First 9/9 attempt seeking advice

[Lanwrath]

Hello, all

  I have been playing for a few years now and am finally taking my first stab at a 9/9 Chivalric/Bouncer and Spec Forces Captain/Bouncer. I have some lobby cheese in here but I really want to get a victory and improve my skills before I give the AI a fair fight.  I am a few hours in and have some questions.

  My first one is about units.  With the ability to hack design servers and gain unit schematics are advanced research stations worth going out of your way for anymore in super weapon games?  In my cluster I already have taken an armored golem. A hive and cursed are also in my cluster and will be easy to obtain.  Between my champion and the golems is the hike in aip worth getting access to Microfighters, Mirrors, or Nanoswarms? Seeing as how the hive and ARS are on the same planet its going to be taken but if they were on different planets would it really be worth going after the ARS?

My second question has to do with pacing.  I usually play pretty slowly and defensively, in this game I am worried that this strategy will not be viable after a certain point.  I saw in the wiki that exo size starts at 13k, grows by 25% each time and caps out at 110k.  From what I understand this number will be doubled because of difficulty 9.  What effect do the intensity numbers and AIP have on these calculations.  I'm trying to determine at what point my HW will no longer be able to take waves and plan my expansion accordingly.

I'm scouring the galaxy for Datacenters and have yet to find one.  Making tachyon free lanes for scouting has been a major challenge at this difficulty with bouncer enabled.  I feel as if 4 planets in 4 hours is too slow but the slow scouting and the exciting combination of Spec Forces captain and Nomads at this difficulty is making me concerned that I will get overwhelmed by the three exo sources I have enabled, with the fourth coming in when I begin building cities.  The special forces having TDL's and Railpods hasn't helped my situation either.

I have attached a galaxy map and my game settings any advice or tips will be greatly appreciated.

- Lanwrath

[Qatu]

 You can play as slow as you want unless you have civilian leaders or auto aip per hour very high. For example in my last 8.6 game I had 3 planets at ~5h, and then I had won at ~9h. The most important things to do during low AIP are scouting as much as possible and destroying AIP reducers. It's fine to scout with almost your whole fleet if your home defense is strong and you go back to clear the threat once in a while.

 Doing so will allow you to carry a science mk2 with your fleet to check what the ARS have and know which are worth capturing/hacking. Also bringing a hacker is super useful to destroy plasma/nuclear eyes and super forts.

 I consider turret controllers to be the most valuable capturables after artillery golem/curse golem/OP ships from fabricators/ARS/designs. For me the OP ships are protectors, blade spawners, neinzul carriers, spire corvettes.

edit: if you just want a win, don't do the spire missions after getting the spire frigates. Instead go all in except your golems on the first AI homeworld when your defenses are very strong, and when you've rebuilt go all in including your golems on the second AI homeworld. building spire cities are fun but are a significant difficulty increase.

edit2: if you have spirecrafts enabled, use the attritioners, martyrs and jumpships. Those 3 ships are part of the OP club. And remember you don't need to capture or even destroy enemy command station to build spirecrafts.

[Lanwrath]

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.