First things first, I have a lot of assists and make-it-easier things going on. Golems, a 10/10 Dyson Sphere somewhere, 10/10 Roaming Enclaves and the Fallen Spire. Also either a +100% or +200% resource handicap. I nearly have a full cap from MkI-IV of ships that the AI is regularly throwing at me due to choosing parasites as my first, getting one of the younglings later (never use the things, don't particularly like that they're pretty much always at half health) and then getting scapegoats. I was a little skeptical of scapegoats at first, but they have really helped to bloat the fleet. Many of the MkIV ships I have in the fleet are unavailable to me as the closest Adv Factory I know of is in the third quadrant. Here's the
state of the map at the moment.
Three Spire cities are up and I have room for a fourth inside home quadrant before having to move out. The next signal is at the chokepoint system of the second quadrant. All Merc ships are on the field.
I'm at the point that I keep reaching in my attempts to play this game. What to do next? You'll notice there's an empty nothingness to the right. I've been throwing my deathball of a fleet at the AI, crashing through repeated 1-2k garrisoned ships that are remainders of old Exo attacks judging by all the guardians and MkV ships I saw. Nearly every system in the second quadrant has a thing of some value on it. Design backups, MkV ships and turrets, golems and ARSs are sprinkled all over the place. I tried using a superterminal to lower AIP but that nearly hit the fan in a really bad way when I noticed a little too late that power surges were not large influxes of ships, but techups of the waves. Only got about 20 -AIP out of that. AI is gonna get really ticked off by ploughing through the rest of these systems, but my fleet tactics don't go beyond select all military, sit on top of enemy wormhole, view galaxy map, V-move into enemy system, wait a minute, AI's dead, Jim. But that's what I really wanna do with the Fallen Spire.
Sledgehammer through to
Pushoyar for the Shard and just keep upping the arsenal of the Spire? Would it even be possible? I had the luck of the first three Shards all being inside home quadrant so the chokepoint bore the AI's assault. I imagine now being almost halfway to MkIII AIP, the assaults are gonna be a tad more vicious than they were at MkI AIP.