So I'm playing a 7/7 campaign with Dark Spire 4 and Marauders 4 among others. With Champions in play, there's also allied factions wandering around. I've got a Dark Spire system that was too tempting not to capture, and need to figure out how to hold it and when to bail.
1) People talk about "critical mass". Given that one Vengeance spawn will also trigger a spawn on other worlds, I think this refers to a situation where killing one Dark Spire ship will spawn more than one Dark Spire ship across the galaxy. At Dark Spire level 4, how many systems can I keep active (killing all the spawned DS ships in them) before I hit critical mass? With marauders, it seems like they're all guaranteed to be awake by the time I'm six hours in. AI ships even in systems I haven't seen ought to be dropping like flies, massively boosting Dark Spire spawns, but my single captured vengeance generator isn't murdering me yet even though I'm killing everything in its system. I'm a little confused why I'm alive. (Maybe marauders don't hit systems I've never seen?)
2) Do ship deaths count by "number of ships" or "ship strength"? If it's entirely based on number of ships, then it seems relatively safe to hold these systems with starships. (I captured it by removing AI fleet ships with mercenary etherjets and, in one case, running away with a Martyr.) But if starships contribute more hidden BP when they die, I'll need to get way more paranoid.
3) My strategy usually focuses on turret fabricators, but I don't have enough fabricators yet to wipe out DS ships without losing several turrets in the process. Do turret deaths count as "ship deaths"? If so, I'll have to change my approach to Fortresses and stuff.
4) What is the border situation like with DS worlds? Do they attack outwards very often? I'm playing with champions; do I need to worry about my allied ships invading DS worlds without me leading the way? If I wipe out the AI command station in a DS system and then don't capture the world, will the AI invade that system with the threatfleet or border aggression (meaning I need to build forward bases to guard the wormholes in, even in AI systems I don't plan to capture)? I already expect that I'll need to prune special forces bases very carefully.
5) Besides waking up the Dark Spire in more systems, do things get worse over time? I've been assuming that the spawn rate per dead ship is a constant as the game progresses, and that their types of ships never change. Is that accurate?
Thanks!
