So I dropped from Very High Alien aggression and Very Hard AI factions and set both to medium because with bs resource shortage I no longer can compete anymore.
Messari invaded, and set up a city pretty near me and I scouted it and saw an 120 str mothership. It cannot take cities thankfully as it proceeded to spend sixty turns trying to kill my Barracuda watercraft playing peekaboo with the mothership on the edges of my science city. A devourer showed up and I had no choice but let it into my science city lest be caught by mothership. Lost 4 pop on that one i think.
I bombarded the mothership with my orbital bombardment platforms for sixty turns as it's str dropped from 120 to 70. . . I decided to go for the kill, brought out an goliath mech and assault infantry and suicided them both on mothership with an avenger tank equipped with gauss guns finishing it off. Messari return ended so easily. War is over. Formers sent in to clean up the infection.
About that messari portal which foolishly spawned near my cities? The messari infantry which teleported upon it was forced to fight against a lvl 20 Galeth named Fluffy and lvl 20 colonial trooper with gauss rifle/armor. Plus a couple of avenger tanks in case both fluffy/trooper somehow died. That was the first portal. Then I learned that if you manage to wipe out all the portals at least once with none left then they will stop spawning and all thats left to do is finish off the remaining messari units then weather will return to normal.
I do have a question though because I remember having tons of fun on very hard alien aggression all the time but now its like there's an solid carpet of doom of them lately did their spawns get boosted?
I did manage to wipe out the bugs only for me to watch other AI factions get wiped out by messari one by one xD They got me at last when They manged to crap lots of ion storms on my lands there was too much of it and I just finally unlocked area aid but it was too deep in tech tree so I died too.
Pity. I had lots of lvl 20 goliath mechs with pulse lasers.
Or does medium alien aggression with messari up normally have lots of portals spawning and I got lucky because first one spawned so near me which ended their invasion quick instead of being near one of the ais.
Edit: Figured I should include the screenshot as well.
I have marked the route where my ship and mothership took. It was like that for next sixty turns. Although by the time mothership went down my watercraft was attacked by random bugs in the water and it had 7.8 str left by then.
And the tiny orange circle on the minimap is where the first portal spawned at.. conveniently right next to my planned Construction bay city where is also my best troops is stationed at.
I really only discovered this behavior by accident because I wasn't willing to lose a level 12 barracuda for nothing. <_>
