Looking for Late Game Tips

[Castruccio]

I am having great difficulty taking out any of the AI Core Planets, to say nothing of actually reaching the AI home planet.  Does anyone have any tips for how to take out a core planet in order to carve your way to the home planet?  Every time I try to take a core planet the AI floods it with a huge number of ships, completely overwhelming any attack I try to mount against it.  There is no AI eye on this planet.

[BobTheJanitor]

Like when you warp in, the AI warps in help from a nearby planet? That's interesting. I don't think I've ever seen it do that. Are some neighboring planets on alert already, maybe filled up with a lot of stalking ships? You can always just take it a piece at a time. Send in your ships and beeline them for one guard post, accepting that they're going to be a suicide squad. Rebuild and repeat until the world is mostly cleaned up. Slow and messy, but it should get you there eventually.

[Castruccio]

Since it is a core planet that I am attacking, a huge number of ships from the Home Planet appear to be warping in from the wormhole to the home planet.  I can get the warp gates and things taken care of, and I can even survive on the core planet for a few minutes.  Once I am there for a little while, however, a massive number of ships flood in.

[BobTheJanitor]

Huh did you manage to put the homeworld on alert somehow? I don't get how that many ships there would already be freed. I don't know why that would be though, since you would have had to have already taken another core world for that to make any sense... I guess if you've been repeatedly assaulting the core world that could have kept it on alert status for a while. To be honest, I almost never take core worlds, I just cut a path to the homeworld wormhole and then send my attack force over in transports with a bunch of decoy transports to make sure they get there.

[keith.lamothe]

Castruccio, how many hops away from your own planets is this core planet you're trying to take?  The AI has a "deepstrike response" sort of thing that's kinda similar to the AI Eye, but the ships come from an AI homeworld instead (iirc).  Only happens if you're like 4 or more hops away from your planets, I believe, and it does announce the problem in the alerts box in the upper left hand corner.

[Castruccio]

Thanks for the tip Keith.  I will check to see how many hops away I am.  I thought it was less than four (maybe right at 3), but I could be mistaken.  So you are basically saying that you have to have a planet within 3 hops of the core in order not to trigger the home response?

[keith.lamothe]

So you are basically saying that you have to have a planet within 3 hops of the core in order not to trigger the home response?

I forget the exact number of hops (it should be telling if it's happening, though), but yes, you'll need a relatively close forward base

[BobTheJanitor]

I want to say 5 hops. It's one more than whatever the usual Fallen Spire shard recovery is, which I think is 4. I know because just last night I was doing a shard recovery through a string of neutered planets and noticed there was a data center one more jump out so I sent a raid squad over and got the deep strike angry AI warning. I was a bit surprised to see it since it didn't feel like I was deep-striking after just clearing all those worlds of almost all AI presence, but they were still technically AI worlds so I guess that's right.