New player questions

[keith.lamothe]

FYI, making the dyson hostile doesn't turn its existing friendly-to-you gatlings into hostile ones.

I'd suggest this procedure:

1) At your earliest convenience, kill the AI command station on the planet.
2) If you can't clean up the barracks and whatnot unleashed by that, just pull back until it gets dashed by your defenses or otherwise disperses (if it stays put, you can whittle it down, but I imagine the Dyson could do that for you).
3) Once the AI's ships are gone, position some overwhelming strength in range of the CSG, and bring a pile of engineers and a colony ship.
4) Build your command station, and use the engineers to make it happen fast.
5) Use the overwhelming strength to kill the CSG quickly.
6) Scrap your command station.

The result should be a liberated dyson, a dead CSG, and a very small number of hostile-to-you gatlings

[WolfWhiteFire]

Building then immediately scrapping your command station is also a great way to claim any special structures that may be on the dyson sphere's planet, in your current game or future ones. You build it, then they are under your control and stay under your control after you scrap it.

[Worblehat]

FYI, making the dyson hostile doesn't turn its existing friendly-to-you gatlings into hostile ones.

Ah, that is very good to know, and not what I thought was happening! I thought there was just one type of gatling, and their target options varied based on the presence/absence and allegiance of any command station in the system. So there are effectively three types of gatlings, omnicidal, anti-human, and anti-AI, if I'm understanding you correctly?

[BadgerBadger]

That has been my experience at least.

[Worblehat]

One more question (so far): what is the value of Lightning Starships? I'm finding them underwhelming. They seem to lightly sandpaper AI fleet ships in large numbers - except missile frigates because they're immune to area damage. This seems mildly useful in big fleetball vs. fleetball engagements and not particularly helpful in set piece wave defenses (not that the turrets need the help lately) or supporting the champion or small detachments on clear-out-the-threat-fleet excursions. The knowledge cost to get mk2 and mk3 versions is substantially higher than other starships so I expected they'd be more useful. Is there something I'm missing here?

Looks like I'm well into the middlegame at this point - map is basically fully explored (I know exactly which systems are the homeworlds, but haven't sent a scout in to either, or to one of the core worlds). Two nebulae are off of core worlds, so I guess I won't be doing those! And the fourth coprocessor is also on a core world - hopefully a fast hit and run to take it out won't have the core and home worlds Alerted long enough to cause too much of a problem.

[Worblehat]

Looking through some past threads, I see I'm not the only one to doubt the value of Lightning starships (particularly their knowledge cost for higher marks). The Neinzul Combat Carriers are working out very nicely though, so I'm 1-for-2 on ARS unlocks so far.

Question about Warp Jammer command stations - the wiki says "Adjacent planets can still go alert from other factors, such as a large enough human military presence." Any guidance on what "large enough" means? I'm somewhat tempted by the third of the remaining ARS (and CSG-A) planets, which is adjacent to a Core world. At one extreme, the wiki could mean that I can try taking it, put the Warp Jammer in, and leave it otherwise empty and hope no enemy ships come through by normal travel. Or it could mean "don't leave your entire fleet there", and it could be defended with planet-caps of turrets to fend off any visitors.

Since the time delay between starting such an operation and seeing how it actually works out would be quite long, I'm hoping I can get some insight here first...  I'm also working off the premise that an Alerted Core world is Very Bad and should be avoided until the Homeworld assault begins.

[WolfWhiteFire]

I believe with Warp Jammers the number of turrets is inconsequential, they won't trigger an alert. I may be remembering inaccurately though.

[Worblehat]

Looks like Warp Jammers offer blanket immunity from alerts - I've had the vast majority of my fleet parked there and everything was fine. Unexpected, but a happy surprise!

So, homeworlds...  Wow, they're nasty in the real game (the tutorial was much much weaker). And although a Hive Golem can insta-neuter a core world, it's useless against the homeworld. Which is on the wiki, now that I reread it.

The first HW on the agenda has a Wrath Lance, Raid Eye, and assorted other goodies including the standard warhead interceptor and OMD. The WI is practically on top of the entrance wormhole, but so are five AI shadow frigates so it's well shielded. Apparently "Nuclear Explosions" immunity applies to any kind of warhead. Setting off an armored mk1 and armored mk3 at the wormhole cleared the fort and the force field covering the command station, but did nothing to the WI or the shadow frigates. The WL is about halfway across the map, and the OMD is near the WL and under a FF.

