In my current game, i just literally scraped by by a hair's width. The situation: my threat had been idling at about 1800 when i put the game down last night, so i assumed that it would stay that way. Today, i opened my game and was watching my sniper ships clean up a few remaining turret balls on a planet i wanted, i suddenly lost my command station, In horror, i rushed to my homeworld to see that it had been decimated by a wave of about 1300 ship of all kinds. [side note to Keith: you sure you didn't ninja raid my game and release all those ships? i know i didn't update
] To top it all off, my engineer troupe was off on another planet 3 hops away (meaning that they get there only shortly before the wave pops up on my homeworld). The waves come on through at about 25 or so seconds after loading the save. I have a SuperFortress and an Ion Cannon MkII at the planet, which could eventually clean all of this up but they didn't have the time.
This was my first decent game, and i wasn't above a little save scumming to rescue it from the dumps. I tried building fighters from the docks (to help dissipate the bombers), a missile silo and a lightning warhead (didn't even finish the silo), and mines (didn't help really). I'll withhold my winning tactic for a while, and post the save to see if anyone wants to have a go at fixing the situation. Hint: you should probably pause immediately to consider your options.
I have to say this is one of the fun things about the AI; ya never quite know if it's gonna nail you unexpectedly