AI War 2:Advice For Specific Unit Types
How Do I Survive Mirrors?
A From CRCGamer: The Dark Mirrors have a variety of ways you can partially mitigate what they do. They punish glass cannons like snipers by outlasting them. But they die quite readily to units that you would usually use as fodder.
V-Wings actually have a damage bonus against the mirrors because of their weak engines. V-Wings are also dirt cheap to replace. Same sort of story with the anti-armor swarmer autocannon minipods and gunbots. Works against armor and dirt cheap. Cornerstone units of Core tech.
Raid tech oddly enough can work against them if you keep kiting backwards. Spaceplanes have damage resistance against attacks from a certain distance away which cuts down on returned damage.
Forcefield Frigates in the classic fleet can intercept the return shots on their shields. Darker Mirrors or the Phantasmal Decoys which are a sub-unit of Phantasmal Host can use shot attraction to keep the return fire from hitting other units. Kamikaze units that suicide to deal damage obviously won't care about non-existent return damage.
Using parasitic damage to make zombies can be a play if they aren't too likely to be reconverted right away. Mulches the guardians that accompany the swarm of mirrors pretty quickly to be honest.
Any units with the Hydra property can make temporary units on death that help slowly pull down the mirror count and don't additionally count against you for counter attacks.
A Retribution Golem of your own absolutely smashes Dark Mirrors with its polarizers and self repairs over time.
Having at least two higher mark combat factories of about Mark IV or V is a somewhat cheesy way of dealing with them since drones are technically "free" and they also on top of that use V-Wing drones which we've already established are fairly effective.
Heck there are even more tricks beyond that. Ever considered giving a battlestation some mines from an ODSS? Dirt cheap to build and place and you can kite the mirrors over minefields. Paralysis mines breaks the swarm apart into smaller bite size chunks at a time. Corruption Mines amplify the damage they take from your forces and make zombies out of them when they die. Implosion Mines gather them into clumps and do extra damage to higher health targets. Fragmenting Mines actually get you an auto-bomb equivalent into range as they die.
You can also pick up Drone Hangars from ODSS for defending your systems while these cannot be taken by battlestations or citadels they provide covered systems with temporary strikecraft while enemies are within range. Again V-Wings are available along with several other options within the drone hangars.
How Do I Survive Retribution Golems?
A From CRCGamer: AI Retribution Golems are a case of stop losing command centers and getting shark waved or pay attention with your Spire fleet assets. Those only really show up in numbers when you have mishandled something elsewhere or are playing a somewhat different game. You pretty much take them on with heavy weapons and don't let them run away to recover.
How Do I Survive Retribution Guardians?
A From CRCGamer: The guardian version dies to the usual stuff you'd flatten plasma guardians with. Tritium damage snipers, Nucleophilic turrets, Eyebot strikecraft. Fusion damage that bypasses shields from the Piercing tech tree also can be a consideration because it kills them faster and avoids a huge chunk of their total health pool. You can handle the return fire by picking up Reactive Dummy mines or Bulwark Turrets to redirect shots for a short time so the turrets doing the actual killing of the wave don't die so fast.
Unfortunately beam weapons are AoE in nature and do huge damage across a lot of units which makes them take enormous amounts of return retribution shot damage. Try some Bomber hangars or other things that deal with them and are mostly single target. The guardians themselves don't do a ton of damage or have much range unless being shot at so you can in some cases use hold fire to allow engineers to repair long range turrets whose health is getting low. And really parasitic converting huge chunks of the wave helps a lot against most guardians. Look for corruption mines and seed approach paths as needed for some fairly significant returns.
And of course if its a Retribution Guardian focused wave you mostly don't have to worry about melee getting hammered by Spiders or Gravity guardians and are free to employ Rams.
The only other thing to really mention here is that unless you are against an AI that uses the same ships everywhere you might actually want to consider some pruning of specific annoying warp gates. Since the origin point gate determines wave composition. Only some HaP or 5 AIP to smack the gate and not the AI command station. And if it forces the AI to utilize another gate with a much less annoying set of ships it could be quite worthwhile.
