New player help

[fatbooboo]

Hello I just started playing a few days ago, amazing game btw.

I am having trouble trying to figure out how many turrets  I should place for defense of my planets and how many is too much or too little.
In my last game my economy seemed to just crash and I was having brownouts.

I was finally did in by a unit called a Raid Eye that caused a never ending wave of around 140 bombers in successive waves until I escaped the planet I was attacking, how do I deal with this unit when its on a planet with heavy defenses without incurring so much threat?

[Vyndicu]

First off welcome to AI War.

It's depend on what kind of map you have. If you have a X map then you can put everything in one system and defend it. If the map has too many paths then you have to figure out where the most likely path of exo-wave/threat will take to your systems. Usually they will pick a target and and attack it. Or even in some rare cases multiple group will attack in different fronts. Mini-fort may help you alot since you can build them per-system unlike the other forts.

For raid eye you may have to use either cloaked fleet whose only goal is to take out guard posts (ignore wormhole guard posts). Raid Eye only active if you have twice more ships than what AI has in-system. You may want to look into using a smaller fleet or cloaker starship or any of the starships. They pack lot of punches.

As for brownouts, it only happens if you lose your power supply. So you will want to have some wuggle room when it comes to power supply so build some matter conversion but they cost resource. The other option is to take more systems to expand your power. But be careful taking too many will result in AI become even more powerful over time.

Try to not overextend your economy and upgrade your harvester and your command station (mark 2 and mark 3 give you more resources however warp jammer cost resource). Also some system may have few or more spot for crystal/metal harvester so plan ahead.

[Kahuna]

on 10/10 difficulty you can have 3 planets (all turrets and mines split between 3 planets) with defenses strong enough to auto stop 1000-2000 Mark II ships (AIP about 80 - 120)

on 8/8 difficulty you can have 6 (all turrets and mines split between 6 planets) planets to auto stop about 500-800 Mark I ships (about 80 - 120 AIP)

check out the "3. Defense" part
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13369.0.html

[tadrinth]

Raid Eyes (and other AI Eyes) only trigger if there are 2x as many human ships as AI ships in the system.  Ergo, you want to use things that pack a lot of whallop per ship.  Starships are an obvious choice, but fleet ships with low ship caps can also work. There is a hotkey that lets you select ships of a particular mark; bringing just Mark IV bombers to a system might be a good way to deal with, say, fortresses in systems with an Eye.

If you bring enough ships into a system, all the guards in the system will leave their posts to come deal with your fleet.  If you bring fewer ships, though, they'll stay at their posts and you can fight them in smaller batches.  That does mean fighting next to a guard post, so make sure to keep any ships that post has bonuses against out of the way.  Smaller raids can be very effective (and that's pretty much how you have to deal with AI eyes).

You can also use ships with tractor beams to drag ships into the next system over to be massacred by your full force.  Riot Starships can pull these sorts of shenanigans and are always available.

Failing that, upgrade to the most recent beta version if you haven't, and then just drop a sabotage hacker in the system.  It'll blow up the eye (possibly after some other stuff).  If you haven't done much hacking, this can be a hilariously easy way to get rid of annoying things like Eyes and Fortresses.