Nephtys wrote:Even in mid-late game, a human Antimatter ship with the common Node Focusing can cross 10 LY in one turn. There's very often no warning for such an attack.
Sadly true. What I really need, I think, are Deepscan destroyers that can sit out in deep space a bit further from my planets and provide a sort of early warning system that extends farther outwards. I almost never get warning of fleets inbound, but I can tell from where they are moving ships to if a force is approaching me. I usually saw ships headed to a border world, and then next turn they'd gone from being halfway to it to being in combat with my defense teams. Hilariously close, perhaps, but engine technology is perhaps the most important research item in the game, and I need to assume my opponents will avail themselves of it.
I did like the Deepscan ship idea though. I've got gates all over and plenty of gate tech, I'm just having problems advancing my gate network. I wish gates were much harder to take down and put up, they'd be more like... highways rather than your sole transportation function. Set up a gate here, a gate there... know what I mean? Low FTL speeds with a few ultraexpensive gates, and treat the gates as hardened nodeline generators instead of wafer-thin wormholes. Ugh. It just makes me angry that whenever they take a gate down, everything that was there when it got whacked is stranded for at least one turn, and that's only if I have a backup gate. Farcasters aren't just a hiver toy, they really should be available at the beginning of the game in some weaker format, like a 3 LY leap, just to make it less ridiculous to set up a gate network.
I know of no other Empire who can be defeated so easily without ever needing to engage and destroy their forces. Most of what I'm going through is lack of practice, but man, I'm looking for the silver lining! For every advantage the gates give me, I see several exploitable problems.
And any word about Hiver specialty techs? What should I be using as the core of my research?