I'd hoped my teleport raiders might be able to do something to the WL, but apparently they entered the system as the WL beams swept over the wormhole, since they died instantaneously and weren't able to port anywhere.

At this point I'm at a loss as to how to crack this system. If it weren't for the shadow frigates I think I could take it - clear the WI, get a warhead close enough to take out the FF covering the OMD. Not sure about the WL. Is there any better way than zerging with teleporting units? How would one deal with a WL in a distant part of the system without teleporting units? I figure the Raid Eye is best dealt with by a sabotage hack, but that requires being able to survive for 60 seconds...

[Kalieum]

From when I was still trying to understand Neinzul Rocketry Corps silos, I think more than 20 fleet ships or 1 starship was sufficient to set adjacent AI systems on alert.
On that note, while this is a newbie question thread, how *do* they work? I already asked this some months back, but I think my several paragraphs of rambling probably warded off any replies, so the short version of the confusion I have with them: Their description makes them sound like Dire Guardian Lairs but with warheads instead of big scary ships, but I was able to set an NRC silo system on alert without ever seeing a missile launch even after the half an hour the game setting mentions, and after eventually triggering a missile launch by moving my fleet right up next to the silo I later received a second warhead even though I'd since pulled back and the system had been off alert for most of the intervening time. I ended up abandoning that game as there were multiple CSG-As under overlapping coverage of several silos, and I couldn't figure out what was and wasn't okay when interacting with them/their systems.

[Worblehat]

According to the wiki, the rocketry silos are not affected by Warp Jammers. I can attest that against normal AI systems, you can pile an enormous fleet (2 golems, cruiser champion, a pile of starships and over a thousand fleetships) and the neighboring AI systems won't care.

I haven't enabled rocketry silos yet so I can't answer your question, sorry.

Still very confused by warheads in homeworlds, though. Looks like "Nuclear Explosions" immunity *isn't* immunity to all warheads, so that's good. On the other hand the damage is not as advertised. I just set off an Armored mk1, with the champion acting as scout coverage that doesn't die instantly so that I could see exactly what happened. The highest hp target in range was the Core AI Force Field Generator, 2,640,000. Mk1 Armored does 5 million, so surely that should kill the force field and take a chunk out of the next thing (in fact it should kill the next thing too, the fort mk3 at 1.8mil). What actually happened was the FF being reduced to 279,999 hp.  I don't understand why the warhead did less than half the advertised damage.

That means that the mk3 that I also set off on my initial attempt last night spent a nominal 25 million damage to kill the last 10% of the FF, the fort, and four shadow frigates. Which is 280k+1,800k+4*150k = 2.68 million, a bit over 10% of the advertised damage output. 

Hard to plan a difficult assault like this if my weapons don't do what they say they do... 

[Worblehat]

Game 1 completed!

My plan for Game 2 is to do the Fallen Spire victory condition. The main question I'm trying to decide is how much to crank up the difficulty. 7/7 random Easy turned out to be pretty easy once I got into the game, with the obvious exception of the first homeworld assault. So I'm thinking 8/8 random Moderate. Or would increasing both the numerical difficulty and the AI type difficulty at one be over-ambitious?

Other parameters - probably concentric map, nomad planets, spire civilian leaders, spirecraft (moderate), some sort of spire starting bonus ship. I'll have to look over the other starting options I haven't tried yet and see what I want to turn on. No golems since I did golems (moderate) in game 1; like with spirecraft, that's my "let's see what this does" setting. Not sure about a champion. I don't think I'll do the nebulae again, so either alternate champ progress or just leaving it off. The free ModForts make leaving it off hard to do though... 

Anything crazy here? I'm a bit unsure of the interaction between nomad planets and spire cities, since the latter need to have no hostile wormholes to upgrade to level 2. Presumably an AI-controlled nomad wandering by might delay such an upgrade for a bit, but it shouldn't downgrade an existing level 2 city. Though with the amount of !!fun!! in this game, who knows.

----

In case future new folks come by with similar problems with the difficulty spike of a homeworld assault (particularly Wrath Lance), my solution was a combination of lots of cheese and "if a little brute force is good, too much must be better".

Assault Transports can shoot, and are neither starships (OMD) nor fleetships (ion cannons, Teuthida). And they're really fast, which helps both with charging the Bad Thing you're trying to get rid of, and for delaying when the WL beams catch up to you. That was the cheese, obviously. Armored Warheads were the brute force - *just* got one within range of the WL before the beams caught it.

