YAVPAs Steam sales were slow and Divinity Original Sin isn't released yet, and as I noted that Keith had made IV and V turrets per-planet, I decided to perform the original "What AIP" challenge with as close to the original settings I could get while still learning something new; Thus for learning purposes I chose to play with multiple homeworlds to see what difference it made to the game.
7.6/7.6 Vanilla AIs
Simple extremely cheesy map: 788659817
3 homeworlds with one of them serving as the single chokepoint for a total of no less than 32 planets
Bonus ships: Spire Corvette, Zenith Beam Frigate, Spider Bot
Ultra low caps
Complex ships
Zenith Trader - this thread originally claimed it wasn't a superweapon, and who am I to argue? (
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Cheesy map:
I can report that with these settings the challenge is trivial, but it made for a fun and hectic game with +3 and +4 speed most of the time, which was awesome.
The joke was on meNeither the Zenith Trader goods nor the extreme cheesiness of the map layout turned out to be needed despite ending at 1844 AIP (I eliminated coprocessors and data centres but left the superterminal alone, building all my forts except the superforts there, in case I ever thought I needed to take the AIP way down. As it eventuated, that proved unnecessary).
With regards to the Zenith Trader, I tanked on my homeworld chokepoint the entire game, hacking away AI designs with radar dampening. While it did look awesome with the three superfortresses and full complement of trader toys I built there when they killed the incoming waves in a few seconds, after winning I reloaded the last save prior and destroyed all the trader toys, leaving only turrets and forcefields to defend, and the tiny waves still got destroyed without needing my attention though a few hundred did survive to reach the lighting/flak/forcefield/HBC defensive line.
With regards to the cheesiness of the map, well... it turned out that building all turrets of all per-planet-cap types when you have three homeworlds was alone with no support of any other defences, strong enough that the AI never had enough threat to dare attack, not even after a CPA, so not a single one of my chokepoints was ever attacked by the AI.
The defences were: I-III, 36k, IV: 60k, V:90k.
Of course, in practice I got a few V's early and didn't take the others tier by tier, but focusing on unlocking turrets during the early game the defences rose much quicker than the masses of threat accumulated at any given AIP encountered, so long as I sent my fleet to crush each CPA. (Which between Spider Bots, RIOT starships, and Spire Corvettes and Beam Frigates supplemented by a growing fleet of other ships was fairly easy.)
Building all these turrets required a lot of energy, of course, but with 150k/planet to start with, it is not as if I suffered energy problems. At the end I controlled 6 ZPGs (900k), 21 EconII and III stations (3*4,075k) and 95 energy collectors (3*14,250k), with a positive balance of 6,200k after paying for 11 chokepoints. Outside the early game, I had no need for energy collectors. I scrapped the last one somewhere between 10 and 15 planets.
EDIT: To clarify; Due to 3 homeworlds, the Econ station and energy collector income was multiplied by 3, just like number of turrets etc., were multiplied by 3, while the ZPGs energy income was NOT multiplied. The result being that ZPGs were much less important in a 3 homeworld game than in a 1 homeworld game.
So I am not saying the same could have been done with a map setup that had required me to defend a lot of planets at a time, but 5-10 locations at a time and a few more when map dominance has been established? Easily doable. And realistically, only the most open maptypes would require one to defend more locations at a time than that when one is playing a game conquering everything.
With regards to wavesizesI had expected large waves, since my one win on 7.0 a month and a half ago had had 7-11k waves with scores of starships hitting my homeworld at ~600 AIP, but Keith had tweaked the AIP=>Waves logic since then because he thought that was absolutely outrageous.
That was with normal cap size, and I was playing on ultra-low here, so if I'd played one homeworld and only gone to 600-700 AIP I'd have expected much smaller waves than those 7-11k, but given the homeworld setting and given the AIP I had expected a substantial number of ships
What turned up at 1700+ AIP was about 1700-2200 ships and a dozen starships per wave, so even with frequent waves and the waves synchronized, it was next to nothing and as my post-win testing with a homeworld stripped of trader toys and with no forts whatsoever showed, something that a full cap of all basic turrets when backed up by forcefields, gravity turrets, and HBCs was easily able to deal with.
