Some remarks after Fallen Spire campaign

[Kittens]

A friend and I finished a 32 hour Fallen Spire game yesterday. 80 planet map, two 7.3 AI's, ZR and LotS expansions enabled. During the final defense, we were hovering around 1126 AIP, which was the mark IV tech level. The exo waves after the capitol contained a bunch of hunter-killers, some up to mark IV. Spire Implosion Artillery inside Spire City shields is definitely the way to deal with those. Everything else just got vaporized by spire fleet beam weapons. =)

Some things that I'm not sure should (or should not) have happened:

• There was no Super Terminal anywhere, which rather made the whole game unexpectedly more difficult (we had Spire Civilians on as well). Was that because the AI's were 7.3 instead of 7?
• The first five Spire Cities and Capitol were built by my ally. By the time we got to colony ships, he had 12 reactors and 12 shipyards in total. When I built my first city, I didn't need to build any reactors; the reactors of my ally were able to support my shipyards and hab centers as well. He still needed to build more reactors to expand himself, though. This means that a reactor supports one shipyard and one habitation center for each player. I'm not sure whether that's intentional.
• The very last shard was on an AI homeworld, though there were still other valid spawn planets available (though not that many). Kinda defeated the purpose of the alternate win condition.

[zoutzakje]

I have yet to complete a full fallen spire game, so I won't be able to answer your last 2 questions. But I know the first one. Superterminals are not always seeded into the game. You usually don't see every golem in a single game either. You'll just have to hope it's out there somewhere.

[Gudamor]

it is allowed to spawn on AI core worlds or homeworlds. Minor detail, heh.

[keith.lamothe]

A friend and I finished a 32 hour Fallen Spire game yesterday. 80 planet map, two 7.3 AI's, ZR and LotS expansions enabled.

Congratulations!  Sounds like quite a marathon

Everything else just got vaporized by spire fleet beam weapons. =)

That's what those beams are for   "This is an Armored Golem in its solid state." ... "This is an Armored Golem in its gaseous state."

There was no Super Terminal anywhere, which rather made the whole game unexpectedly more difficult (we had Spire Civilians on as well). Was that because the AI's were 7.3 instead of 7?

Odd, I thought it would always seed one, as that does make rather a difference difficulty-wise.  Though somewhat less-so on FS once you have a huge capital fleet; normal AIP isn't negligible by then but it does tend to matter less than the exos.  On the other hand, was your Spirecraft minor faction the hard variant?  Spirecraft exos get harder as AIP gets higher.

The first five Spire Cities and Capitol were built by my ally. By the time we got to colony ships, he had 12 reactors and 12 shipyards in total. When I built my first city, I didn't need to build any reactors; the reactors of my ally were able to support my shipyards and hab centers as well. He still needed to build more reactors to expand himself, though. This means that a reactor supports one shipyard and one habitation center for each player. I'm not sure whether that's intentional.

Heh, no, not intentional actually.  Remind me, though: it gave you a foldout for the refugee outpost and each of the shipyards so you could build your own capital ships to a separate "cap", right?  But it doesn't give you foldout-likes for the hab centers or reactors (which would be a significant boost to the number of defense modules for a city as well as a boost to your income from the hab center).  The latter I tend to waffle on a bit but code-wise it would be problematic to have modular foldouts, etc.

The very last shard was on an AI homeworld, though there were still other valid spawn planets available (though not that many). Kinda defeated the purpose of the alternate win condition.

You don't have to take the planet to get the shard, just bring your spire flee-oh. Homeworld-defense exo, right?  Yea, pretty rough   Anyway, assuming you can deal with the defensive exo you can just park your spire fleet with your survey ship in the middle and when the shard shows up have your fleet group move with the shard back home.  Don't even have to blow up any of the guard posts (except perhaps the neinzul translocator ones, those can be pretty troublesome).

[Kittens]

On the other hand, was your Spirecraft minor faction the hard variant?  Spirecraft exos get harder as AIP gets higher.

