Okay. This game has gone sideways on me.
I have my corner of the universe absolutely locked down and the AI can't touch me, but I can't touch the AI either.
A wave of bombers spearheaded by 4 Shadow Frigates just hit and while I lost a few turrets the wave was not an actual threat.
However, I have taken too long to set this up. The worlds on alert around me have reinforced to the point that the AI is putting ships in carriers on those planets due to ship count getting too high.
Also, I went for a starship fleet. However it looks like starships have a variable effectiveness as compared to fleet ships. When there are lower amounts of enemies the high health of the starship allows it to shine as they never die even if their raw DPS is not as high.
However, as the count of enemy AI ships goes up and they reach the critical mass to start killing your starships despite their high health, starships just don't have the dps to be as effective as fleet ships.
I am so far past this critical mass at this point that even my 40 ship strong starship fleet has about a 15 second life expectancy when I warp into an enemy system.
To give the AI another counter to my starships is that one of the AIs has Gravity Drains (the ones that slow a ship when hit). Most of my starship fleet is immune to this as they have shields and it does not matter if the shield module gets slowed as the slow is not transferred to the starship.
However, my plasma siege are affected by the slow and all it takes is a single hit. When hit, the plasma siege slows down and falls behind where it is quickly destroyed by the AI ships chasing my starship fleet ball.
I'm going to turn to warheads and see if I can break out here with an acceptable AIP cost but I'm pretty locked into my corner of the galaxy at the moment.
D.
