And by sideways it was a mad rush to snipe the final AI before the AIP increases getting incurred by the allied scourge I'd shrugged and hacked for a couple hours ago didn't drown me. Definitely an experience I'll probably not as blithely re-attempt in the future.
Allied scourge basically do *nothing* for the first hour and a half. But then its an express train with no brakes as AIP starts skyrocketing as they go wild with removing warp gates at minimum and get into a lot of other stuff along the way.
Extragalactic War units are a mixed bag. Maugrims as a unit seems a bit too weak. Since I think most of their damage in in the drones... and if the drones cannot live for more than a half second they are pretty anemic as a foe. Poltergeists do make for a big annoyance to need to smack down before they even get to breathe on forward outposts enabling your deep strike chain. And the one thing I can't find a log name for that had 8m hull and 4m shields was was *quite* annoying. And these were a lot of the reason why I had to go ham with ending the game because the scourge had shoved the AIP into 400+ territory and taking the final homeworld of the AI shoved it to 560+ where it double dropped exogalactic units in the middle of my attack on it.
The AI has a bit of a problem dealing with massed infinite range units. I had a long range fleet consisting of 29 tier VII sniper frigates, 7 tier VII ramifier frigates, ~30 sentinel gunboats of mark 3, ~100 regular sniper strikecraft of mark 3 as well, 15 tier V tractor drone launcher frigates, and a few tier III shield frigates.
The primary strike fleet was an insane mass of tier VII V-wings and ablative gatlings. A couple thousand worth courtesy of a few fleet extenders (one line alone of the ablative gatlings was 444 units) led by an Orchid Ark. Lower mark ablative trolls, stingrays, and kites were also in said fleet.
As the "extra" sauce I also had the Botnet Golem. Which is what initially shoved my AIP close to 200 and was worth the trade for easy threat fleet removal as I was prepping for taking a few worlds to take the fight to the home worlds. Which is about the time the scourge "woke up" and I gained 150+ AIP in about forty minutes mostly from their shenanigans. I had gotten 240 points worth of AIP reduction through the first few hours of the game just doing the usual low AIP style gameplay.
But yeah that last hour was a mad dash that had eight exo units dropped into the game and me frantically attempting to squash the last AI and keep my final military forward outpost alive so I could keep getting reinforcements fast enough. The last few minutes of the game were a nail biter as my metal stock ran out.
The research caches that showed up were 1 Technologist (taken), 2 Melee (ignored because there was only about five ship lines of decent melee available in the entire game), 1 General (taken and abused to the max with my fleets), and 1 concussion (also ignored since I had only two ship lines and one turret type using it).
