I wanted to test quite a number of things and played through a fairly loopsided game. Difficulty 9/9 with Warden and Hunter set to intensity 3, Royal and Tsunami AIs, with most sliders and setting maxed out for stuff around. The theme was to have an absurdly wealthy galaxy fitting the Royal AIs hoarding goods. Most permadeath options were off and Zenith trader was in.
I ultimately won after sixteen hours of fighting. There was quite bit of save/loading as I tested things (and got my homeworld killed in the Lone Wolf testing).
*The highlights:
-Staying at low AIP is too tempting and the waves between 100-200 AIP are too mean for playing aggressively. Combined with the common risk of the seed locking the players behind highly-defender world, you pretty much learn to break high-defenses then you can go around thorough the galaxy by grinding.
-Not much point in splitting forces for multiple fronts, surprisingly. I tried but due to metal expenditure it was far superior to have my two main forces nearby each other, one ensuring the other safety in retreat, and keep my metal up for beachheading when I approached max metal.
-I removed Wormholes invasion for this run. This surprisingly didn’t matter that much. I stayed below 210AIP for long enough (granted, max AIP reducers around). Still I appreciated not needing to put too many forces behind. One thing it made me realize:
-I now understand the urge to kill an AI homeworld before triggering Wormholes (210AIP) if you can. The Rogue AI mess will quickly gather hundreds and hundreds of ships due to conquest waves… including in my backward. So you need a fleet there anyway… till you kill all warp gates or stabilize the situation anyway. Alternatively I could have taken risks and rushed the second AI homeworld… but heh.
-Lone Wolf and Golems are underwhelming at this difficulty. This isn’t counting the three ‘best’: Botnet, Armored and Artillery Golems that I deliberately avoided since I knew they were good. I wanted to test new things.
-Suppressors frigates and relevant tractor ships are gold with Battlestation-beachheading tactics. I was able to snatch threats and guard ships then bring them out to a ‘surprise’ ambush/Nucleo/Spider turrets trap. Ctrl+Alt very useful for building those with battlestations.
-I stumbled upon the Metabolizing Citadel and found its much more useful than the Hive Lone Ship. It really help to have either tanking waves on diff9/9. It helps a lot for defense and it boost economy quite a bit. Amazingly, despite tanking waves at 200% exp for over 12 hours my Hive ship was only mark V, 100k exp shy from Mark 6. That might need some tuning.
-Minefield (Ensnarer battlestation)trap did not work in an attempt, with Thanatos Ark and Beam Spire. At 134 AIP with Raptor and Stingrays waves, my military planet taking waves got slaughtered. Not taking any of the three made for a much easier game.
-I learned in that interval from the guide in AI War 2 for returning veterans that wave composition is based on planet, which I then used with great success. Only Pulse Tank and Vangards to deal with turned out much easier than raider.
-I had a lot of struggle in the early game due to AIP reducers being too far for my battlestation to get there, and having started with the Raid-focused starting fleet (I know, what was I thinking right? Well, I wanted to test it out. Dagger+suppressor frigates work great though). For the first few hours of the game I didn’t have any good kiling tool for Data Center and Instigator, that could survive the journey and long enough to kill the things (Royal Dire in the way!)
-Devourer golems proved so much more annoying than Astro Trains. It bumped the shields in my planet with a Major Data Center over and over. There might have been savescumming because those shields refused to come back together and sometimes wandered away due to bumping on each other or something. That was aggravating.
-Tech was a big problem for a lot of the game. I didn’t find the Nanocaust beacon till quite a while. Then I did and spent a few hours corralling it on AI planets and wiping out warp gates. Neutral Science gathering really help. Battlestations-heavy playstyle also made it safe. It's much better at dealing with worrying Nanocaust fleets than Lone/Golems.
-First AI Homeworld was underwhelming after that. Royal Red got its fleets thinned out then I jumped in and dropped a hundred mark VII turrets at the entry point. It made my full seven millions metal drop by five millions by the time I achieved control but it was pretty easy.
-After Red went Rogue, things got complicated. I had to go back near my homeworld to clear out Conquest fleets, which proved more threatening than both CPA and Waves combined. Still I was able to take advantage of the chaos to ‘free’ more worlds then hacking them for science. A few warp gates cleared later, then I was free to throw myself at Green (Tsunami).
-Making my way to Green was easy. Killing it? Oh boy. After Red died its strength count kept shooting up. Despite draining it its seems its budget don’t deplete because the more Warden/Hunter/Praetorian I killed outside the AI Homeworld, the more it had in the homeworld. It went beyond 1k strength, which still fill me with disbelief for an Warden/Hunter intensity of 3. I first tried an assault from two wormholes but the refiling rate was just insane. Ultimately I gathered everything and warped in, dropping 300 turrets in its lap and stalling with tractor beams. I ended up needing to order spider turrets to help with killing the guard posts because my forces had trouble finishing them.
-Killed the Overlord phase 1. Phase two managed to get out while fired at by sixty-something Nucleo mark 7, remarkable. It got into my friendly world and still managed to ouput 200 Strength worth of ships because my fleet caught up. The End.
On one hand it was a very enjoyable game where I learned quite a bit. On the other hand I felt frustrated by the powerlessness of a number of Lone Wolf. I avoided taking planets due to their presence, and due to needing the AIP for more planets because I desperately needed the energy. Not very surprising since the amount of stuff meant I had a lot of thing to build. Still, somewhat disappointing since I considered making an army of Lone Fleets and see where that went. I also thought Ensnarer battlestation would let me do the trap-trick that I used suppressor+turrets for… but that didn’t work out.
CPA were weird. Sometimes the threat barely shot up by a hundred when I was thinning out fleets in the two-hundreds-eighty strength as a mundane event. That’s before the patch for CPA get out so maybe that’s normal.
The funniest part of this run was probably running into the Nanocaust/AI-fighting with hundreds of strength of both sides, with my first fleet here. I built up Spider+Nucleo+MLRS on my side of the world, put my fleet in Attack move rather than pursuit, then let the Nanocaust break itself on me after we finished the AI. It was such a beautiful and classic AI War 2 moment.
