The Wiki says that it takes two starships to trigger adjacent planet alerts. Does every ship module count as a separate ship? Or are the shadow vessels counted as Golems? I'm noticing that wherever I take my shadow frigate, every adjacent system goes on alert, even if it's alone, and that's bad, because there's a Dire Guardian lair next door.
On that topic, about how long do the lairs take to build a dire guardian? I'm wondering if I have time to neuter a Mark II system or two next to it, or if I should just stay completely clear?
For the alert system, you probably already noticed the red glow around planet's icon (in the galaxy view) that mean the planet is alerted. And yep, shadow frigates put adjacent planets on alert.
On the DGLair topic, you can see a build-point (BP) counter when you mouse-over the lair. IIRC, the guardian is released when this counter reach somewhere above 5,000 points. But don't worry (I mean, yes, you can worry but...) there is a timer when the guardian has less than 10 minutes to spawn (it's displayed as a wave with a text like "Dire guardian will spawn on XXX within MM:SS").
Just some free advices, as my last game leads me to capture many planets adjacent to a DGLair (very bad luck, but I learned to deal with them).
- First: a DGuardian spawns as threat, which mean it won't attack right after its spawn. However, this is not a good thing because it will roam your frontier and wait for the best time to murder you. You'll probably need to go out and hunt this big game.
- Second: beachheads are a must. Well, maybe it was because I had MkV sniper and missile turrets, but... let me explain. DGLairs often spawn because you put their planets on alert for a long time, right? So it's very often because you have captured the planet adjacent (just passing by from time to time is like a drop of water in the sea). So you probably have supply on the DGLair's planet, right? (Unless you have the evil combo DGLair + CoProc and one other CoProc is on a homeworld...) So you can bring a mobile builder and some engineers (and some troops to protect them) and build turrets in range of the lair. With the full caps of MkV sniper and missile, I was even able to crack open a lair and kill the three guardians.
I won't say DGLairs are no more a problem, because they can sometimes spawn on a planet you want to capture (and not only on an adjacent one), but this made me much more comfortable in dealing with them in the future. Try this out and come back telling me how it was!
And for the occasional passing by, don't worry, it's not some shadow frigate's deepstrikes that will wake the DGuardian up.