HW1 wiped most of the fleet, for a reprisal 4 and two cycles of the Raid Eye. But at 7/7 that was literally a "Pfft, whatever, don't care" situation, turrets plus the few ships that weren't involved in the HW assault were plenty to make them go away.

HW2 went pretty well. Ceremonial nuke to start things off, transports rushed the OMD, one unloaded a full cap of mk5 neinzul railpods, and their double-salvo took out the Warhead Interceptor. The transports and champion (BB hull!) managed to kill the Teuthida before the warhead got there, so the warheads were just a bonus to make things go faster rather than a decisive factor. The mk5 Zenith Reserve on a core world did a great job wiping the strategic reserve.

I could see HW2 being possible without transport cheese (though without the railpods, maybe not...). No idea how to do HW1 without cheesing the hell out of it though. I've seen people not use Assault Transports because they're so oddly powerful, but I don't know how they do it. Very impressive! I wish I could get by without them.

[keith.lamothe]

Congratulations

Yea, between warheads and transports and whatever bonus ship types are available (some are particularly helpful in a tight spot; railpods are a definite favorite of mine) and other tools of destruction there's generally a way to make it happen. Though the Wrath Lance is borderline, in certain combinations.

On the FS game and the difficulty, it depends on how you see a hard-fought-yet-lost game. Given your resourcefulness here I'd suggest 9/9 with each AI at either random moderate or a specific harder type you choose as interesting but not too brutal. Some of the "red-hard" types could be too much of a curveball combined with the difficulty increase.

Another question is the map type and how many planets you're likely to have to defend. Crosshatch, for instance, would be pretty rough for your first FS game.

Have fun storming the castle

[Toranth]

The one big thing to remember in jumping difficulty is not only that AI response increases, but at Diff 8 AIP reducers are less effective, and at Diff 9 they get another reduction in effectiveness.  So, not only does AIP produce a larger response, it's harder to keep it low.

[Worblehat]

Heh, I'm no Peter Ebbesen, though I was a big fan of his back in the glory days of EU2 on the Paradox forums! 8/8 seems like a better plan.

Difficult start so far. Actually several starts, I tried several things out. Outer rim was bad, hemmed in by a coprocessor on one side and a mk4 world on the other, and nowhere near the links to the next inner ring. Tried a core start, but the AI choices were One Way Doormaster and Peacemaker, so I noped right out of that game. Doable, but slogging through a black hole machine or a couple OMDs with ion cannon support on *every single system* sounds like the opposite of fun...

Third start seems decent, with one glaring problem. AIs are Experimentalist and Thief. The former sounds really interesting, I guess it's the Captain Hammer approach to AI War, "They say it's better the second time, you get to do the weird stuff. // We do the weird stuff!" Thief could be unpleasant, but in a way that's still !!fun!!. The one big problem is that one of the Thief's starting ships is the Zenith Bombard, which pretty much negates my Spire Stealth Battleships and seriously limits my champion (I decided the modforts were too tasty to pass up, so I kept champion enabled...). And the Thief controls most worlds near my starting position, especially the mk3/4 ones two hops out. Need to find the design backup and make the bombards go away! (Also, I know what my bonus ship in game 3 will be). So kind of a slow start, which worries me a bit with the Civilian Leaders out there.

Question about stealth at the strategic level - if later in the game I had a fleet of stealth battleships and raptors (another Thief ship, backup is on Nomad 1, which is hilariously overdefended for what I'm capable of doing so far), would the threatfleet recognize that they're on one of my frontier systems, or would the cloaks potentially let me sucker the threatfleet into an attack it shouldn't have made? I know the AI notices when the player has a pile of cloaked stuff on an AI system, not sure if they can also notice cloaks existing on human systems.

[Worblehat]

Or not... Nomad 4 had a Raid Engine. No way to take it out (well, warheads, probably, but I hadn't even built a silo and couldn't have afforded much anyway), and constant mk4 raids eventually picked consecutive mk4 plasma siege starships. Dead home command station. Ouch!

*Really* unimpressed with Spire Stealth Battleships. They accomplished basically nothing, other than being constantly rebuilt. Sort of like mk1 raid starships that way - not my favorites.

Is a Raid Engine on a Nomad system just terrible luck, or is that common enough that one should plan for having to deal with one within the first 30 minutes? That's the first one I've ever seen, though I had read about them in some AARs.

Back to the drawing board. Not sure whether to retry this Spire themed FS concept with Nomads (or ditch the Nomads?), or give Zenith or Neinzul theme games a try first.