Some oddities I've noted that should probably be looked at. For reference, I'm playing a 9.8/9.8 game with minimal planets taken as a test bed for strategies.
After about an hour and a half, I've had *one* max-time wave. The rest are piddlies or half-waves. While this makes for some explosive combat the rare times the two tandem up and hit you with a double max-time, it's basically a loss if that happens because you're lulled to sleep by the lighter waves. My guess is when building a wave the AI (each of them) should get a 10-20% chance to wait for max, if not higher. My preference would be 40% or so minimum.
Neutral Dysons are not tractor resistant. This makes for much humor for tractor guardian deaths.
Neutral Dysons can get stymied. Put in artillery guardians (pretty common spawn) + munitions boosters (2.7x at Mk IV) and you have a one shot kill for dysons. Park this near a wormhole and watch hilarity ensue. This is probably not the only AI combination to make sure a neutral dyson is never fearsome. I recommend Neutral Dyson spawns are modified. Instead of being 1/5seconds, make it 3 / 15 seconds, and have them 'flock'. This will allow them to have a much higher chance of breaking one-shot blockades, or streaming deaths, without changing the base volume in the galaxy.
Alerts and reinforcements: Since I'm only 3 worlds taken, including the homeworld, does that mean the two worlds on the edge of the dyson are included in the 3 worlds that would normally be reinforced, or no? They're not listed as alerted, I assume that's to reduce 'cheap' scouting for the dyson, but once you've got scouts this should probably list correctly if they're part of the standard reinforcement mechanic. If not, I'm going to be a little nervous about the homeworlds.
Low power units should probably be blind. While quite an amusing way to save power, low-powering all of my scouts once they're in picket position should not continue to allow me to see what the heck is going on.
Is it my imagination, or is it the higher # of guardposts, the more chances the world will be a higher mark? Or is the obvservation inverted? Higher Mark = more guardposts?
