Final Spire Shard in a bad place: Need tips

[Vyndicu]

It seem odd that I have a bad luck steak!? First the 50k dark spire ships roaming; then the final shard spawned in a bad place.

First off. Notice where my highlighted solar system in northwest direction from Murdoch.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=130370426

Now for the solar system itself with final spire shard. It is a bit heavy on defending. Core warhead interceptor, level 3 fortress, blackhole, two warp gates, and an angry neighbor if I went in with brutal force.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=130370315

I have 4 spire city hub in each deadend hub and one spire city hub with a galactic hub in zarde. So as a result I have quite large army. I have MK5 engineer (Not that I need them hahah), MK5 bulletproof fighter, MK5 tackle drone launcher, stealth spire battleship MK2, gravity ripper MK 2, spire starship (the one that built like a roit starship), regenerate golem and finally a botnet golem.

I should notice the AI in this game seem to love zenith reprocessor/spire blade spawner which are sadly both zombified immune.

Unfortunely for me I see two more ARS I could try to hack but they are on the opposite side of the universe in caow general area and most golem are also southeast with a few northeast.

Should I take varnumar and start work on put a large amount of turrets (They would be quite exposed should the rocketry enclave launch an emp warhead) in there or stay in zarde and try to skip ahead?

[KDR_11k]

I believe if the shard dies a new anomaly is spawned elsewhere? In that case you could just use a cloaked survey ship to make the shard appear and then let the AI trash it.

[keith.lamothe]

No, if a shard dies you can't progress further in FS in that game; you can use what cities and such you already have but you have to win conventionally then.

[Vyndicu]

Spoiler for those who have not done spire campaign ahead.




This is not a normal city hub shard but the final one required for the spire thingy that allow a massive huge swarm of spire ships to show up from other galaxy. I already have unlocked the spire colony ship so I don't need another shard just this specific one. So hence the asking for tips on taking on the solar system.

[Aeson]

My advice? Go in with brutal force and take the system. Kill every warp gate you see on your way there, maybe even kill every system you pass through to get there, and certainly kill every AI ship you see. Possibly even kill the AI homeworld next to the shard recovery zone; definitely kill any raid engines in the area. If you can take the black hole machine intact (I recommend using cloaker starships, transports, or both to sneak several colony ships and engineers into the system with your fleet), you have a temporary plug for the shard recovery response. If your fortress world at the entrance to your space can hold against late-campaign exo-waves, it can hold against normal wave attacks even if you punch the AI progress up fairly significantly. At this point in the game, even permanently alerting an AI homeworld isn't really that much of a problem, nor is picking up an additional one or two hundred AI progress, unless you fail to recover the shard.

Alternatively, quickly go in and smash the black hole machine and withdraw the fleet to Doorla, send in the Survey Vessel under cloak either while you smash the black hole machine or after you do so, and hope the shard spawns close enough to the exit wormhole to escape before the AI response fleet kills it (helps to also destroy the in-system warp gate, at the very least). Remember to clean up loose AI ships before you withdraw to Doorla - you don't want anything shooting the shard if you can prevent it from doing so.

At this stage in the campaign, AI progress only really matters from a "how bad will it be if a wave lands while I'm dealing with an exo-wave or with the recovery force" perspective, unless you have obscenely high levels of AI progress (670 or so for a five-city Spire campaign isn't that bad).

Another thing to consider - take Varnumar so your 5th city (the one on Zarde) can be fully built out. Give that city a habitation module and five reactors, and put five shipyards on a different spire city. Zarde is now a very good candidate for a fortress world. Also put a habitation module and five reactors on the city in Birew, to better protect your homeworld. Two of the other three cities should then be given five shipyards and a habitation module, while the last city should probably get two of each build option. This allows you to maximize your defenses at two key worlds and still permits the maximum-size Spire Fleet for your five cities.

[Vyndicu]

Well good news and bad news.

Good news first off. I manage to free the dyson sphere in the northeast corner and built a spire city hub in a dark spire system to keep the population under control. I cleared everything in northeast arm except for one level 4 with an ARS. I plan to hack that one and I got a third golem artillery.

I don't plan to colonization the Murdoch or the dark spire right next to it. So I used knowledge hacker (AI often patrol ) since AI do not control either and I have supply to both.

Spire tech tree has been fully unlocked except for the one thing that require mk 3 plasma starship.

