Just encountered the AI Mothership

[Red Spot]

Hopefully you tested to ensure that the win-condition final super spire fleet can kill this mothership? I would be sad to get to the end of a full FS campaign and come riding in heroically with my super-dreads only to see them all get vaporized and release an angry mothership to come barreling down on my homeworld.

Now that you mention it, I'd love to see it happen .. once

[keith.lamothe]

The initial contact would be iffy, it would depend on how close it was to the spire fleet when it spawned.

But one of the main points of triggering the minor-faction spawn is that you not need to worry about things like the AI defending itself

[Sir t]

For the Spire fleet to ensure a victory they would have to concentrate their forces all on it at the same time n(rather than spread out over the galaxy like they do), and their logic just does not allow them to throw everything into the AI Homeworld at exactly the same time and go straight for one unit. Otherwise the Mothership could defeat the Spire fleet in detail. You could have the Mothership spawn at the player homeworld right when the Spire fleet appears, but depending on the situation with the defense battle against the HUGE Exo spawns the AI is throwing at you at that stage, it could be disastrous for the player. Its a lot simpler to just have it vanish.

BTW I've just finished a game on my work computer (its been a slow couple of weeks boss, honest!) and I just saw the AI redeploying 4000+ ships back into its homeworld in a desperate attempt to fight off the Spire fleet. Now THAT was a battle, and my poor laptop was groaning under the strain of it all. The Spire won of course... 

[keith.lamothe]

BTW I've just finished a game on my work computer (its been a slow couple of weeks boss, honest!) and I just saw the AI redeploying 4000+ ships back into its homeworld in a desperate attempt to fight off the Spire fleet. Now THAT was a battle, and my poor laptop was groaning under the strain of it all.

Haha, yea, that could get pretty intense.

The Spire won of course... 

Yep   There may be some additional tweaks necessary to ensure this, but basically this is supposed to be the AI's turn to experience a brutally overwhelming force.  One that's more thorough than the AI was the first time around   At least at taking out warp-capable stuff.

[TechSY730]

YES! I managed to take it out. It took 8 Spirecraft rams, several Spirecraft penetrators (all but 1 died), several Spirecraft siege towers (all of them died) an armored golem (survived, thankfully), and it took out 4/5ths of the rest of my ship capped army (which included fallen spire campaign ships at four spire ship yard ship cap levels), but I won!  

When I finally get around to recovering from my MASSIVE losses, it should be much easier to take on the homeworld for real.

Then I get to do it all over again for the next Homeworld.

EDIT: For the curious, those 8 Spirecraft rams consisted of 4 Mk. Is and 4 Mk. IIs. Together, they managed to take off about a 1/3 of the mothership's health. That may seem underwhelming for the durability of the mothership, but keep in mind, a single Mk. I Spirecraft ram has enough power to oneshot the vast majority of all non structures, and a single Mk. II has double that power.

[keith.lamothe]

Congratulations

And unless you take an inordinately long time to assault the other AI Homeworld, it probably won't have enough points in the "defense bank" for another mothership.  Basically what you just saw was it throwing everything it reasonably could at trying to save the first homeworld.  There's only so much it's willing to go through for the Milky Way, after all.  But if you let it regroup for long, it might be able to try it again.

[TechSY730]

Congratulations

And unless you take an inordinately long time to assault the other AI Homeworld, it probably won't have enough points in the "defense bank" for another mothership.  Basically what you just saw was it throwing everything it reasonably could at trying to save the first homeworld.  There's only so much it's willing to go through for the Milky Way, after all.  But if you let it regroup for long, it might be able to try it again.

Oh, so the "last-defense points" are shared among the AIs. Whew! I was afraid they were saving up separately, and thus I would have to go through that twice.

[keith.lamothe]

Nah, it's shared.  It's as close to "absolutely not fooling around" as the main AI gets, and even then it has limits on what it's willing to commit.

[Sunshine!]

Tech: next time use a full fleet of Spirecraft Implosion Artillery.  I guarantee you they'll do far more damage than the rams, or anything else you have access to.  Your one mk5 implosion is going to be taking off 4% of the mothership's remaining HP each shot; if you have a full fleet (these numbers are going to be off because it's assuming they all hit simultaneously which isn't the case) it's something like 17% off the mothership's HP in the first volley.  They fire every 2 seconds (1 second on normal).  That's a messload of damage there.

[Orelius]

Speaking of which, how much damage do spirecraft implosion artillery do, anyway?  I've never found out the number and because of that, I generally avoid them.

[keith.lamothe]

I have to wonder about the balanced-ness of an uncapped damage from those implosion artillery units   But they are "superweapons", so it kinda makes sense.

[Sunshine!]

Implosions could probably stand to have their damage halved to slow them down a bit since 8 mk1s can take down pretty much anything in a relatively (5-10 mins) short period of time, but how they function is fantastic.  They're fragile so they definitely need support, so they promote combined-arms.  They also speed up certain other tedious processes like wormhole guard post removal/forcefield removal, are ineffective against superfortresses, are ineffective in combat against anything other than a golem-sized ship, and building them is a choice between implosions or another more generally useful ship type since there's a finite resource for spirecraft construction.  And yeah, they are a superweapon, so slapping a damage cap on is kind of questionable.

Orelius: Implosion Artillery do damage equal to a certain percentage of an enemy's remaining health.

If a mk1 spirecraft is firing at an enemy ship, the enemy ship will lose .25% of its current health every time it is hit.  It's .5% for mk2, 1% for mk3, 2% for mk4, 4% for mk5.

Against a wormhole guard post for example, which has 400 million HP, the damage dealt by the first shot of each mark would be 1 million, 2 million, 4 million, 8 million, and 16 million, and will decrease as the guard post takes more damage.  They're basically reverse Neinzul Vultures.