Won a game! To be precise, the game pictured above. Screenshot attached, because I can.
Played on a 15-planet X map, since I was tired of restarting 80-planet realistic maps and I guessed only having one front would be vastly easier, even with the increased reinforcement density. I was pretty much right. Definitely easier than my previous games, although that's probably more an artifact of the map style than the map size. Turned on both golems and spirecraft just because I could and went at it. Put CPUs on difficulty 7 with random easy/moderate and advanced hybrids on, I got a train master (lol) and grav driller.
Game was pretty easy. My initial impression of golems stands unchanged; to bring one online, you spend 5 minutes not being able to build much of anything else, and when you do get it online it's suddenly the bees knees and can solo systems. It's a lot of waiting, to be honest, especially if there are several you want to bring online.
I chose space planes for my starter ship, since they looked like they got a fair amount of bonuses towards useful things and, more importantly, got a bonus against ultra-heavy and had enough radar dampening to stay out of a fortress' range. They gave mixed results; I'm fairly sure they did something, but against fortresses in particular? Forts have high enough armor that planes still do trivial damage even with their multiplier. That's too bad, since you're always starving for bombers early game. oh well, at least they all lived. Maybe they saved me from waiting on one or two additional bomber salvoes.
Mark III economic stations are amazing. I can't imagine putting my initial knowledge towards anything else.
Early game was uneventful. I chose the long arm of the X map, so the only branch was 5 planets in. Steamrolled the first 5 planets, put a bunch of turrets up in the center, then divined which of hte three branches had a homeworld by the presence of a mark iv world two hops in (since there was no way I was spending knowledge on mk ii scouts on a map like this). The branch with the awesome planet I posted above didn't have a homeworld, so I steamrolled that too, although I had to reload a few times when eyebots would hop in when I wasn't looking and take out fabs.
Then the problem showed up. The last two A-Prime core shields were bordering the AI homeworlds. That... kinda pissed me off, considering the game before this I quit because I put a homeworld on alert too early, and it hopped up from 200 to 700 ship count in like ten minutes. Eventually I decided to neuter everything on the path to both homeworlds, then take the one with a spire archive and without an AI eye first. Since I was also playing with avengers on, I went wayyyyy out with preparations for it, since I didn't know what to expect. I cheated by sneaking a glance at its stats in the refs tab, then picked a planet I wouldn't mind being nuked and spent 30 minutes building it up. Maxed out on mk ii and iii basic turrets, two forts (these took a while, esp. because I wanted to get more golems too......), built a bunch of implosion artillery, etc.
By this point I had something like two armored golems, two artillery, and a hive. I capped the planet bordering the other AI homeworld with a core gen, then built a couple hundred turrets there, and left it. I then began to assault the first AI homeworld. The orbital mass driver happened to be next to the wormhole, so I popped my fleet in, ganked it, then dumped the golems in. I'd managed to avoid putting this one on alert, so it only had 300 ships, and a hive golem swarm combined with armored golems combined with a fleet managed to take it without difficulty. I retreated everything back to my fortress chokepoint, then sent my fleet back to finish the home command station off and triggered the avenger. That thing is lovably huge.
It was also anticlimactic. I didn't even need my line of max cap of mk ii and iii basics. :/ Forts and armored golems tanked it, implosion artillery helped, artillery golems were MVPs and sniped the hell out of it. I had to reload once because I left my fleet in system idle, and when it died it nuked them.
I then spent another hour bringing more golems online and building fortifications around the exo wormhole. A combination of waves and exowaves made me reset a few times. :/ When I finally got to the second AI homeworld, it'd been at 2000 ships for a long while. I had no idea what to do.
Then I noticed that it had a gravity drill. Curious. The AI was supposed to be a grav driller, but that was the only one on the whole map. Then it hit me. I built a bunch of spirecraft attritioners...
I used an armored warhead mk iii to clear out the wormhole. Never actually saw a core warhead interceptor in action before, but if ion cannons and counterspies were any indication, the bullet would have some travel time. Pop it in, move it away from the grav drill, pop. 400 ships down. Send fleet in, gank the orbital mass driver (also conveniently located by the wormhole), send everything else in. I had: 1800 fleet ships, 2 armored golems, 1 cursed, 1 botnet, 1 black widow, 2 artillery, 1 hive, 1 regen. Oh, and a bunch of attritioners.
The hive golem and my blade spawners were worthless in high gravity. I was assuming they'd be immune, since that's their only form of attack. I was expecting the golems to be vulnerable, though, and... they aren't? That made things so much easier. The AI eye was busy spawning stuff, but it couldn't actually get its ships to me with the combination of attritioners and cursed golem. I set the artillery to pinging it out. The black widow and botnet died without doing much of anything, and I forgot to power the regenerator on -_- , but the armored and cursed golems soloed the entire planet. Speaking of which, I am so glad the other homeworld didn't have a cockroach guard post. Those things looked like they would have destroyed my fleet if they could move to it.
I forgot about the other avenger, so when it spawned I was surprised. But armored golems tanked it without taking much damage at all. heh. Pretty sure it spent less than two minutes alive.
final verdicts!
golems: broken (yes I was using broken golems hard, the exowaves absolutely do not make up for it)
spirecraft: need to play around with them more. from my experience with fallen spire in other games, I also don't like how they're a completely separate tech tree from regular spire. thematically it feels off. Haven't gotten far into fallen spire though.
X maps: easy
Small map difficulty: overrated
I don't feel like I really experienced all the terror ai homeworlds are supposed to offer... I saw some post about how you're not supposed to be able to blob through them but that's pretty much what I did. >_> oh well. I can't decide whether the next game will be on 80 or 120 planets. It'll definitely be on a Realistic map though.
