[AI War: Fleet Command] Let's Play~

This is a two man game with me and a friend. We are still playing this game so I won't do a full report, but you will get the gist of the game with this bit. I apologize in advance for not being able to provide many screenshots, seeing as the stuff I'm gonna write about has already happened and I didn't know I was gonna write this.

We picked an 80-planet map with a simple layout. We kept generating until we found a map we liked. We wanted to spawn in a small cluster with as few chokes as possible to the rest of the galaxy. This way we can get some
good starting resources in the beginning and defend it easily.

With too many fronts you can get raped pretty easily. It's very very stressful sometimes when you have to keep an eye on ten systems at once where the AI sends raiding parties.

Finally we found a good map.

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(As you can see, I took the screenshot from an ongoing game. You won't actually start with that many planets in most games.)

We chose to play against one difficulty 6 and one difficulty 7 AI with random easier AI Archetypes. The 6 AI ended up as the Zenith Descendant type, which only uses Zenith ships, which are much stronger than normal ships but in fewer numbers. The 7 AI randomed the Fortress Baron AI Type, this guy has a lot of fortresses on his planets which SUCKS! Each planet is a pain to destroy because of the fortresses, especially with the grind approach we are doing. Forts are very very strong stationary guard posts of sorts, they have to be dealt with using great caution. Luckily this AI is not that aggressive, so we can take our time doing things.

Most often you will only control one planet at first, while the controls ALL others. There are no neutral planets or anything, the AI simply controls all of them no matter the map size.

When you start a game you can produce Fighters, Bombers and Missile Frigates from your space dock. You always get to have those three for your army, the rest are either unlocked by finding Advanced Research Stations (ARS). When you create the game you can pick one to unlock at the start depending on what planet your home system is at. In this game I picked the tractor platform. This ship can be built in low numbers, but it can take a good beating. As the name suggests this ships purpose is to use tractor beams. This is very useful to keep enemies from running or attacking. My friend picked the Laser Gatling, a small all purpose ship which can be built in large numbers.

The early game is usually pretty boring in my opinion. I just scout whatever planets are close and send Raid Starships (Starships are very strong ships which usually has specific purposes.) to destroy the AI command station to later capture the systems.

Note: The way my friend and me are playing in this game is only one way to play. We took the grind approach in this game, this will lead to a lot of AI Progress (AIP, it's basically a difficulty counter, the higher it is the more aggressive and dangerous the AI becomes) culminating in huge battles with thousands of ships. Some people play with a minimalistic approach, utilizing guerilla tactics to minimize the AIP gain.

We took the systems closest to us while defending the periodic waves the AI sent against us. We had a very lucky seed with many ARSs and good resources. Once we had taken the planets close to us, we set out to fortify the planets of Preacher's Refuge and Priest's Pity to set up stable chokes.

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This is the Priest's Pity choke. At first glance it might look like a pile of shit, but let me assure you, this is a pile of UNBREAKABLE shit! Complete with fortresses, mines and all kinds of deadly turrets will destroy ANYTHING coming through the wormhole (Nathan's Voyage).

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I zoomed in a bit so you can see more detail. The icons with a pink contour are ships, the rest are stationary defenses.

We were very lucky with Priest's Pity. Our grinding nature resulted in a high AIP and a very agressive AI, but luckily we found a Superterminal at this planet. When we capture it it starts reducing AIP every so often, but spawns AI ships. We held it long enough to lower the AIP by about 100, which was a very nice boost.

Now, there were so many things that happened which were interesting so I can't list them all, I'll tell you about a few favorites.

When we had set up the chokes we were discussing how to approach next. We had unlocked the Mark 4 scout, it is slow and you can only build one of it (as opposed to Mark 2 and 3 which has caps at 20 and 30 respectively), but it can't get decloaked. So as you can see from the map image, we have scouted every planet in the galaxy. This way we can prioritize targets.

We decided that a deep strike at Omicron Lyrae (one of the planets at the very top) would be in our favor. This system contained a Dyson Sphere, some sort of alien entity which spawns strong ships that attack anything in sight, that is, until we liberate the planet it is at, at which point it will spawn that are friendly to us. The ships it spawns are very strong and can fuck up the AI pretty bad. The Sphere itself can't move, but the ships it spawns can even move to other planets. This has cleared whole clusters of AI ships for us in the past so it was a sound plan.

After a lot of micro and a few failures I manage to suicide my Raid Starships into the AI command station and free the Dyson Sphere. A small victory feels good.

Note: I don't currently have a scout in this system so you can't see the ships the sphere spawns in the pic below.
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There are many "random encounters" like the Dyson Sphere, Human Rebels etc., so the games are usually full of them if you turn all of the settings on.

We decided that next we would move our choke at Preacher's Refuge to the Pluto -> The Wall belt of planets. Unfortunately many of the systems in the belt had Counterattack Guard Posts. When you destroy them the AI will send waves to a random system. This would turn out to be a very hectic time. With normal waves crashing into the chokes we got these counterattack waves deep into our home territory, specifically we got two waves in Rhy's Crusade and one in Light of Heart at the bottom. Usually these waves are not big problems but Light of Heart is a VERY important system for us since it contains a one of the only two Mark IV Factories in the whole galaxy.

After a lot of cursing and fighting we destroyed the waves, though it was a close. See my friend had to keep his army at the Priest's Pity choke to take on the normal waves, so I had to defend these alone.

I continued to push up the Pluto belt and we get a Human Rebellion Colony warning from Hila's Joy (the system in the top left with a yellow glow). This was 26 minutes in the game. Now we need to take that system before the invisibility timer goes out, or the AI will see the colony and destroy it, netting it some AIP. If we reach the planet in time to save it, we will apparently gain some special docks to build ships from (This is the first game we play with the Human Rebel Colonies setting on). We'll see what happens.