And the scary part is, I think I liked it.

Backstory: Been playing a game off-and-on for about a month, on StarTech Captain Difficulty with 10x crisis strength. Gigastructural Engineering, Startech, and ESC3.0 are my only major mods that alter tech tree or endgame stuff (I have a few more cosmetic things that won't come up in this discussion as well). I was comfortably dominant over my galaxy since about 2300, and was mostly resting on my laurels and letting the clock tick while I watched videos on youtube.

My empire had what I considered healthy production numbers- 4k a month in alloy production, 6k for food and minerals and energy. Sometimes I capped out on resources and would start a new megastructure, or trade resources around to stockpile rarer components. I had a BIG Vat and several major shipyards to reinforce all my main battle fleets (that hit about 800k each without even bothering to build planetcraft).

So far, nothing had really threatened me- even on 10x strength, the Unbidden proved to be a pushover after two centuries of snowballing. The most combat action my admirals saw in this game was when I decided to go genocide a hivemind with a global pacifier- because I wanted to lower the galactic pop count and improve my game's performance. At this point I was mostly just screwing around and enjoying my sim-city goal of slowly relocating all my pops to a Penrose Ring World and a couple of other specialty worlds.

And then the Blokkats showed up. With main fleets around 2.7M and scout fleets listed as 550k. Big numbers, but manageable if I stack all my fleets together. And a whole lot of event text (that I quite enjoyed, but am not getting into here). Whoo boy, was I wrong.

Apparently, those numbers I quoted above are AFTER the fleet strength had stack-overflowed three or four times. Because 5 of my fleets stacked on top of each other (about 4M fleet strength) were utterly annihilated by one Blokkat Scout Fleet that advanced into my space. I didn't even get through their shields.

Their main system ship (that's invincible until the end of some giant research chain) is a long way away still, and I figure I have some time to work with. But after having basically been roleplaying as a Fallen Empire for half this game, I feel a slight terror at what I'm walking into.

Having never reached lategame with Gigastructures before, I would love some advice on how not to die. I'm weirdly attached to my Divine Empire, and don't want to give up just yet. But I have NO idea how I can win this fight. Any advice?

Edit: Update. Just sank the first of the dismantlers using a nearly-literal Zerg Rush. I have a BIG Vat producing non-stop waves of fodder for escorts, and am tying up all 3 of my megastructure build slots ramping up planetcraft. It may actually be enough to slow them down while I work through the research project related to this crisis.

Update 2: Didn't realize they would consistently replace a dismantler and escort fleet after only 6 months. That's still faster than I can destroy their ships. And that, plus the harvester's decision to cut right around to my core world, means I won't have time to finish the shield-piercer thing, or get a bigger systemcraft up. GG