Smallish update here. I’m learning the AI behavior a bit more here, in particular around aggressiveness. In particular around the planetary bases.

• Get Missile Towers. That’s steps 1, 2 & 3.
• Destroying a base and NOT filling in the “hole” means you’ll see a new base in about 60 seconds.
• It takes a little less than 10 minutes for a base to construct fighters
• The attack wave progression has a linear linkage to power generation. You make more power, they become tremendously more aggressive. At mid-game, this could mean an attack wave every 30 seconds.
• The enemy will continuously try to create bases on the planets in a system. 3 seems to be the main goal to run at any given time.
• Letting the enemy dig bases and filling with a geothermal plant = ~310% efficiency, and a relatively small footprint. It’s a decent boost in the early game.
• Enemy waves drop random items, at volumes that are relatively meaningless aside from inventory hassle. And they can drop any base items (there’s like 20 of them), that you’d need to build a sorting chain to manage. I am hopeful this is a placeholder for something else.
• The space hive doesn’t get angry or attack you, even with interplanetary towers. The next step is to see what happens when I deploy warpers.
• Defending planets from random base construction is an interesting feat. I don’t think the game does a good job explaining how to get there, at least in a practical sense. If you’re on planet #2 and planet #3 all of a sudden has an imminent attack, you are not going to get there in time. And my planet #3 is a production hub, meaning half of it has stuff on it, making it quite important to stay “up”.
• Oh, planetary shields are worth a mention. While they are listed as a mid-game item, the material/power to make/run them is actually late game. And you need 80(!!!) to fully protect a planet. I am clearly missing a key piece of info here.

In terms of quality of life here, the added materials/products that were released with this add a substantial amount of complexity to builds. Not that I’m advocating for a single simple bus to build every end-state item, but at the same time it shouldn’t require massive spaghetti farms. The saving grace for this challenge are Logistic Distributors+ Logistic Bots.

These little doodads sit on top of storage containers and ship items between them. They don’t move huge amounts of items, but for a production bus they do wonders. It allows you to construct base materials in one area, and ship a few around the map to another container. So if you need to inject a single item within a bus, it works great! If you want to produce material around a planet, then you can centrally store it too. It doesn’t really work if you are producing multiple items (say 6 assemblers making the same thing) as the volume is too low. And the initial versions have a limited range, which can be upgraded to a decent place by mid-game. By the time you get to planet-level production, it’s simply required, and you need the upgrades to increase their range.

I’m nearing the warp phase of the game now, which I consider late game. Getting rare resources has a huge impact on simplifying production chains – especially the oil ones. Oh, how the oil ones are painful.