Who's Sadistic Idea of Fun... (Spire Hammer)

[eronrauch]

To continue my pain-train of thought, who's sadistic idea of fun was it to have the Spire Hammer's home world?:

1) Have such a thing as a core mark raid engine at all.
2) Have said raid engine spawn 500-550 mkV ships per tick.
3) Have it *additionally* spawn a spire DREADNOUGHT per tick.
4) Have said home world, with said engine, spawning said uber-nasty ships — and this is the key part — have 2, yes TWO, of these ******* raid engines on opposite sides of the same home world with an army's worth of gravity turrets, forcefields, a core fortress and the AI home command between them.

Which, in simple terms, means an aggressive wave that comes with 4 Dreadnoughts & 1100 core mark ships, spawning right next to you a mere 60 seconds after you enter the tech IV buffer world.

That QQ aside, Brisebonbons and I actually did manage to figure out how to survive and beat this mess. (The short answer: It's complicated.) We died and had to save scum a good number of times, but still, that was one of the more hair-pulling, face-desking, keyboard-throwing moments I've had in a video game in a LOOOOoooooonnngggg time.   

[Wanderer]

Well, if it helps, in the next release the 'brutal' stations on AI HWs will be toned down (and depending on difficulty, up) slightly, to not allow the RNG full control over the pain threshhold.

So, depending on difficulty, you can expect to never through always see a couple of these.  Check the release notes if you want the details.

Also, watch your AIP and scout early if you DO end up on higher levels where they will exist so at least you know what you're fighting.

[keith.lamothe]

1) Have such a thing as a core mark raid engine at all.

Check, falls within our normal DM-meanness parameters.

2) Have said raid engine spawn 500-550 mkV ships per tick.

Check, ditto.

3) Have it *additionally* spawn 2 spire DREADNOUGHTS per tick.

Whoa 

That, my friends, is emergent behavior in action!   When I wrote the Spire Hammer I was only thinking in terms of normal waves, and the lower tech ones just get frigates/destroyers.  You might get to cruisers I guess at high AIP.  Battleships probably not and Dreads really quite unlikely.

Raid Engines, as always, really don't care what anyone else thinks

*applies the "feature" branding iron and pats it on the back.




Congratulations on beating it anyway, quite an accomplishment!

[eronrauch]

Thankfully my friend and I tend to play so as to keep our AIP quite low, so we hadn't even seen these until the two mkV raid engines at the home world started spawning them. For me, it wasn't the dreadnoughts (spire rams > dreadnoughts) nor even the core mk ships (martyrs can clean those up), nor was it having a raid engine at a home world, it was that there were two of the raid engines that was so much trouble lol.

Also, thanks keith We had to really dig in and put together a whole multi-world strategy for dealing with it (and lots of mines and Spire rams). And we died more than a few times on the first attempts, but it was as fun as it was aggravating!

[eronrauch]

Not enough caffeine for my first posts/replies so I wanted to clarify a couple things. First, each raid engine spawns a single Dreadnought per tick, for a total of 2 per double-engine wave. (TBH we had 4 up on a large percentage of our attempts owing to the timing with killing the second engine).

Second, I didn't mean to say that a Dreadnought isn't still scary in it's own right. Ditto with 500+ core mark ships. Either of those would still be brutal to deal with, but comparatively to a combination of 2 Dreadnoughts and 1000+ core mark ships that caused the massive headache, they are "deal-able."

To keith, if you're interested how we dealt with the pair of core raid engines with the dreadnoughts, here's a quick rundown:

The layout was this: My Highly Defended World (the real world we want to fight them at) ---> Mk3 World (our bait) ---> Core Mk IV ---> Core Homeworld (With 2 Core Raid Engines).

I took the Mk 3 as a fake world for the raid engine waves to hit first. It had a Factory IV, but we had one elsewhere from way earlier. Perfect bait. Knowing the AI prioritizes targets like that, I put dozens of mines in a line between the wormholes from the mkIV and to my real world. Loads of sniper turrets at the ends. Not that these will do that much damage, but they were just to buy us some time between the spawn and having to fight the 'noughts.