Apparently Guardian Neinzul loves to trigger CPA?! I used the new chat commend and they keep attacking pretty deep behind enemy lines. They manage to kill every AI post and the fort in the system. So I decide to take advantage with my champion and kill all stuff Neinzul didn't touch. Now the system with the shard signal is actually gate-less now. The only thing left is reinforcements and the wormhole guards. There is a very nasty side-effect with deepstrike from Guardian Neinzul they will kill all guard posts without a champion present and ignore some stuff that will kill them (mostly ion mk3-mk4). The chat commend is nice but I would like to have some way to say "OK let attack this system together".



Bad news It is now more than 25 hours into and AIP has gone up to 1026 or so. Not lot more I can do without triggering tech 4.  I plan to continue gate raiding the entire northwest except for the homeworld and try to prepare for it as much as I can.

There was many setback including one time where a devourer golem manage to burn my full mercenary, mk 2, mk 1, and starships from 3200 strong down to 1200. At the same time almost killing my regen golem. Which was pretty bad considering I have not even started on building mk 3 turrets in Varnumar.

One small thing did keep hitting me pretty bad as predicted making a fortified system in a neinzul rocketry cluster has a hefty price to it. One time it manage to eat about 70 mercenary ships because my fleet was sitting on a wormhole waiting for orders. The other neinzul rocketry cluster is pretty under control because if it tried to attack the system it is on the military mk 1 commend station will just laugh at it. If it tries to strike another solar system then the spire city hub's snipers gets dusted off.   Any tips on how to handle having a neinzul rocketry cluster in your frontier fortified system? Especially an emp one.

Notice to DEV: It also has a nasty side effect of "denying" experience to champion with limited option for experiences. In this game nebula wormholes are very hard to get to. Including ONE wormhole in an AI homeworld?! The easy 4 to get to was located also with a strange coincidence at all of the first four spire city hubs. The rest were located either in a hub system in northwest and northeast or one in caow and southeast AI's homeworld. I don't "like" the wormhole in the northeast branch so I have not start on it yet because of "insert colony ship reason here".



Question: If I gate raid the entire northwest branch would that cause reinforcements to appear from the southeast branch to fly up northwest? Or would the northwest homeworld spawns everything from tech 3 to tech 4?

I keep having about 100 up to 400 stealth ships sneaking, at the same time lot of non-stealth ships attacking, into my fortified system and scatter everywhere. Is there a good way to find where they are without "waking" them all at once (tachyon warhead or tachyon pulse from champion for instance)? I am asking because this AI seem to LOVES stealth spire battleship and zenith reclaimer. As previously noticed they are immune to botnet and most of my tool for dealing with a swarm. I had a particular nasty one where there was a mk core included with the group that sneaked in. Perhaps I will get more options once I hacked the northeast ARS. One good option I can think of is a tachyon fighter however that is unlikely to be something I get since I have all 4 expansion enable so many ship types. Remember I have gravity ripper, stealth battleship, spire corvette, and whole lot of spire asteroid including some mk 5 ones.

One last question: Should I attempt to take any of those ship type to help combat lot of stealth ships? Warbird starship, beam starship mk 5, zenith chameleon mk 5, decoy drone fabricator, Microfighter mk 5 frabricator, advanced factory (no mk 3 yet but could get), Zenith mirror mk5 (this one is in a dark spire system right next to mordoch). The last one is not a good one to get because it could potentially trigger an invasion of the northeast branch when I want to keep AI from "noticing" it. There is a laser gatling mk 5 fabricator but it is out of the qusetion because it is in nano system in southeast branch. There are two easy to get to broken golems: Armored golem and cursed golem. Should I try for either? For some strange reason southeast branch has more golem than anywhere else. There is one more armored golem, one more artillery golem, Hive golem, black widow golem. There are also two more ARS in the southeast branch but the hacking will most likely be very intense with those two after hacking the third ARS in northeast branch. Don't worry about power being limited because I have been very very lucky with zenith power generator. I have one built by zenith trader PLUS 4 captured zenith power generator. There is a 6th in Murdoch but unlikely I will be able to hold it.

For irreplacement spire ships I have one titanite, one adamantite, 14 ebonitie, lot of everything else. I already used a few for some siege tower mk 1 and implosion artillery mk 1, and One penetrator mk 1. Siege tower and implosion artillery are gone.  Is there anyting of particular interesting that I can take advantage of?

DEV notice: I built those because I thought I could repair those as they don't have "immune to repair" in their tip box. Even given that I couldn't repair. I got lot of use out of them. So I can't complain much.

[Hearteater]

If you are playing Spire - Moderate, no Spire ships from asteroids can be repaired.  On Spire - Hard you get Exos attacking you but can repair Spire ships from asteroids (except those that can never be repaired).  On Spire - Easy you get no Exos and you can also repair any Spire ships that aren't immune to repair.

