- The Spire units are freaking awesome. By the time you get to the 4-5 spire city stage, you can crush pretty much anything short of a homeworld.
Yep!
You can turn up the Fallen Spire option's intensity in the game lobby if you want a stronger AI response to it. Normal AI stuff doesn't change, but their exo attacks in response can get rather gigantic.
- The Champion scenarios are a little on the boring side. Of course, it's possible that I just happened to upgrade the wrong stuff for said champion.
In the current beta there's an option for "alternative champion progress", which gives you the champion without the scenarios (you gain XP and unlocks from knowledge and capturing things instead). That's for people who don't want to do the scenarios.
- The Dark Spire faction is incredibly annoying with no counter. They're out for future playthroughs.
They can get pretty annoying, yeah. Really funny was when they were a lot more powerful and kind of took over half the galaxy.
- Devourer Golem is fun to watch at the beginning, but the joke starts to wear thin when you suddenly notice your entire Spire fleet has disappeared in transit. He's out.
- Astro Trains have gotten to be quite annoying. I'm considering turning them off for future plays.
I don't tend to use those things either, at least not regularly.
- The new turret caps make energy management quite critical. By the time you've unlocked high-end turrets, energy collectors can't keep up with the energy demands, so it's still critical to pick and choose which systems you defend.
Yeah it's kind of nice to actually have to think about energy. In a FS game before that change, energy was kind of a joke.
I think it'll be a little while before I start up another round of this game, but man it finally feels good to get a "YOU WIN" screen (with about thirty "YOU LOSE" on the way there)
Question: Is there any reason to have more than one habitation complex in a spire city (other than the extra minerals and turrets)? Seems like I could squeeze out a few more shipyards elsewhere (and thus, more ships) instead if I stack up extra reactors.
No, there isn't. In fact it's a good idea to build extra shard reactors instead so you can build more shipyards, as more shipyards = more (and bigger) Spire ships. Each shipyard requires one shard reactor somewhre, so if on your first city you build 3 shard reactors, 2 shipyards, and 1 habitation, on your next city you can build 2 shard reactors, 3 shipyards, and 1 habitation.
Alternately you can build "frontline" cities at your choke points that are 4 shard reactors, 1 habitation, and 1 shipyard, and then build a city in a safer spot that has 4 shipyards. Since the shard reactors can mount weapons/shields and the shipyards can't, you want more of those in spots that are getting attacked more heavily.
(Then if you turn on the Zenith Trader, you can add even more stuff to it and make an hilariously absurd choke point. I once had one with a spire city, most of my turrets/mines/tractors, two fortresses, three modular fortresses, a superfortress, two orbital mass drivers, a black hole machine, radar jammer, and planetary armor booster & inhibitor. The AI really didn't have an answer for that. Sadly I didn't manage to build the Ion Cannon mk V, because it's pretty crazy expensive.)
