I was simply curious what is the opinion of forum people on this aspect of the game (Awakened Fallen Empires), and if my issues with them are my personal views or do many people share them.



Personally I like the idea of AFEs but I honestly still consider for them to be

a) Really overpowered in comparision with... basically everything else in the game

b) Very uncomfortable to have in your game sessions - and by that I mean, they bring insane amount of bloated fleets (enormous amounts of ships) which really mess up the game's performance and general management comfort.



Okay, I understand that these are "centuries/thousands of year long ancient space empires" and are supposed to be powerful and major threats by the lategame, along crises. I still think they are too strong - firstly, I think they are too close to the power of Crisis Invaders (not to mention they often surpass them), and secondly, I dislike how basically all AI regular empires are basically hopeless against them, and how once AFEs appear half of galaxy's development and history may as well go to garbage disposal, as nothing can stop them anyway beyond player's intervention.



And that player's intervention is, at least for me, really frustrating one - AFEs field so insanely huge fleets you need a lot of pain, micromanagement and plain CPU efficiency just to bring equal numbers of ships (btw I greatly support the initiative occasionally appearing on these forums "Please reduce lategame ship numbers in galaxies by like 3-5 times, there are too many ships overall). I honestly think AEs should be toned down a bit, to not roflstomp the galaxy that much. This can be achieved in many ways, from boosting regular empires AI response to Awakenings, straight nerfing AEs, or adding some Achilles Heel to the Fallen Empires.

Look, every type of powerhouse in the game has its weakness:

- Regular empires have the greatest fredom and lategame potential, but can be easily destroyed on their slow path to power.

- Lategame crises are powerful and get their power "out of thin air", but you can: prepare for them, exploit their weaknesses such as very specialized ship designs, get echs and events designed to counter them, snipe down their portals as they have no regular stable economies etc

- Fallen Empires are, well, powerful as **** from the very beginning, but passive and static so you can slowly prepare for taking them down



I am not sure if Awakened Fallen Empires have any weak point. They appear semi "randomly" but once they do they combine insane tech and firepower of FEs, freedom of regular empires and lack of specialized countermeasures akin to crisis ones unless I have missed something. You cannot deal with them in any way other than out-doomstacking them. And that's something I don't like. I'd love AFEs getting expanded and by the way receiving some sort of Achilles Heel, such as the possibility of declining back to "fallen" status, generally losing morale, leaving galaxy, being more "decadent and delicate" than regular empires etc.



What do you think on that subject?