[Vyndicu]

I am playing on medium spire but those two spire ship in the spire mining ship building tab shows no "immune: repair"; only reclaimation for R. Perhaps add something to mention that you can repair on hard spire setting in the tip box? I already have plenty on my hand just considering a full gate raid and a final shard retrieve operation. 

[Aeson]

On Spirecraft:
The Spirecraft version of the Ion Cannon can be useful, if you're facing lots of ships of an appropriate mark which aren't immune to insta-kill and you can keep a decent shield over the Ion Blaster (or whatever it's called).

Implosion Artillery is always useful in a Fallen Spire campaign since it helps wear down the big stuff quickly, so if you don't have as much of a cap of those as you can have, I'd suggest building them (and build caps of every mark, as well).

Attritioners are great for helping survive a big battle, or for angering entire planets. A few hundred damage per second may not seem like that much, but it is applied to everything that isn't attrition-immune - so if there are 1000 fighters, that's (attrition damage amount)*1000 damage every second. It probably won't win the battle for you, but it will make it easier. Also note that the attrition damage output is cumulative within and across marks - there is no cap saying "only X attrition damage per second can be dealt on any given planet" or "no more than Y attrition emitters can be active on a planet" or anything like that (as far as I know). Thus having full caps of all marks of these makes a good supporting group for a fortress world or a fleet.

Penetrators are good at the surgical removal of hard targets, but Artillery Golems serve essentially the same role; Fallen Spire ships can do essentially the same thing by application of massive firepower, and, unlike Penetrators and Artillery Golems, Spire capital ships are replaceable.

On cloaking detection:
If possible, don't use Tachyon warheads if you can instead use champion tachyon bursts, because it's cheaper on the AI progress.

On reinforcements and gate raiding:
Gate raiding only stops standard wave attacks, exo-wave deployment, and shard pursuit spawns. Gate raiding the entire Northwest branch will possibly make shard recovery easier, but might not because suddenly the shard pursuit spawns are spawning between your territory and the shard, and you'll have to fly through them in order to return the shard. Better to take Murdoch and turn it into a fortress, then gate-raid up to the world you're recovering the shard from (and maybe one planet beyond that) rather than have to fly through the entire response force while trying to recover the shard. Unless you want the challenge, anyways. Taking Murdoch also isn't necessary, since at this point it's probably safer to leave the fortress world at the city closest to the AI territory.

Planetary reinforcements and Special Forces reinforcements spawn at guard posts and the command center on every planet. Killing warp gates isn't going to affect where these come from, although killing guard posts could.

On special ship fabricators:
Unless these happen to be protected by a city or two, or unless you're willing to weaken your main defensive line to protect these, they'll just die to the next exo-wave that comes by. They aren't worth taking unless you're willing to commit a lot to defend them, and even then you'll probably lose them. You could take them for a one-time ship cap build and then abandon them, and they'd be useful (particularly Microfighters sitting on a wormhole if the AI likes stealth units - but that role has significant losses attached to it, and you probably won't be able to keep the fabricator for making replacements, and you can fill this role by replaceable tachyon drones and turrets or stealth tachyon turrets).

If you think you can protect these, and you have the economy required to build and power everything that comes out of the fabricators, there is no reason not to get them. If you think you can take them but not hold them longer than would be required to produce a cap of the bonus ships, then you'd need to decide whether or not having an irreplaceable cap of high-mark ships is worthwhile (Tachyon Microfighters are essentially normal fighters, from a fleet utility point of view, and if you want decloaking ability scout starships or decloakers will serve you better; Warbirds are essentially a variant of the Raid Starship - fast, cloaked, intended more for hit and run than a straight fight; Chameleons are similar to Bombers in their utility, but have a cloak which is annoying for players to deal with since tachyons can't break it and isn't really that useful for players either; Beam Starships, last I knew, were good combat starships; Zenith Mirrors are only really good if you can replace them, since their special abilities make them die quickly).

As for the golems - if you think you can hold the systems they're in long enough to fix them up, both the Cursed and the Armored Golem are great direct combat golems. I don't know that they are worth further increasing the AI progress in your current game, though.

[Vyndicu]

I just had a particular nasty exo-galaxy force at the same time 7 min down to a backdoor warp + ARS hacking with neinzul guardian assistant and two golems only. My defending fleet was somewhere else at the moment. I have not even built the researched various turret mk 3 yet. There is a maraudar human force but they are a joke to the neinzul drones. There is some stealth starships yet again but nowhere as bad as the 400 were.

Here is the picture screen shot result from defending in my fortified system including a superfortress at 500k hp remaining. Notice 721 remains haha I have to get back to rebuilding it all up.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197989933643/screenshots/