Turns out a self destruct guardian intercepted my little raid and basically stopped it. My metal supplies really took a beating as I rebuilt my bombers (This was still pretty early game).
Now that's just mean. I hate how you think you have everything planned out, and your resources are balanced juuuust right, and then you unexpectedly lose a huge chunk of bombers or something else vitally important and extremely heavy on one resource (especially if your starting bonus ship is useful and also leans that way) and throws everything off while you're stuck reorganizing everything to compensate. Except I don't really hate it
that much, because that's the kind of stuff that keeps things interesting (at least as long as it's fair and my fault for not noticing it and dealing with it properly).
I haven't met any self destruct guardians, however, I will regardless suggest you check the planet summery better first (before starting the raid), as certain guardians (Looking at you EMP guardian) can lose you the game if you piss them off, or at least put you in a really bad situation. (your command stations don't last long under bombardment by even AI fighters without force fields. that is how I lost my last game, I learned my lesson.)
I don't at all mean this to be rude or critical, so please don't take it that way, but I just find it amusing to see someone making basic gameplay suggestions to a guy who's spent nearly as much time playing the game as the devs. To be fair, though, I haven't seen him around on here as much lately, so newer members probably don't all know him yet. Heh.
And yeah, EMP guardians are all kinds of evil when they catch you off guard. I've had some good times with them that totally would fit right in with the stories in this thread, like the literal
train of EMP guardians that ran through multiple systems in
this game a few months ago. I don't think I would've been able to hold that off without the Fallen Spire stuff. In a regular game, the AI sending EMP guardians to multiple systems in a row
after already having used one to wipe out a good chunk of my fleet would be more than enough to take any depth that remained out of "defense in depth".