SC was on medium, so no troubles there; I was just surprised there was no Super Terminal anywhere. In the end, the regular waves didn't really give us much trouble despite the AIP. The only warp gate 'receptacle' system had an armor inhibitor, armor booster, black hole machine, MkII Radar Jammer, full caps of lightning turrets MkI-III, electric shuttles MkI-IV, SC attritioners MkI-III, two thirds of my entire non-spire fleet, two fortresses and about 250 other assorted turrets. Everything that entered instantly melted and took my framerate with it.

Heh, no, not intentional actually.  Remind me, though: it gave you a foldout for the refugee outpost and each of the shipyards so you could build your own capital ships to a separate "cap", right?  But it doesn't give you foldout-likes for the hab centers or reactors (which would be a significant boost to the number of defense modules for a city as well as a boost to your income from the hab center).  The latter I tend to waffle on a bit but code-wise it would be problematic to have modular foldouts, etc.

Yes, fold-outs for shipyards and refugee outpost only, with my own cap of spire ships, determined by the total number of shipyards no matter who owns them (as intended I believe). However, I was able to build my shipyards and hab centers without any of my own reactors because the reactors of my ally allowed me to do so, even though he had 'saturated' his reactors already. In the end, he had 14 reactors and 14 ship yards, while I had 0 reactors and 10 shipyards.

You don't have to take the planet to get the shard, just bring your spire flee-oh. Homeworld-defense exo, right?  Yea, pretty rough   Anyway, assuming you can deal with the defensive exo you can just park your spire fleet with your survey ship in the middle and when the shard shows up have your fleet group move with the shard back home.  Don't even have to blow up any of the guard posts (except perhaps the neinzul translocator ones, those can be pretty troublesome).

Huh. Did not know that, interesting. In the end we just bulldozed our way there only to find out we had to kill another Core Shield gen somewhere else, come back later, and then kill everything. I guess we were just following spire fleet SOP.

[Mithror]

I'm the friend

Game was pretty awesome, but I have to admit it was rather easy. I know... that's a dangerous thing to say here as that means you'll just make it harder :p

Anyway, a fully equipped spire fleet with all turrets unlocked is definitely a force to be reckoned though. And that aspect is really cool. Would be a pain to have to rebuild all those ships with every exo wave, so don't change that please

Apart from the questions and issue Kittens raised, I do have one myself too:

The exo galactic waves all seemed to follow the same pattern: fleet ships, spirecraft ships, gollems which later get replace by HKs.

At one point though, and I believe we had just looked with our fleet into the AI Homeworld, it sent a wave at us containing a mothership (first time we say it!) and a crapload of HKs, lots of the MKIV kind even. It was definitely the hardest wave we had to face, despite them not getting past our outer border. I do wonder why this wave was so different from the others, composition wise? Or is that the "defensive exo" you're talking about? If so, what triggers is? Just an attack on the Homeworld?

I do agree with Kittens that it is a bit silly to have the signal spawn on the AI homeworld, because if you have to send your fleet there anyway, why not just blow it up? It's not like the AI matters that much anymore. It felt like it sorta pushed you more toward just taking out the AIs yourselves. And that definitely would have been a lot quicker than doing the last part of the campaign. But we persisted and it was cool to see the events unfold in the end. Although we had to wait a while for the game to end... It's a strong ending, but slow to unfold

And yeah, at first we were like: "wtf, no super terminal and all the leaders are so faaaaaaar away, this is not gonna end well.", but then we were like: "Hey AI, check out mah spire fleet! Oh... hey... where did you go? I just wanna be your friend ".

Also, rearranging the planets in the galaxy tab is the best feature ever. Just saying!

[keith.lamothe]

Game was pretty awesome, but I have to admit it was rather easy. I know... that's a dangerous thing to say here as that means you'll just make it harder :p

Haha, well, 7.3 isn't supposed to be too brutally hard, though there are some recent changes (addition of H/Ks, notably) that may be affecting things and may need to be rebalanced.

