So I just won my first skirmish match vs the new Voidbringer invaders that were introduced in the Invasion expansion. The first time they showed up (in my last game) they murdered me to death in pretty short order. This time I tried to be a little better prepared for them, but even though I did manage to win it was a pretty messy affair.
First of all, the last time I described my experience with these invasions I had mentioned that they will occasionally transform random sectors into volcanic once they’ve shown up. This isn’t exactly true, at least not based on this last game. Spawners always tended to do this with unoccupied sectors this time around. I think I was conflating two different issues my first game was having: firstly, invasion spawners, which create volcanic, and secondly, a Fungal Event that WAS transforming various sectors (owned or not) into Fungal every turn for 5 turns. I had both happened at once in the first game, but because the whole world had gone to shit I got a bit mixed up about what was happening to my beautiful world.
Okay, so back to this second game. I was playing on a medium sized map and the Voidbringers showed up around turn 55 or so (I think they showed up on turn 61 the prior game, at least that’s when I first noticed them anyway).
On the turn they first announce themselves the only thing new on the map was a big domed HQ of theirs and one stack of enemy Voidbringers wandering around the map. You can’t get through the dome at this stage, so don’t even try (I did). But you CAN murder that stack of wandering Voidbringers to death. This part could be a coincidence, but it wasn’t until I actually destroyed that wandering stack of a the Void that the next stage began: Spawners started dropping in around the map.
In order to get through the protective dome at the VoidB HQ you will have to destroy a number of these Spawners (I had to destroy 4, I don’t know if smaller or bigger maps require another number). And the Spawners will not all show up at once. There will be far more of them appearing than you actually need to destroy to get through the HQ protective dome. And the turn before a spawner shows up in a sector you will get a warning in that sector about a Spawner coming soon.
So in my game the Void HQ showed up in the most butt-end asshole place on the map, way the hell deep in a bunch of lava mountains that would take me something like 8 turns to travel to from my nearest city. But the spawners showed up all over the damn place.
All remaining players had to choose whether to side with or against the void, and those that sided WITH them formed an alliance, and those that sided AGAINST them were pretty much left in every-man-for-himself mode. Although the AI was quite pro-active in destroying every Spawner they could find near their own borders, they were a little slow about it at first and I was the one that had to kill the first 4 Spawners to breakdown the protective dome at Void HQ.
But I did manage to kill the 4, and I started heading towards the ass end of the world to take out Void HQ. Now, while I was travelling, spawners were still showing up around the world every couple turns. And with these spawners came stacks of new Voidbringers that attacked everything they could find.
Now, I had all my forces far from my own territory because I had read that once I defeat the Voidbringers I win the game… so I more or less abandoned all my colonies for the journey. I was counting on the Void’s defeat to bring me victory, and not worried too much about losing everything in the process. Thankfully I had saved up enough energy to fund my armies for a few turns so I didn’t have to worry about my dwindling income as I lost territory.
But it turns out that victory is not the only option (excuse the shitty off-screen photo taken with my tablet where I play on my Xbox):
Even though I COULD claim victory here, if I wanted to continue my campaign to win my own way, I was free to do that too. Well, I hadn’t planned on that being an option, so because I had already sacrificed so much territory to defeat them and because building everything back up felt like too much work, AND because I wanted to claim this victory condition for the first time in the hopes of getting an Xbox Achievement (there wasn’t), I decided to call it a win here and cash in my chips (I think it was turn 91).
All in all I really enjoy this new victory condition, but it flips the game over on its head quite significantly when it activates, so it’s up to you to decide when or if you want invasions turned on when setting up a skirmish game.
One other thing of note: Like I mentioned earlier, some players will join the void, some will not. The ones that join are immediately all allied. The ones that do not join aren’t forcibly allied together. They can still war with eachother, sabotage eachother, and pursue their own avenues of victory completely unrelated to the Voidbringers (if they can actually manage to do that while under constant assault from waves of the Void spawners).
in my game, I still had to bribe my way into the good graces of the people that stood against the void, and they each neared (domination) victory by wiping eachother out and claiming eachother’s land. I don’t know if AI players can defeat the Voidbringer HQ and claim a victory that way (I didn’t give them a chance), but I do know that when I claimed victory all other players, whether friend or foe of the void, were recorded as losers.
