Started a new heavily modded run. Start with the cathedral ship start "Notre Dame." I expected to have a typical Notre Dame campaign, in which you fly around with your giant fat nuclear-missile armed megastation slowly repairing it up until you're ready for deep space exploration and colonisation. In reality, the Hivers proved way more aggressive and powerful than when I last used them. It was non-stop invasions and saturation bombardment missions being sent by the Hivers to all the core worlds, and my Cathedral ship was flying from system to system intercepting the Hivers. The standard Cathedral meta of just spamming a million missiles did absolutely nothing to Hiver fleets, as they field a billion point defence craft and weapon systems + their ships regenerate hull damage. So I outfitted a MAX-DAKKA loadout. Shields on the front module, shields on the side, high-accuracy long range weapon systems everywhere. Four highly skilled, ambitious talon fighters. Standard engagement protocol:
1. Set cruising speed towards main enemy capital cluster or siegeworks objective (added the sick mod which adds "defensive bastion" objectives. Capture them and you get a respawning defensive bastion).
2. FIRE ALL DAKKA. Overload enemy flux. Pierce their armour, unleash the talons and every missile. Use phase mines to snipe all of the enemy's fighter cover.
3. Vent under cover of the three frontal shields, repeat.
I like the idea of the max-missile cathedral ship as it's like roleplaying as a defensive station and is fairly chill. But it just doesn't do anything to remnants or hivers. Max-dakka puts you at way more risk and stress but heavily rewards optimal BATTLESHIP decisive doctrine. You can take full-frontal engagements with XIV battlegroup capital ships because your guns are so potent.
So after spending millions of credits rennovating my flagship, and accruing a small but elite coterie of salvaged capitals & black-market procured missile frigates & phase ships for objective capturing, I began flying around building alliances with the Hegemony & Persean League. And while I wasn't able to get Pirates, Sindria or Tri-Tach in on the alliance, I was at least able to get relative neutrality between them and the grand Luddic-Hegemon coalition so everyone could focus on the fucking space bugs. Ferrying cargo goods, defending space stations, hunting bounty fleets... I almost never left the core worlds whilst building up a fortune of 15,000,000 credits and a true lean mean armada fighting machine. I took a quick stop at every major hegemony and luddic church world, buying up all the heavy armaments and marine/crew contracts I could get.
I had 13,000 crew and over 3,000 marines, with enough heavy weapons to equip 4,000 marines. Every month I lost a net 150,000 credits as my giant warfleet traveled the stars, briefly exploring solar systems for worlds to reclaim for humanity. Found plenty of weird anomalies, including the Hegemony planet Sentinel which had been lost to the history books for ages. Settled a pleasant desert world which I began turning into a terran world. Until at last I reached the Hiver home systems. It was so cathartic managing to sneak into their terran-world centre of heavy industry, purchasing all of their stocks of supplies and fuel, before annihilating their station and dropping thousands upon thousands of marines, mechs and grav-tanks. Every single hiver patrol began racing towards me at speed 20, revenge-fleets and counter-invasions too, and I would alternate between annihilating these fleets and tactical bombarding the ground-resistance so the bugs would finally be eliminated in the name of Ludd. In 8 days the world was claimed, and all of my marines retrieved. I requested an armed fleet of venture cruisers come reinforce my new conquest (the Luddic church were displeased I took it under direct administration), whilst I began systematically degrading the defensive capabilities of their key fortress-worlds in preparation for total system conquest.
Felt like a rogue trader just burning millions of credits to ply the stars, set up new colonies and annihilate xenos. What a fun campaign