Funniest moment of the game....After having destroyed all AI planets except AI2 homeworld and the planet that warped waves to my own homeworld, the design backup on the wave planet had reached what appears to be maximum capacity. I had hoped that all the designs would end up there, but it seems as if there's a maximum of eight allowed - at any rate, when I destroyed the third-to-last AI command station, only some of the designs on its design backup were transferred to the second-to-last, and I had to make do with those. (Had I known there was such a limit I'd have downloaded from the third-to-last and second-to-last simultaneously to get all that remained.
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Even so, Design Downloading 8 designs in 5 minutes taking my hacking balance from +1k to -11.5k was awesome and gave me something to spend my last 37k knowledge on.
At the end of the game, there were only 6 slots free for further shiptypes on the Fleet2 tab at the normal docks and my fleet was in excess of 4.5k ships
on ultra-low caps.Saddest moment of the game....When I hacked Lightning Torpedo Frigates early in the mid-game and saw how those, together with the Neinzul enclaves, had a hard time killing anything. I had read in the patch notes that they'd been hit hard, but seeing is believing.
Oh, well, they were probably too strong before, since Neinzul Enclaves were a near obligatory early unlock, and the only reason I didn't unlock them in the early game this time was because I wanted to test whether the Spire Corvette (HBCs+Railguns), Beam Frigate, and Spider Bot combination was as awesome as I had hypothesized (it was!)
Most awesome moment of the game....When I killed the second AI, who was all alone in the Galaxy except for the wave-planet, having some 45k special forces keeping it company on the homeworld...
...and I sent in a nuke followed by a veritable barrage of lightning warheads from the neighbouring system, then followed up by my fleet that now outnumbered the survivors, wiped out its Wrath lance in seconds, and killed the AI within two minutes thereof, sending me from 1732 to 1844 AIP.
...the warhead interceptor having been destroyed by raid starships earlier in the game, in preparation for that moment.
Remaining sources of AIP in the game: 20 AIP from the last planet sending waves to my homeworld and as many AIP as I could want from gratuitously scrapping warheads.
Victory stats
Final thoughtsAll of this was with three homeworlds. With only one homeworld, the turret defences would only have given 12, 20k, and 30k defence respectively. If the AI given one human homeworld had only gotten a third of the wavesize, reinforcements, and CPA it got in this, the turret defences would have performed equivalently in scaring off the AI in that situation. But I seriously doubt that this is the case.
It became bloody obvious from this game that part of the increased challenge of multiple homeworlds is more frequent waves rather than larger waves, so either the wavesizes aren't larger or, if they are larger, they probably aren't anywhere near thrice as large, so it probably would be harder to do this with one homeworld rather than three.
On the other hand, I turned out to be able to scare off the AI entirely without the use of forts in chokepoints in this game and, in the test of the final normal wavesizes, also able to tank them on a turret defended homeworld with no use of forts at all, no trader toys, and no fleet, and I did all this without using the superterminal, so I think my conclusion has to be that with all caps of turrets having a per-planet cap, it would be
really strange if one couldn't conquer or destroy every planet in the galaxy using a single homeworld and 7.6/7.6 vanilla AIs without any minor factions or AI plots enabled and using a map with chokepoints, using forts to support the most exposed locations.
Based on these experiences, I will go so far as to assume that anybody of my skill level or above would find it easy, though probably more tedious than this game. (At least until somebody tries it and tells me that it is bloody difficult.
) Mk. I-V turrets everywhere that needs to be defended is bloody powerful.
Bugs observedOnly one. I had RIOT and SCRV unlocked and on the starship tab when I conquered a Protector V fabricator.
Expected behaviour:Construction possible from the starship constructor under its own PROT tab, just as other starship fabricators acquired make it possible to construct at the starship constructor.
Observed behaviour:Construction solely possible directly from its own constructor. The starship constructor neither acquired a PROT tab, nor did the ship appear on the STAR, RIOT, or SCRV tabs.
I've attached the victory save, which showcases the issue. The fabricator in question is on the planet immediately south of CHOKE MID, which is the P1 chokepoint in the middle of the map. All starship constructors are located on FLEET homeworld (the homeworlds being TANK, FLEET, and SCOUT)