Then we took a couple extra worlds with high mk spire asteroids. From these we built a couple dozen mk3 and mk4 rams, four mk 4 atritioners, and four mk4 martyrs. We hid those at a world adjacent to the world where we really wanted to fight.

From there I had Brisebonbons bring about 75% of his fleet over to the real battleground world.

I built a full cap of transports. Loaded 75% of my ships in those. 1200 mixed ships total. About 100 ships per transport with about 7-8 dummy transports that were empty. This sounds weird, but what we realized after a whole bunch of other failed attempts, the only way to beat this was to skip through the core mk4, into the Core Home, and straight to the first raid engine and get enough ships there to pop it (only 6 mil hp) and then have enough transports left to re-load 200-300 ships and cross the map to the other and pop it. Any ships that got stranded would just serve as a distraction to give the strike force space to frantically do it's thing.

This meant we had 4 minutes from crossing in to the core mk 4 to kill both. It was ugly, and I lost the full cap of transports and all 1200 ships but got the second engine with 15 seconds to spare. Couldn't have done it without abusing the transports, I think.

So that left us dealing with the wave. The bait world bought us about 2 minutes while the dreadnoughts and ships wandered around and evaporated anything there, with the mkV ships eating many many mines along the way.

At this point, I've managed to rebuild about 50% of my fleet at a nearby world and the light show starts: We use the attritioners, placed deep to the side in the backfield of the defended world to lure away the core ships, which are then, SURPRISE, all grabbed from behind by the martyrs that pop through the wormhole behind them. That kills about 600-700 of the ships. (Note: Brise kept his ships in transports until the AI fleet started moving.)

(This happened almost simultaneously with the atritioner/martyr trick:) Though in reality, we really just wanted the core mk death ball to move away from the Dreadnoughts — Pulling a move from the Zap Branagin playbook, we clog it's cannons with our ships to distract them. During the slaughter, I take 20+ spire rams and pop them through from the next world over and plow in to the Dreadnoughts with only seconds for them to react. Boom.

It was a giant mess, and we probably lost about 3000 mixed ships total, but hey, that was the hard part! And we only lost the one world we had planned to lose!

*Edit* I realized that many of you might be going, "Why no golems?" Well, because of course this is the game Brisebonbons and I were experimenting with game settings and have them completely turned off...  So golems weren't an option.

 

[keith.lamothe]

Spire Rams do have their uses!  Pretty clever approach all around  

The game does give you a lot of tools, it's generally more rare to have to use so many in conjunction, but it can be a lot of fun to figure out.

[Brise Bonbons]

My alternate idea for dealing with the core raid engines (which I only verbalized after the fact, of course >.>) was to stuff a dozen bomber starships into some Spire Jumpships and bypass the gravity guardians entirely. I'm not convinced the starships would hold up long enough to kill both engines, though, so Eron's plan was probably the safer bet. Either way, the fact that we had so many potential tools to deal with the situation is a testament to AI War's brilliant design and balance.

I'm sure some of the more experienced players have some super efficient setup of turrets and hard-counter ships for dealing with the core raid engines, but they're a scary sight the first time you see what they spit out. We were especially confused in our first brush with them, because we both hit a core mark IV world of a separate AI simultaneously, and for a few minutes only noticed one of the three CRE's on the map - but had 3 and then 5 waves of MK V ships coming in. We thought that the one CRE was capable of spawning 4 dreadnaughts and 2500 ships, which was a much less reasonable prospect than dealing with 1 and 500 per raid engine, let me tell you.

Lucky for us we managed to shave off around 75 AIP earlier in the game by sacrificing our combined fleets to hold a Super Terminal far longer than was strictly wise. I'd hate to think what that raid engine wave would look like if our AIP was close to 500...

[snelg]

Started playing the game again last weekend.
Think I'll start playing without those core shield things after triggering a raid engine on one of the AI homeworlds by mistake. 
At least I hadn't had the time to get too much AI progress and the AI itself didn't seem like one of the more brutal types.

Still it took a few hours to get the shields down to be able to hurt the raid engine.