Description | The reason I suspect the Scourge is twofold. First, I'm not sure if a late spawning Nanocaust gets bonuses to counteract any Scourge expansion, which as I understand does happen with the standard AI via an AIP based scaling of the Nanocaust's initial strength. The second is that the Scourge seem to be immune to Nanocaustification. Now I'm not sure if this is actually the case, nor if it's the game working as designed, but given that the Scourge tend to become a fairly significant internal police force for the AI after a few hours, and constitute a disproportional large, powerful, and aggressive force, they are likely to be the primary, or at least co-equal with the Sentinels, opposition to the Nanocaust.
I should note that I've been playing some pretty non-standard games with very powerful factions, but my expectation would be that the Nanocaust can keep pace with or even overtake them once it shows up, and become and even bigger threat itself. Instead they seem to expand by a few worlds before getting bogged down and either contained or outright eliminated by AI forces.
Also, more critically, allied Scourge will kill the Nanocaust hive, even if you are in the middle of hacking it and allies destroy command stations is turned off. I presume this goes for other allied factions as well, which is pretty frustrating. I've also seen them blow up the Super-Terminal's command station, so maybe some capacity for players to order allies with "do not kill" flagging is required to eliminate this. |
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