Offensive turtling (my name for it): that is, putting up turrets in a hostile non-neutered planet to bleed off reinforcements. Is it a good idea? According to how I think things work if you turreted up a handful of alert Mk 1 AI planets very early you could completely shutdown 90% of the reinforcements the AI gets throughout the game. I tried some of this out, not sure how well it works since I didn't have much of a benchmark to compare against.
Sounds like a good plan on paper, though there's a reason it doesn't work well: The turrets will constantly get damaged or destroyed, forcing you to micro extensively as I don't think it's possible to autobuild engineers or remains rebuilders on a hostile world. In either case, engineers and remains rebuilders get killed so easily on non-friendly worlds so it's not really worth doing so.
Gate Raiding: I can't see how this is helpful? Warp waves give you plenty of time to prepare and have your fleet ready to fight off the attack, and +5 AI progress multiplied on several worlds would seem to be counterproductive. Yet everyone seems to think that leaving more than 1 adjacent warp gate up is a bad idea. Spamming 100s of turrets coupled with a large AI progress increase to fight off waves seems much less effective then having your fleet take 5 minutes away from kicking the crap out of AI planets and defending. What am I missing here?
It allows you to force the AI to go through one "checkpoint" and die in large troves. Useful when you cover a lot of territory so you can just set up one world that kills everything. Otherwise, your limited number of turrets and fortresses would be largely spread out and ineffective against a truly large attack. Your strategy consists entirely of a rolling defense, which I use in the early game, and is great in its flexibility. However, against higher difficulty AIs, you'll soon find yourself overwhelmed as you can't cover every single of your border planets unless you've got a chokepoint.
Dyson Sphere: insanely overpowered or just ridiculously overpowered? I found one of these 2 planets away from my starting position, and 10 minutes after capturing it I had ~2000 allied firepower patrolling through each and every planet I owned (decreased to 500-1000 firepower as I took planets, but thats still huge). Is this normal? I basically didn't have to produce a single defensive turret all game except for on my home planet, I just built shields and my ally handled everything short of wave attacks.
Protip: firepower is only something that should really have meaning to the AI. It's simply not useful as a gauging mechanic for ship strength.
Gatlings are a great thing to have on your side in the early game, in the mid-to-late game they're okay but I find that they just lag my game with their sheer numbers, and suiciding themselves onto AI worlds whenever I'm trying to concentrate on something important.
Golems/Spirecraft: The AI was supposed to use these? I never saw a single one either in the wave attacks or in the AI defense forces, and my own golems were almost as overpowered offensively as the Dyson sphere was defensively. Once I amassed 3 Cursed, 1 Artillery, 1 Botnet and 1 Regenerator I basically just grouped them together with my forces and FRD'ed them through about 10 systems in a row to win. Seems too easy this way. Does the AI start using nice big meaty golems and spirecraft on higher difficulties? Unless they do it seems like you may as well declare victory once you get 2 or more good golems.
Are you using easy spirecraft/golems? That's probably why. The AI does not get any of those while playing with the easy minor factions enabled. When playing with the hard spirecraft/golems minor factions, the AI gets lots of spirecraft and golems to play with in their exo waves. Did I mention that hard mode also adds an extra exo-wave per hour per hard minor faction enabled?
Also, the hard AI type Golemite has golems that are more or less fully functional on several of their planets. Another hard AI type also adds spirecraft in their normal waves, I think, though I do not recall it right now.
Spirecraft Shield Bearers: Useless? I can't see any reason at all to use these, which is a shame because they would be really nice if not for their inability to be repaired. Why would anyone waste semi-irreplaceable resources on something that is designed to attract damage yet can't be repaired? Worst of all, their shield radius goes down as they get damage, so you can effectively cut their real HP in half because after that they don't do much. Shield Bearer fighters seem 100x better since you can spam your heart out, they can offer more combined shield power than the spirecraft and are repairable. Even if you don't have those simply streaming regular fighters at something as a screen works out to a massively better resource/HP ratio, nevermind the asteroid saved.
They're useful for some, but I personally don't bother with them. If you don't like it, don't use it.
I guess it's best for clutch situations where you really need a mobile forcefield to protect your ships.
Spirecraft Rams: Any way to keep these off FRD if you have auto-FRD selected in the options? A 1 shot unit wasting its 40 million+ attack on the first random 1 million health enemy to enter a system makes me cry, and since I am too manly to be able to afford crying every 5 mins with other people in the room, I moved on to...
You can give individual orders to units like rams that override the autofrd if you enable autofrd.
Or you could just store them in a remote location completely unexposed to enemy ships. I don't tend to build rams unless I want to assault a homeworld or quickly kill a golem when my other defenses are tied up elsewhere.
Spirecraft Implosion Artillery: For some reason I'm having problems getting them to work against the AI fortresses. They should easily rip it apart, having 25k range vs 20k. But whenever I tell them to attack they either bug out and move too far away to fire (if I have Auto-kiting on) or move too close and get instantly mauled by the fortress. Eventually I just gave up on trying to make my 15 strong force of these work and just had a cursed golem pummel away at the fortresses for 5 mins.
Some ships, especially AI ships, have radar dampening effects that prevents you from simply sniping them from out of their range. Implosion artillery are best for hitting high-hp units or structures while being covered by other units that take the hits.
Besides, you're probably better off using bombers on fortresses as bombers are practically immune to flame waves.
Starships in general: How viable are they as primary force in lieu of massed starfighters? I was afraid to invest in them overly much since they can't take advantage of the advanced factory to massively increase my standing forces. Knowledge constraints would seem to make 400 fighters vs 2 starships a pretty easy choice.
Starships are not meant to operate alone, with maybe the exception of the raid starship. They're meant to complement your fleet. The knowledge unlock ships allow you to more of these starships that can make your fleet so much more powerful. I personally prefer having large amounts of small weak ships that can be easily replaced, but when I have surplus resources, I often invest in a fleet starship or two to multiply the attack power of my entire fleet by 1.6.
I don't normally get starship knowledge unlocks as I primarily focus on my economy rather than my military.
Hope that helped!
