You were never allowed to have lightly defended worlds before - CPAs, Exowaves, or even Counterattack posts or Warp Guardians sending an unexpected wave to one of the 10 turret systems would have been doom. But now, you can defend that system. Or not, if you want to save the Metal and Energy you'd otherwise use.
The point that paragraph was trying to make was that when you were forced to scatter your defenses, you became weaker everywhere, but the AI would still attack at full strength.
It's not a "point" you've been making. Before you had to scatter some defenses in order to not have worlds defended too lightly, let's say 50 turrets / planets and have a few chokepoints.
Now, you've got 300 turrets / planets and still a few chokepoints. But the AI got stronger waves and more ships.
Basically "light" defending became "300 / planets" instead of "50 / planets". The only people seeing a difference are people not using any per galaxy cap defenses like mine or grav turrets and so on.
But nothing changed as basically waves and so on were increased accordingly.In all of your answers you're forgetting that part. The player was boosted when that change came out but now the AI is boosted accordingly and we're back to square one.
The game just got MOAR stuff in it. Again, you're not argumenting in your favor here, but in mine. The AI still trashes low defense worlds. The AI still requires chokepoint as the main blocking strategy. The lattice still is harder than most map types because of the higher connections.
Normal waves don't normally have any special targeting... Are you thinking of Exowaves? Those still do have the special targets, and will beeline to your uniques to kill them.
Also, I'm surprised if you are regularly seeing Threat choose to attack your systems and lose. I can't remember the last time a Threadfleet attack didn't win easily in any system where I couldn't directly interfere. The AI does a pretty good job of calculating the strength you have available in or near the target system, and gives itself a hefty overage just in case on top of that.
An individual planet's maximum defensive strength did not go up with the per-planet cap change. Your chokepoint was always going to be as strong, or stronger, than any current world. By making it possible to have multiple "chokepoint-equivalent" systems, players are allowed to spread out, and allow more connections to AI space. Because now, there is no large inherent advantage in hiding everything behind a single chokepoint.
Maybe I didn't explain myself properly. When I first played AI war, I spread turrets and when the AI came in my planet, whether threat, EXO or anything, it targetted different things in my system in order to maximize damage.
Now, I'm playing better and place turrets better. The AI calculates it's chances and thinks it can beeline to the most important target (command station, usually). However, whatever calculation it has been using failed at finding out that my placement of turrets, mines, grav turrets, tractor beams and so on multiplied exponentially the efficiency of those defenses. As far as I've been able to find, the AI actually can't take that part into consideration. So basically it's always choosing the same target.
Therefore it can and will be baited to suicide. As I stated in my post, the problem is alleviated at diff 9+ because there are multipliers to what the AI thinks it requires to win. But at lower diff level an efficient defense pattern will trick it into dying.
About chokepoints... It was already possible to have multiple chokepoints before. I don't see your point. Actually, the inherent advantage behind going to a single chokepoint is even higher than before because a single chokepoint spawns higher waves. MOAR SALVAGE.
I love hacking, but hacking both Advanced producers plus even half the Fabricators is impractical - It'll normally run about 650 HaP to get both Mk IVs plus a mere 5 Fabricators. That doesn't include hacking ARSs, or K-raiding, or design download/corruption, or sabotage, or the SuperTerminal, or... anything else, really. HaP is always tight, if you are taking advantage of it. Saying it should have been the way to cover for the fact that it was impossible to protect your uniques seems like solving the wrong problem. I like being able to do some much more, different, stuff with Hacking that I would hate if I had to spend it all on just acquiring a few 'capturable' uniques.
What are you speaking about
I just stated that hacking provided a solution to being able to "protect" advanced constructors and that the higher turret cap did not do it. If an exo targets your unique it's dead. I personally like the fact that you need to choose. But that's another subject entirely.
As for normal fortresses, I have to disagree with kasnavada. If a planet gets overrun, your fortress will absolutely die
I tend to place them at chokepoints. Then, if it's overrun, I'm dead. Otherwise I agree with you actually - if you don't use them as a resource which spells your doom if killed, it's a waste of K and metal.
