My 800 star game is locked in a brutal conflict with the Contingency. I got lucky and only had 1 of the Purge Worlds appear in my territory (out of 4), which I managed to destroy with major losses. I don’t think I would have been successful had I not taken the Defender of the Galaxy perk for the +50% damage to Endgame Crisis enemies.
They appeared right after I destroyed the Awakened Empire, and in retrospect I should have maybe waited on conquering them so they could help with the struggle. The prospect that three Purge Worlds are still churning out fleets is daunting.
I’m having a blast (I haven’t even seen an Endgame Crisis in over a real life year, the game in 1.9 was almost impossible not to have won a century before they were set to begin triggering), but I do have a complaint. I hate, hate HATE the seemingly arbitrary hard-caps. 3 Titans, 50 Starbases, and 1000 Fleet Cap. The Titan one is an absolute hard-cap, unless there is a rare tech I haven’t seen. The starbase and fleet caps can be gone over, but you start paying absurd penalties if you go much beyond them.
I feel like the game would benefit greatly from the removal of these caps, and giving a Titan cap depending on your fleet cap (I’d say ever 200 fleet cap = 1 Titan is about right). While I’m on the subject, I think the game could also use a 20-30% increase in sublight travel speed across the board, as the travel times are pretty crazy; and I say that with Jump Drives, 8 gateways and several wormholes in my Empire.
Also, as a PSA: don’t start a Determined Exterminator or Devouring Swarm run until the hotfix next week, they are badly bugged.