AI War:Keeping Astro Trains Away

How Do I Keep Astro Trains Off My Planets?

Q: With AI players of difficulty 5 and up, Astro Trains keep coming through my planets and shooting up my stuff. It doesn't hurt most ships very much, but it's annoying. How do I stop it?

A: The Astro Trains themselves are almost indestructible, so you can't combat them directly. However, they route through Astro Train stations, which you can probably find on nearby planets. If you take some bombers and destroy the train station, the likelihood of Astro Trains coming through your adjacent planets is lessened somewhat.

However, on the higher difficulties the Astro Trains are just a fact of life (unless you disable them). They are actually significantly more troublesome on enemy planets in the first place, since they reveal your cloaked scouts if the two pass too close by one another. On your planets, the main risk is that they will finish off very-damaged ships that are stationed at a wormhole, and if there are a lot of astro trains passing by, your turrets and mines will be progressively damaged. So keep an engineer handy at affected locations.

The other occasional benefit of Astro Trains is that if they happen to be passing through a minefield (which doesn't affect them) at the same time an enemy wave is coming in near the minefield, the enemy wave will temporarily be able to see and shoot at those mines, which means that a minefield's efficacy can occasionally be thwarted by the AI.

Either learn to live with them, turn them off, or start destroying those train stations. You can also use Counter-Dark-Matter Turrets to mitigate their effects at key wormholes. The choice is yours!

AI War:AI War