Fallen Spire Questions

[Wingflier]

I turned on the "Fallen Spire" campaign in one of my recent games.

I successfully returned "The Shard" to my base, then on my next expedition, I "discovered" an Alien Starship which I was supposed to escort back to my home planet.

Unfortunately, said "Alien Starship" spawned an extreme distance away from where my units were, then a wave of powerful enemy ships spawned on top of it, basically killing it before I could even get in range to help. (Which I find kind of frustrating)

After it died however, I never got any kind of "mission failed" notification in my journal.  Since the Alien Ship died does that mean the Fallen Spire Campaign is over for me?

Thanks in advance.

[Wanderer]

Yes and no.  The Fallen Spire campaign can't continue, no, if you lose any of the shards/colony ships.  However, you can still win the game through normal means.

[zoutzakje]

yup exactly. This is pretty much why I always save my game seconds before the survey ship finishes it's job and locates the shard/refugee ship. If it dies, I can always try again.

[Tridus]

If you have a save from before it or an autosave, you can reload and try again. The shards/ships tend to get progressively farther away as you go through the Fallen Spire campaign, but the rewards get stronger as well. Before you send the survey ship in and start the "chase" part of it, you want to make sure you have your fleet and defenses ready.

Until you get the hang of just what the AI is going to throw at you, you can expect to have trouble with it. But what you get out of it is worth it.

(The tricks are to make sure you have a big fleet with the shard/ship, and defenses on your home planet, as the AI will try to hit both. If you have chokepoint worlds, those are great to fortify and contain the AI in to reduce the places it can hit you from.)

[LintMan]

Another tip is to try to limit your expansion while going after the shards:  Each shard appears several planets deep in AI territory.  If you take the intervening planets, the next shard will lilkely appear even further away, and the slow return trip gets longer and longer, with more and more territory for you to defend.

Instead of that, don't persue the shards past the colony ship mission or so, until you've taken a good hunk of territory and set up some solid defenses, maybe a chokepoint or two.

Then, send out your fleet and neuter all the planets on the way to the next shard location, but don't take out the command centers.  This makes the trip home easier and gives the possibility the next shard will be found along the same path of already-neutered planets.  Or at the very least, you won't have to clear out another 4 planets in this same direction.

[zoutzakje]

Another tip is to try to limit your expansion while going after the shards:  Each shard appears several planets deep in AI territory.  If you take the intervening planets, the next shard will lilkely appear even further away, and the slow return trip gets longer and longer, with more and more territory for you to defend.

This is not entirely true. The more shards you've collected, the further they will spawn yes. But that's always counted from the homeworld. It doesn't matter how many planets you take or just neuter for this, since the shards will always spawn x hops away from the homeworld, with x increasing as you're collecting more and more shards.
How this works with multiple homeworlds I do not know.

[Minotaar]

Another tip is to try to limit your expansion while going after the shards:  Each shard appears several planets deep in AI territory.  If you take the intervening planets, the next shard will lilkely appear even further away, and the slow return trip gets longer and longer, with more and more territory for you to defend.

This is not entirely true. The more shards you've collected, the further they will spawn yes. But that's always counted from the homeworld. It doesn't matter how many planets you take or just neuter for this, since the shards will always spawn x hops away from the homeworld, with x increasing as you're collecting more and more shards.
How this works with multiple homeworlds I do not know.

LintMan is correct here, the shard will spawn at a set number (2..6) of hops into AI territory (from nearest human or neutral planet), not from the homeworld.

[zoutzakje]

really? Guess it was just coincidence then that the shard never spawns at more than 6 hops from my homeworld in any game, even though I have other planets much further away.

[lemons]

The exact mechanics are on the wiki. Basically it always tries to spawn the shard at least (2/2/3/4/4/4/4/6) jumps away from any non-AI system (neutral or player controlled). If there are multiple options available it will always chose the system closest to the homeworld. If there isn't a system at least X distance away it will then try to find one at X-1 and pick the one closest to the homeworld, and so on and so forth until one is chosen. There is also some stuff like it won't make you cross a Mk4 world early on, or a core world/AI homeworld until the end, but it's usually not that important.

As you might expect, this is very highly exploitable. If you plan from the start you can get those final shards pretty much in your backyard thanks to selective elimination of AI worlds to make the algorithm work with you. If you leave 3 AI systems near your homeworld untaken with the 3rd one at least 3 jump away from any system, you only really need to "take" (colonize or leave neutral, it won't matter) every 6th AI planet to eliminate all planets more then 4/5/6 jumps away and of the planets 3 jumps away your little cordoned off area is the closest to the homeworld so it's always selected.

Also remember that the waves come from Warp Gates, so start neutering rampantly to try and corral enemies into the right area. Feel free to neuter planets several systems deep on sections of the map that are harder to defend. Turns out that once you get far enough along the spire route AI progress becomes a lot less scary than those uberwaves coming in your backdoor.