I cannot fight off these gigantic fleets. My big fleets have 1500 points, their's have 2700 and they just steamroll over me.



I'll try again, but damn.



The thing is I just don't see how throwing more resources behind military is going to help. They just have SUCH FREAKING HUGE FLEETS.

The question you really need to answer first is what kind of ships is the AI throwing at you? Are they many small destroyers, large dreadnaughts, something in the middle? If you ever want to be able to take an enemy on, i would suggest larger ships with more defenses and weapons rather than a large amount of smaller ships that may be hard to replace depending on your industry or dust. Plus you need to always have at least one dedicated combat hero, they can help you so much I cannot stress how important it is to have one. On the other hand, if you just want to deal with giant AI fleets, I would suggest making a fleet of dreadnaughts with tons of defenses and repair modules. Then just use them to blockade a system that the AI keep invading your empire from and all enemy ships from there should be cut off, with the AI either unable or unwilling to attack and you with no enemy reinforcements to worry about, can mop up the remaining enemy fleets inside your borders. Also, you should probably research techs giving you more command points, that will definitely help you keep up with the AI in terms of fighting power.

Adventurer_Blitz wrote:
...Plus you need to always have at least one dedicated combat hero, they can help you so much I cannot stress how important it is to have one...

+1



The battle hero is the key to the whole bag of goodies.



Also, don't try to go toe to toe with the enemy at first. Take Adventurer_Blitz's advice and use a chokepoint to stop them. If you have enough real estate on the map, the chokepoint should be a system that you own. That way, if it's a full colony, you can repair there. Even if it's just an outpost, it'll become a colony as long as you don't let the enemy start an invasion. Blockade is ok, but not invasion.



If you put several fleets on a chokepoint, the enemy might not attack and you can hold them off until the cows come home.

I'm so going to have a combat hero next game...

Is it common for the AI to upgrade their ships and suddenly change weapons?

of can you see what they have and focus on that.

One thing that helps fight off enemy fleets, is having a good fleet composition. What I mean by this is to have different ships in your fleet doing different things. My strategy as of late is to use only small ships, mainly because it makes it harder on the enemy, having to focus on more ships. I also build a ship that is all weapons, usually LR Kinetics, this allows you to rip through the enemy much faster. Kinetics fire 4 times during each phase. Then I also build a ship that is all defense, usually I try to balance out the three. So now you have ships that are ready to defend and others to do the destroying. With this setup you need to make sure to change your formation, before the battle, to defensive formation. In the early game you can easily get your fleet total CP up to 12, which means you can have 8 weapon ships and 4 defensive ships. This is usually a great composition for most of the game, later you will want to add in some battle fighters to keep the enemies bombers and fighters from destroying your all weapon ships. Also once you get a bunch of the support modules, like engine, repair, and others, you can build what I call a "commander ship". This ship is just there to load up on support modules, because the bonuses will apply to the whole fleet, so this one ship will act as mini hero on your fleet. Also one last thing, make sure that you have at least 2 of your first three hero's be fleet commanders. If you want to do a lot of fighting, the pilot, commander, and adventurer are your best friends. I usually only have one corporate/admin guy the whole game, to sit on my most productive system, to pump out my fleets. Use the hero's for every fleet you can.

If you are following a defense ship strategy, you might as well scrap the fighters (as you need a few of them to be effective and small ships can only have 1 or 2 per ship, plus it wastes tonnage in some cases) because point defense will defend your ships from fighters very well.

I play my games on Endless difficulty and I would agree that having a lot of fighters in your fleet can be a waste of tonnage, but at the point when you need them, around turn 125-150, it can really help keep your fleets intact. I tend to always use the defensive formation in this setup and I have noticed that when the enemy uses bombers the only defense is battle ready fighters. If I don't have fighters on my defense ships, the bombers tend to attack my weapon heavy ships and will wipe them in the first battle phase. So it maybe a waste of tonnage but necessary to keep all my weapons ships alive and by that point in the game you should have relatively good defenses and weapons. It is roughly 30 tonnage forfeited on my defense ships but that is what they are there to do, defend.

Have you ever used point defense? Here is an excerpt from the wiki:



Defending against fighters and bombers can occur in two ways:



By using Battle-Oriented Fighters

By using Point Defenses

The first option has already been covered, so we will go into the second option. Point

defenses can be researched relatively early in the Galactic Warfare tech tree, weigh ten tonnes, and require one special slot. These defenses act as AA Flak Turrets that shoot at attacking Strike Craft. The damage done to the Fighters/Bombers is directly correlated with the defensive level of the Capital Ship on which the defenses are based. I.e. A ship with many defenses (Flak, Shields, and Deflectors) Shoots down Strike Craft faster than a Ship with few of these defenses. (The specific damage formula will be added later)

Rancor wrote:
I'm so going to have a combat hero next game...

Is it common for the AI to upgrade their ships and suddenly change weapons?

of can you see what they have and focus on that.

Yes, very much so. Maybe not so much upgrading existing ships but updating the design so newer ships will have different weapon types. The AI tends to focus on just one weapon type depending on what defenses it encounters, and will also focus on countering your strongest weapon type with defense modules.

Idaho wrote:
I cannot fight off these gigantic fleets. My big fleets have 1500 points, their's have 2700 and they just steamroll over me.

This huge gap in power should not happen, in fact, unless at a high difficulty level, you should have the advantage in points over them. How do you design your ships? Do you both researching +command point tech to get bigger fleets or are you outnumbered?

Finally winning some battles. A hero makes all the difference in the world.



Also, since I'm playing as the Amoeba I knew where the AI's homeworld was and I blocked him with colonies. He has to funnel his fleets through one of my two systems where I have fleets. It's a war of attrition and he isn't going to make it.



Now I need to build some invader ships....

Idaho wrote:
Finally winning some battles. A hero makes all the difference in the world.



Also, since I'm playing as the Amoeba I knew where the AI's homeworld was and I blocked him with colonies. He has to funnel his fleets through one of my two systems where I have fleets. It's a war of attrition and he isn't going to make it.



Now I need to build some invader ships....

There you go. Once you learn the finer points of this game (and believe me, there are plenty if you chose to play vs min/max'ing the game) you'll get better. It just takes some time is all.