Dealing with the special forces

[chemical_art]

On my current 9+ game, and my previous low aip 10/10 game, I was able to eventually beat down SF through attrition. I'm attacking HW now in my 9+ game and have depleted their reserves. I wonder what is going on.

[Winge]

On my current 9+ game, and my previous low aip 10/10 game, I was able to eventually beat down SF through attrition. I'm attacking HW now in my 9+ game and have depleted their reserves. I wonder what is going on.

Rebuilding would be my guess.

[keith.lamothe]

They only check for new spawns about once a minute, iirc, and can only spawn a certain % of their max size per check, so if a full SF fleet comes at you and you wipe it in 5 minutes, they'll be pretty small for a while.

FYI, killing the special forces guard posts doesn't really diminish their overall strength unless they're on a non-AI planet (when they stop being an eligible spawn point and start increasing the spawns slightly), but it does impact where they can spawn.  The AI home command stations are also eligible spawn points so you can't totally freeze them out, though.

[Kahuna]

Btw... How is anyone supposed to use the Ship Design Hacker now? If I try to hack an Advanced Research Station I would just get obliterated by the Intergalactic Sentry Eye aka Special Forces

[Hearteater]

Do you have CSGs turned on?  I thought SF only cared about ARS planets if CSGs were turned off.  Maybe they always care about hacking.

[Kahuna]

Do you have CSGs turned on?  I thought SF only cared about ARS planets if CSGs were turned off.  Maybe they always care about hacking.

Finally: they don't defend every planet; it's gotta have a Broken Golem, core world, home world, or CSG (if you have CSGs off, then an AdvFact or ARS) for them to bother.

Atm I'm playing with CSGs turned off. I was soon going to hack an ARS. I was cleaning Ion Cannons and Guard Posts with Raid Starships and then suddenly Special Forces showed up to chase the Raid Starships. I realized hacking the ARS would be impossible because of this so I destroyed the CS and captured the planet and ARS with it. It seems like Special Forces have disabled Ship Design Hacking and Knowledge Hacking on some planets (ARS, AF etc). This seems to be an unintended side effect of the changes made to the Special Forces.

EDIT:

core world, home world

LoL I just realized I'd have to deal with the Special Forces when I attack the home worlds... -______________- zzzzzzz... I guess I'll have to find Special Forces Alarm Posts, blow them up with Raid Starships and let my defenses take care of them.

[LordSloth]

Bad idea, fun idea:

Draw the patrol to a system (either the hacking or sacrificial goat with a CSG and nothing important).
Hit the system with an EMP (or nuke, preferably mk3)
Send your fleet in to wipe out patrol and establish a beachead under the idea that the patrol will come to die, since it doesn't really flee much. Put up (mini)forts, spider turrets, riot starships, you name it. Just take into account wormhole guardposts preventing shields from being eligible from repair. Kill them as they come in.

Alternate idea? Draw them over a wormhole with either a durable superweapon (armored golem), expendable superweapon (champion), or infinite stream of cheap and expendable bonus ships (mk1 fighters, cutlasses, neinzul ships). Then hit them with a sufficiently large enough lightning warhead. Warning: Repeated Use may be bad for your health!

[TechSY730]

Do you have CSGs turned on?  I thought SF only cared about ARS planets if CSGs were turned off.  Maybe they always care about hacking.

Finally: they don't defend every planet; it's gotta have a Broken Golem, core world, home world, or CSG (if you have CSGs off, then an AdvFact or ARS) for them to bother.

Atm I'm playing with CSGs turned off. I was soon going to hack an ARS. I was cleaning Ion Cannons and Guard Posts with Raid Starships and then suddenly Special Forces showed up to chase the Raid Starships. I realized hacking the ARS would be impossible because of this so I destroyed the CS and captured the planet and ARS with it. It seems like Special Forces have disabled Ship Design Hacking and Knowledge Hacking on some planets (ARS, AF etc). This seems to be an unintended side effect of the changes made to the Special Forces.

EDIT:

core world, home world

LoL I just realized I'd have to deal with the Special Forces when I attack the home worlds... -______________- zzzzzzz... I guess I'll have to find Special Forces Alarm Posts, blow them up with Raid Starships and let my defenses take care of them.

Though I think the SF caps and spawn rates could use a bit of a nerf (especially at <=8), I do like that it makes the AI more active in its defense.
It's just that is seems that their current caps and rates means that you will encounter a fleet-stopping sized force of them a bit too often.

Special forces alarm posts would be pretty nifty if you wanted to get all of them out of the way at once, except that, IIRC, they are broken right now (triggering them does nothing)...

[keith.lamothe]

Special forces alarm posts would be pretty nifty if you wanted to get all of them out of the way at once, except that, IIRC, they are broken right now (triggering them does nothing)...

They were reactivated when threatfleet behavior was added: trigger the sf-alarm, and all sf become threatfleet.

For dealing with SF, if it's really truly killing you, then something like LordSloth described should work:

- capture a planet next to a CSG planet
- without taking the CSG planet build a sufficiently intense beachhead (turrets, forts, forcefields, etc) on the CSG planet
- once you've broken the SF fleet's initial attacks, you just have to deal with the ongoing spawns, but they should all happily march into your beachhead and die (unless you start hitting them somewhere more important, but at least they won't have a full fleet)

Of course, if the AI's SF forces you to do something like that it's already accomplished a large part of its purpose (making your life difficult), but they shouldn't ever be a total wall if you know how to handle them.

The strategic reserve on the homeworld, on the other hand...

[Faulty Logic]

The strategic reserve on the homeworld, on the other hand...

Are what warheads are for.

[LordSloth]

On a side note, I'm generally able to wipe out the AI special forces patrol in an unrelated low mark system, and then proceed hacking as normal. Although certain bonus ship types can make that difficult (Tackle Drone Launchers, I choose you!), it generally isn't harder to keep up with new patrol ships. After you do that, it is relatively simple to handle the hacking on more moderate difficulties. The main threat will remain the zombies, I don't recall seeing starships in a patrol, thankfully.

Smart-Aleck Suggestion: Golemite Patrols AI.

I haven't actually baited the spec-ops onto a beachead in most of my games. I have baited them off a raid target, or onto a low value system to take them out. I do believe I'll find a beachhead extremely valuable in my current game, however. It's a bit hard to wipe out special forces patrols accompanied by sixty tackle-drone launchers w/o superweapons, and using just fleet ships and starships. I've spotted a Broken (medium) Black Widow Golem that is fairly crazy in terms of metal and crystal, but patrols make clearing this system enough to settle challenging. I'll go about establishing a beachead and seeing if miniforts and mk1 forts can keep up after the initial patrol is wiped, then later switching to the Black Widow once I need to clear systems for the Fallen Spire Campaign.

[Kahuna]

The strategic reserve on the homeworld, on the other hand...

Are what warheads are for.

I love the smell of Lightning Warheads in the morning.

[Kahuna]

Special forces alarm posts would be pretty nifty if you wanted to get all of them out of the way at once, except that, IIRC, they are broken right now (triggering them does nothing)...

I tested that few days ago and every single Special Forces ship in the galaxy attacked me.

[KDR_11k]

BTW, what do SF rally guardians do now? They don't seem to invite the SF into my planets so what's their point?

[Kahuna]

LoL I just realized I'd have to deal with the Special Forces when I attack the home worlds... -______________- zzzzzzz... I guess I'll have to find Special Forces Alarm Posts, blow them up with Raid Starships and let my defenses take care of them.

Nice plan.. too bad there isn't even a single Special Forces Alarm Post in my current game LOL