Trying an AI10 Game.

[eRe4s3r]

Well.. my test game against an Ai 10 and AI 1 (with 100% handicap for me) turned out very unhealthy ;p

6 hours in i had captured pretty much everything there was (previous page), except 5 worlds (2 adv research labs there ,p)

Well but these 5 worlds.. they were a problem ;p

About 10 minutes 6 hours passed i lost a pretty decent amount of ships, rebuilt them and wanted to to continue, when the dreaded "An Attack is forming" message came, a quick look with 10 scouts revealed, 2400 ships of which about 1400 were collecting at my wormhole... 5 seconds later my first nuke went off solving that problem... or not, about 10 minutes later about 300 Vampire Claws MKIV came through (same planet) and.. well these things prompt me to rethink my strategy in AI war again. They rip through defenses and shields like butter... so these were still no problem but i had to move my 1500 ship fleet out of my homeworld for a moment...

3 Thinks happened then
1 New "An Attack is forming" message, this time, the second IV world
2 Waves appeared with from the DIF 10 AI at 1minute 50s counter - 3.2X Bombers and Cruisers
(Could hold them with my defense fleet, sadly that prompted me to move it right on top of that wormhole for a second)
1 Wave from the green too, but that didn't even come in anymore ;p

About 20 seconds after that, came this



I didn't need to count them ;p My Fleet couldn't be back in time to stop them from going straight at my command station ;(

Its really quite hard to get anywhere with dif 10 AI...

[x4000]

Ouch!  Yeah, dif 10, even when paired with a dif 1, is a real challenge...

[darke]

Would it be worth to nuke 2 IV  planets owned by the DIF 10 AI and capture another 6-8 (mostly owned by the DIF1 ai) to create a complete closed off side of the map, with exactly 1 (yes 1) front (1 wormhole to enemy planet) literally about 12 planets all under my control (and with that, no more spec ops posts so no more patrols in this entire "arm" of the galaxy.

Hard to say.  That will skyrocket the AI Progress, so it depends on the specifics of your map.  Sounds dubious to me, though.  But if the resources are worth it, then that's cool.

Generally if you are that early in the game and a plan involves "use more then one nuke", you are probably barking up the wrong tree.

Usually by late game I'll have one or two nukes built as a "defensive" mechanism, but I'll rarely use them (maybe once out of every 3 or 4 games?) unless absolutely time critical. In all other cases you'll be better served by using multiple Lightning Missiles. For a regular sized planet a single missile will take out a single chunk of ships around a wormhole/command point/ion cannon/etc with only a dozen or two stragglers left over, so a stack of 8 will wipe out pretty much anything of import on a planet within half an hour of game time. It's just resource-intensive and more fiddly.

[eRe4s3r]

The problem was the plan involved nukes because there were 3 - yes 3 Ion Cannons MK3 in those sectors, and i have no MKIV ships, or could even find a single factory in reach (and i *looked* ;p)

If you take a look at the pre-release thread, that screenshot? Thats the result of not even getting my second nuke to target (those ships came ALL from the second planet..)

I nuked the IV world only when an "Attack is forming" message came, sadly with core turrets still there i couldn't traverse to the other IV world and the time it took me to even get anywhere at that front the second attack was forming, with the 2nd nuke way out of range (and we are talking attacks of at least 1000 MKIV ships vs 1200 largely MK1 and 2s and 300 MK3's)

Ok, seriously.. the actual problem was i wanted to see how DOOMish a DIF10 Ai is, let me say, its Doom alright ;p