Wow this game got hard all of a sudden.....

[Luddite42]

Ok so I'm not some world class rts player, in fact I often play turn based games so it takes me a while to adjust to the specific rts I choose.  I'm playing on difficulty 6, and abandoned a 10 planet map for a 30, lost on that, and now am trying a 40 planet map with a tree structure.  I decided to play with Zenith Mirrors again, I want to try and figure out the best way to use them before trying a different special ship.  I quickly took two planets near my homeworld, though they had nothing special about them I just wanted somewhere to acquire knowledge and gain more energy.  Was this a mistake?  I took another slightly stronger AI world thats kinda a hub for 3 or 4 other more valuable planets.  But I just can't take anything else.  Every planet 3 hops away in any direction has like 7 or 8 Gaurdians on it, about 250 mark 3 or 4 ships, and like 4 or 5 various gaurdposts.  I can deal with these issues, I have all mark 2 ships unlocked and mark 3 zenith mirrors, but these AI EYE things are just ruining my day.  Even if I send every single ship I can build (well over 1500) as soon as I hit one of these planets with an AI eye, it spawns a 500-700 mix of 6 or 7 different ship types all at mark 3 or 4 level.  I get decimated because they have not only better ships, but ones that I literally have no counter for, plus they use armor boosting ships.  I have two stardocks producing replacement units continuously, and I can kill just enough AI ships that when they counter-attack one of my worlds, I can hold them off and not lose anything of my own.  But the AI progress is only at 100!  How do I kill these AI eye things, and if I do, will the AI rebuild it?  I also need to kill the tachyon gaurdians so I can move transports through with cloaker starships but I can't seem to last long enough to manage that either.  What am I doing wrong?

[x4000]

Your problem is that you're throwing lots of ships at the AI Eye -- which is what causes it to spawn more ships.  Check out the tooltip on the AI Eye, but those are basically a way of preventing you from sending massive fleets against the planet until it is dead.  You'll want to raid the eye with a smaller force (no more than twice the number of the AI ships on the planet), kill the eye, and then move on with the rest. 

When you encounter a new unit that is causing trouble like that, be sure to check the tooltips -- they explain what the unit is doing and thus help you figure out how to counter it.  Just throwing as much stuff as you can muster at an Eye is about the worst thing you can do, in this case.

Good luck!

[Winter Born]

Welcome to the forums. As X4000 indicated the new AI-Eye is designed to break the Blob of Death

http://www.arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_AI_Unit_-_The_Eye

[Luddite42]

Alright then, seems I need to think more carefully in the future.  This game really makes me feel dumb sometimes.

[Winter Born]

This game will challenge you, but would you rather have a game you can beat every time or one that says pay attention i have something new to show you. I don't play tic-tac-toe anymore  but I do play this game and a few others. I have played AI War about a year off and on, won a handful of games, never harder than 7.3AI. So enjoy the journey, as much as you can.

[Luddite42]

Hmm I guess I should ask another question, in order to liberate the dyson sphere do you just have to kill every single thing of the AI including the warp gaurd posts that have hundreds of millions of hit points?

[zebramatt]

Hmm I guess I should ask another question, in order to liberate the dyson sphere do you just have to kill every single thing of the AI including the warp gaurd posts that have hundreds of millions of hit points?

Nope, just the AI Command Station.

[HitmanN]

Hmm I guess I should ask another question, in order to liberate the dyson sphere do you just have to kill every single thing of the AI including the warp gaurd posts that have hundreds of millions of hit points?

Nope, just the AI Command Station.

And with that those guard posts with hundreds of millions of hit points should blow up too.

[oddlaurence]

Regarding the AI eye, it was a problem for me too when i first encoutered it in 4.0 version. However i found some possible sollution to it (probably not the best, but works for me): if you have higher mark bombers unlocked, put them in a transport ships (usually 200 is enough playing on normal caps unless that Eye is covered with some other defenses) and simply do the raid. Given bomber's armour and dmg multiplier vs heavy structures, its often more than enough to destroy it and sometiems even to get away with minimum casualties. Of course, if AI eye is covered by lets say mark 2 or 3 forcefield, i tend to destroy some EMP warheads before launching in my transport ship, so it gives some time to focus on eye at cost of little AI progress. I pressume starships should also do the trick, but since i dont usually unlock them, cant say for sure...