, saving me from that huge wave, but maybe I should go for the Cursed Golem if I can't just take it with merc ships, or just cut supply to the planet and take it with ease, which I just remembered was a viable option.