Why hello CPA.
Hello threat.
Hello failing to scout because I can't be bothered.
Hello "You have lost".
Well, this is kind of embarrassing. As you may have surmised, I misread the situation badly and paid for it.
My game setup was Diff 7.6/7.6, Vanilla/Vanilla, all AI Plots and Minor Factions off, lazy AI off on an 80 planet map.
This is as far as I got (Galaxy shown is from few minutes before the CPA that killed me is released):
My home world is circled in purple, my fortress worlds are green and yellow and my current target of 3 systems is circled in red.
Note the Threat and Wave count.
As I had been hammering the 3 systems circled in red, I thought the majority of the ships on the threat counter were in those 3 systems. Note the one on the right with the command station destroyed and 440 ships left.
Now, the wave counter is a 500 ship wave which I deal with easily, but the other 1500 is the first CPA of the game.
So, my yellow fortress system is the problem. It was the second system I put up and while I have two fortresses Mk I in it, I don't have many supporting turrets present, only 150 or so. Although I have backed them up with a Military Mk II command for the attack boost.
So, pretty straight forward right? 1,500 ships can be handled pretty easily as I stopped attacking to make sure my fleet was at max when the CPA hit. I have my fleet positioned to respond to whichever fortress world the CPA decides to attack. (At the time I did not know it would be the yellow circle (Bimb).
I expect that against 1,500 ships a system with 2x Mk II FFs defended by 2x Forts Mk I and 150 other turrets can hold for a short while to allow my fleet to arrive.
2,500 ships warp into Bimb and the system is gutted before my fleet arrives. The command station is technically still alive but both forts are down and a couple salvos later the command station goes down. Without the fixed defenses my fleet can't handle the 2,000 ships that remain and I pull it back to try and salvage the situation by trading systems for time.
It takes another 15 minutes, but I end up failing. The only defenses any world that is not circled has is a couple of mini-forts. The AI does split its fleet up and I start destroying it in detail as it goes after my various systems but it's still almost 2,000 strong when it decides enough is enough and crashes my Homeworld.
So, you know that 1,500 threat on the threat meter I thought I had contained in the 3 systems circled in red? Wrong. There's only maybe 200 threat in those 3 systems. I did not know this, but if you leave guard posts alive and destroy the command station, any ships still attached to a guard post do not release onto threat so all those ships in the red circle that I think are threat are not, it's all down south in Roadje, just west of the yellow circle, just waiting for the CPA to show up and ruin my day.
The other, and perhaps bigger mistake, was misjudging the CPA danger. AIP is up at 254, that's Mk II. In my normal games the first CPA is
always MK I, and the second CPA is quite often Mk I also due to my playing low-AIP games.
This was a Mk II CPA, not a Mk I. 1,500 Mk II ships is a
lot more dangerous then 1,500 Mk I ships.....
So ya, a couple of pretty stupid mistakes and this game is done.
Not sure what value it has for what you were looking for Keith, this is more a chronicle of what happens when you charge forward expecting an easy game and the AI making you pay for it then anything about balance and what can be done at 7.6.
D.
