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[Tarran]

Yeah. This game really needs more wave options. Like, decrease wave size, not frequency.

Turns out, it's not the frequency of waves that kill you, it's the 16K ships per wave that do. Never before have I witnessed so much destruction by a wave of Missile Frigates...

[Aklyon]

Well, technically (according to part of semirecent patch notes) FS wil shrink wave sizes by lowering how much excess reinforcements add to waves, down to 100% reduction at 5 cities.

The problem there, is that the waves only get smaller because they aren't relevant in comparison to the exos, which get bigger as you add cities.

Technically we might be able to get a similar effect with some level of Preemption (since that also effects reinforcements, so might make it take long to get to an excess amount of them), but that'll give us significantly more threat ships to deal with in general. I'm only going off the tooltip though, I haven't actually tried this setting.

[GiglameshDespair]

It was all going so well until the sudden 20k waves.

[wer6]

I'm telling you guys now, Super forts.

[Aklyon]

Yeah...Perhaps lower difficulty like Tarran said will help.

Other things that might help:
Spire city choke points (which cause exos but give heavy defenses and extra ships)
The ridiculously expensive Superfort of wer's favor.
An X map (with Nomads so that its not quite so linear)

Spoiler: Exile spoiler (click to show/hide)

Exodian Blade (which causes exos that are attracted to it that it eventually can't murderbeam solo)

Or maybe (and very much only maybe) high-intensity Dark Spire, but thats as likely to cause ruinous problems as it is to attrition the AI in ways the Dyson fails at.

[wer6]

The only thing that can take a super fort down is a fleet of 10000 bombers, but I usually have a shit ton of anti bomber turrets around it.

[GiglameshDespair]

Is it worth leaving more neutered enemy systems rather than taking them to keep air progress low? Wave size does feel like the curve is more exponential than anything.

[Aklyon]

The only thing that can take a super fort down is a fleet of 10000 bombers, but I usually have a shit ton of anti bomber turrets around it.

We have had such a fleet. Made of Electric Bombers and Plasma Siege at that.

[Tarran]

Trust me, Wer, a couple superforts wouldn't have saved the game, we didn't chokepoint enough and in time.

Besides that, the waves were extremely nasty and too frequent, and the AI built up a massive reserve. There were simply too many ships, one building would have shifted the balance slightly, but we were on borrowed time for quite a while, and didn't have any real time to build one. The AI was only going to get more nasty over time and we weren't building up to meet the challenge fast enough.

[wer6]

Must be soul destroying.

[Frumple]

Is it worth leaving more neutered enemy systems rather than taking them to keep air progress low?

Um, yes? Very? That... that's a fundamental part of AIP management in AI War. The only way you can manage to be indiscriminate in your system acquisition is, maybe, if you're going for a spire game. Any other situation (and probably that one, too) the AIP is just going to get entirely out of hand and you start getting hammered with 10k+ waves you can't really do anything about.

Otherwise if you're going for victory you really need to be getting as few systems as possible and neutering systems/sneaking through transports to snipe off prime objectives and whatnot. If you're just yoinking up every system you can get your hands on, you're aiming for a fun time but the chances of winning the game are very small...

---

... I keep forgetting sundays are happening until it's nightfall. Maybe after I notice a sale for the latest expansion...

[Tarran]

Well, Gig, you missed Nomads getting into very incontinent positions, allowing AI ships to go right on past both your choke and mine. There's now a couple thousand ships hanging around blocking the link between our two clusters, and one or two thousand raiding the systems adjacent to Sundered Gate. Said ships also wiped my fleet when they were once 6K. Yeah, it's pretty bad. Recoverable, but bad.