Were the periodic exo attacks any challenge, with your combined fleet?

The exo galactic waves all seemed to follow the same pattern: fleet ships, spirecraft ships, gollems which later get replace by HKs.

At one point though, and I believe we had just looked with our fleet into the AI Homeworld, it sent a wave at us containing a mothership (first time we say it!) and a crapload of HKs, lots of the MKIV kind even. It was definitely the hardest wave we had to face, despite them not getting past our outer border. I do wonder why this wave was so different from the others, composition wise? Or is that the "defensive exo" you're talking about? If so, what triggers is? Just an attack on the Homeworld?

Yep, that was the homeworld-defense exo, and it is triggered by bringing a large attack force to an AI homeworld (roughly twice the power of the guards there).  Every time it sends one of those announced attack exos at you it adds a certain percent of the budget for that attack into the defensive exo "bank", which gets dumped into one gargantuan battlegroup when you show up to attack a homeworld.  Generally that's enough points for a mothership, and it basically buys the most expensive lead ship it can (rather than only spending 1/3rd the budget on the lead ship).

Anyway, between 32 hours of play, more than 5 cities, and 2 players it makes sense that it threw a pretty massively powerful group at you.  Was it any challenge?

I do agree with Kittens that it is a bit silly to have the signal spawn on the AI homeworld, because if you have to send your fleet there anyway, why not just blow it up?

Well, if you can, then go ahead   The Fallen Spire campaign has three separate "endings", one for winning before building a capitol, one for winning after building a capitol but without building the last structure, and one for winning in that last phase.

Also, rearranging the planets in the galaxy tab is the best feature ever. Just saying!

Yea, that's a crowd favorite

[Mithror]

Game was pretty awesome, but I have to admit it was rather easy. I know... that's a dangerous thing to say here as that means you'll just make it harder :p

Haha, well, 7.3 isn't supposed to be too brutally hard, though there are some recent changes (addition of H/Ks, notably) that may be affecting things and may need to be rebalanced.

Were the periodic exo attacks any challenge, with your combined fleet?

No, can't say that they were. We had three fronts basically, Kittens his front, my front and the wave planet, which was also a front actually. That almost always made the strikeforce arrive in those systems, so we never had to fight off one huge wave, but several small ones. Generally my fleet was on my front, Kittens his fleet was divided between the wave planet and his front. Since the wave planet was also our advanced factory planet, I left my MKIV ships there too. His front was heavily defended with black hole machines, armor boosters and inhibitors. I had a layered defense front, that never got pushed beyond the first real layer. I basically had a system occupied with my fleet and when it threatened to fall I would go back to the previous planet that was fortified somewhat with turrets and shields. I also later built a Super Fortress but by then it was really late game. Further down the road were other defended points so if one broke I could always surrender territory and retreat. That was the plan at least. Never had to use it. The spire fleet just smashes the exo waves.
We also had, what we called, our strikeforces. Basically we had some jump ships where we put (part of) our spire fleet in and jumped them around to where they were needed. The only really annoying thing was that it took sooooo long to kill the Hunter Killers. They just have so much hp

I probably should mention that we expanded rather quickly in the beginning. Mostly to get two spire leaders. That gave us more knowledge and I invested heavily in turrets and shields so I could put pretty strong turrets on those spire ships. That might have something to do with it.

The exo galactic waves all seemed to follow the same pattern: fleet ships, spirecraft ships, gollems which later get replace by HKs.

At one point though, and I believe we had just looked with our fleet into the AI Homeworld, it sent a wave at us containing a mothership (first time we say it!) and a crapload of HKs, lots of the MKIV kind even. It was definitely the hardest wave we had to face, despite them not getting past our outer border. I do wonder why this wave was so different from the others, composition wise? Or is that the "defensive exo" you're talking about? If so, what triggers is? Just an attack on the Homeworld?

Yep, that was the homeworld-defense exo, and it is triggered by bringing a large attack force to an AI homeworld (roughly twice the power of the guards there).  Every time it sends one of those announced attack exos at you it adds a certain percent of the budget for that attack into the defensive exo "bank", which gets dumped into one gargantuan battlegroup when you show up to attack a homeworld.  Generally that's enough points for a mothership, and it basically buys the most expensive lead ship it can (rather than only spending 1/3rd the budget on the lead ship).

Anyway, between 32 hours of play, more than 5 cities, and 2 players it makes sense that it threw a pretty massively powerful group at you.  Was it any challenge?

It was the hardest wave, but I wouldn't really call it a challenge. First time we only lost the black hole machine, but we had to redo it because a later save (which we loaded after dinner or so), had completely wiped all the turrets from Kittens his fleet. And then we definitely breezed through it. I definitely wouldn't increase the number of HKs in that wave though. But perhaps adding maybe more fleet ships or some golems might be better, dunno, other people will be a better judge of that than me

I do agree with Kittens that it is a bit silly to have the signal spawn on the AI homeworld, because if you have to send your fleet there anyway, why not just blow it up?

Well, if you can, then go ahead   The Fallen Spire campaign has three separate "endings", one for winning before building a capitol, one for winning after building a capitol but without building the last structure, and one for winning in that last phase.

I know, we wanted to do the last phase, seemed like the most fun =)

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, I have some thoughts on making the exos take a bit more effort (not sure about more challenge, just less "let them splash"), we'll see how it goes

In the meantime y'all might want to try difficulty 8 for a bit more challenge   And/or perhaps switch spirecraft over to hard and/or add broken-golems-hard.  I suspect those will keep you on your toes more.

[Kittens]

That huge wave had like 27 HK's and a mothership in it, and was the only thing that ever put a dent in our defenses. I lost over half my spire frigates (59?) in that one, along with a bunch of other spire ships, all my turrets, all ships stationed there, including full SC Implosion caps. My economy and half my defense was out of commission for almost an hour after that, but we didn't lose any systems.

So yes, recovering from that was a bit of a challenge.

The other exo waves were not a big challenge so long as a 'main force' was there to deal with them, which wasn't very hard. The only thing we had to keep doing was shuffle our own strikeforces around to match the incoming ones. Incidentally, I really love jumpships.

[chemical_art]

I've been in your boat before.

Add more sources of exowaves (hard variants of the goodies) and you'll soon find it very, very interesting.

[Nethris]

I've been in your boat before.

Add more sources of exowaves (hard variants of the goodies) and you'll soon find it very, very interesting.

Key point there being that the golem/spirecraft exowaves charge based on AIP - with just the fallen spire exowaves, there's not much downside to AIP you get as long as you're getting more cities at least occasionally, since normal waves are more controllable than the exowaves, and anything that can hold up to the exos isn't going to be overly bothered by high AIP waves.  I also think the fallen spire exowaves just target homeplanets and cities, haven't tried the other exowaves yet but if they are willing to target other things (adv. factories and other irreplacable things for instance, or just random planets) that changes how you have to defend quite a bit.

[keith.lamothe]

I also think the fallen spire exowaves just target homeplanets and cities

Yea, that's what I remember telling it to do.  Chase groups will send something after the shard too, but I imagine you were talking about the pre-announced exos.

haven't tried the other exowaves yet but if they are willing to target other things (adv. factories and other irreplacable things for instance, or just random planets) that changes how you have to defend quite a bit.

They don't do that currently... (except random planets, they do that some)

Hybrids try to, but they don't have the same degree of firepower.

[TechSY730]

haven't tried the other exowaves yet but if they are willing to target other things (adv. factories and other irreplacable things for instance, or just random planets) that changes how you have to defend quite a bit.

They don't do that currently... (except random planets, they do that some)

Woa, there, don't give him any ideas!

It's bad enough that the hybrids show off how well the AI can prioritize important targets.