Homeworld on a spoke - 7.3 difficulty

[Saan]

Okay, being the masochist i am, i am trying to play a map where there are two 7.3 AIs - experimentalist and stealth master.  At about the 2.5 minute mark, there are around 30 stealth ships in system, severely screwing my economy.  at the 3 minute mark, there are 60+.  To make matters worse, its a crystal poor starting world, so building turrets is rather difficult, especially with 9 wormholes to defend. Any ideas? I refuse to believe its impossible.

[x4000]

Sounds like you might have some sort of special forces opponent in addition to all the rest, not sure.  But, should be possible, if you pause at the start and set up some tachyon emitters paired with some turrets along the most likely paths that the enemies will take to get to your resources.  You'll take a beating for a while, I imagine, but if you survive you're going to have 9 planets that are potentially very weak (if they were not upgraded).

[Saan]

Well, i figured it out - MkII autocannon minipods, exo-force fields, and decloakers did the trick wonderfully.  There just wasnt enough time or crystal for turrets. 

Another question - on a spoke map, is it more likely that the 'hub' planets will have more resources than the isolated spokes?  Maybe its just coincidence with the seed I'm playing.

[x4000]

Ah, very clever -- I should have though to tell you about the exo forcefields for harvesters.  Bravo on that, I'm sure that helped a TON!

Your starting planet always has around 5x the normal resources of any other planet.  Also the AI home planets are the same.

[Saan]

Yep - and let me clarify my question - I know that starting worlds always have 12, and other worlds have between 0 and 8, but what I've noticed in the first and only spoke map I've played, is that ALL of the 'hub' planets (the ones with 6+ wormholes) have 5 or more resources, and all of the 'spoke' planets (the ones with 1 or 2 wormholes) have 4 or less resources.

Is there any correlation? Or is this just coincidence?

[x4000]

Just coincidence.

[Saan]

Just coincidence.

No, its a horrible, horrible, terrible, awful coincidence.  It took me 1.5 hours just to secure my first 9 wormhole world. 

I wish i didn't like challenges.

[x4000]

[snrub_guy]

I know you have figured it out already but I thought I'd tell you my tactic for defending a hub.

Spider turrets- 10-20 of them next to your base, no wormhole defences. If you have the knowledge, a fortress has enough range to sit in the middle of all the wormholes and finish all the stranded ships. Harvester forcefields for any harvesters near to the wormholes, and maybe an Ion cannon or two, if the merchant pops by. But once the spiders are up, you have time to do whatever you want with the defences. Of course, looking at the OP, this doesn't really do much for your stealth master.

[Saan]

Thanks for the comments!

Yeah, i absolutely abhor the harvester force fields(losing 1/6th of the income of the planet seems a bit rough), but with so many wormholes and so many cloaked ships, it was the only way the ships would stay decloaked long enough for anything to get to them, or for spider turrets to kill their engines.

[Lancefighter]

I'm assuming you are playing with the expansion, so you should pick up a counterspy as well - instakill any cloaked ship of any mark.. muhaha