I just beat the War in Heaven for the first time on a vanilla playthrough last night (I'd always done it with some variety of mods that allow for a greater degree of 'min-maxing' before hand). That's cool, and all, but what really strikes me about the thing is that it was only possible because the AI fought like an absolute moron.
I tried dividing my fleets and using "guerrilla" tactics at first. This didn't really work, because the AE's are massively faster than I am. BUT... I did notice that the AE tended to follow a fairly predictable pattern. If I attacked one of their systems, they would send pretty much everything they had after me. However, if I left the system, most would wave off (usually returning to bombarding planets in systems they had occupied, but not yet invaded for some reason), and only one or two would come after me.
So, I basically just put all of my empire's fleets and my fed fleet into a giant death ball, around a star fortress. All together, it came out to around 130,000 total fleet strength for my forces + 30,000 for the fed fleet, and another 10,000 for the station; around 170,000 or so in total. There was an occupied system two jumps away, so I'd just fly the death ball in, kill the station, and then fall-back to my star fortress.
Like clockwork, they'd send a fleet or two to attack the death ball. I'd massacre the thing, and research the wreckage. Rinse and repeat until I had decimated virtually their entire navy, and stolen all of their tech.
Granted, 170k is nothing to sneeze at, but it also should have been well within an AE's ability to stomp, given half a chance. There was *at least* half a million worth of fleet power in the general area they could have thrown at me. Instead, they'd just come one at time, in 70k to 100k stacks. Even when they came two at a time, they'd never bother to link the two fleets up before hand, so I could simply defeat whichever arrived first in detail, reinforce my losses, and get ready to meet the next wave.
It just feels kind of cheap.
Frankly, this seems to be a common trend with *most*, if not all, of the "crisis enemy" AI.
The "Great Khan" spawned next to my empire in this playthrough as well. He did no damage to my empire because he died charging, alone, like an idiot, against one of my star fotress systems.
End game crisis fleets, meanwhile, are infamous for just kind of "running out of steam" and sitting around doing nothing after a certain point.
Is this deliberate on the Dev's parts, to actually give you a chance against them? Or is the combat AI here really just *THAT* bad?
I tried dividing my fleets and using "guerrilla" tactics at first. This didn't really work, because the AE's are massively faster than I am. BUT... I did notice that the AE tended to follow a fairly predictable pattern. If I attacked one of their systems, they would send pretty much everything they had after me. However, if I left the system, most would wave off (usually returning to bombarding planets in systems they had occupied, but not yet invaded for some reason), and only one or two would come after me.
So, I basically just put all of my empire's fleets and my fed fleet into a giant death ball, around a star fortress. All together, it came out to around 130,000 total fleet strength for my forces + 30,000 for the fed fleet, and another 10,000 for the station; around 170,000 or so in total. There was an occupied system two jumps away, so I'd just fly the death ball in, kill the station, and then fall-back to my star fortress.
Like clockwork, they'd send a fleet or two to attack the death ball. I'd massacre the thing, and research the wreckage. Rinse and repeat until I had decimated virtually their entire navy, and stolen all of their tech.
Granted, 170k is nothing to sneeze at, but it also should have been well within an AE's ability to stomp, given half a chance. There was *at least* half a million worth of fleet power in the general area they could have thrown at me. Instead, they'd just come one at time, in 70k to 100k stacks. Even when they came two at a time, they'd never bother to link the two fleets up before hand, so I could simply defeat whichever arrived first in detail, reinforce my losses, and get ready to meet the next wave.
It just feels kind of cheap.
Frankly, this seems to be a common trend with *most*, if not all, of the "crisis enemy" AI.
The "Great Khan" spawned next to my empire in this playthrough as well. He did no damage to my empire because he died charging, alone, like an idiot, against one of my star fotress systems.
End game crisis fleets, meanwhile, are infamous for just kind of "running out of steam" and sitting around doing nothing after a certain point.
Is this deliberate on the Dev's parts, to actually give you a chance against them? Or is the combat AI here really just *THAT* bad?
Last edited:
