Best way to deal with Spire Shield Sphere guard post

[Ramsar]

I'm currently in a difficulty 7 game (5.0) against the tank and the one-way doormaster (how I hate the latter, especially when he has an adjacent planet with a raid engine on it). I'm encountering a lot of planets with the Spire shield sphere guard post (which has +300 million health) and I have difficulties dealing with these as it takes ages to take them down (even with bombers mark I-IV,  bomber and siege starships). Is there any strategy to take these down efficiently or must I resort to "give it all I've got and just sit back and wait"?

[BobTheJanitor]

If you have cleaned up the rest of the planet enough to make it safe for building, you can build your own command station (this assumes you've already killed the AI comm station of course) which will make all the guard posts go away.

[fiorenzospa]

If you have cleaned up the rest of the planet enough to make it safe for building, you can build your own command station (this assumes you've already killed the AI comm station of course) which will make all the guard posts go away.

It seems it doesn't work for me... I built my command station and the posts are still there ... firing perfectly...

[BobTheJanitor]

Yeah I'm not actually clear on the rules for that either... I thought it worked all the time but now that I've tried it out that seems to not be the case. I don't know what determines if a guard posts goes away or if it stays.

[DeBunny]

From what I've noticed as I've played (I'm relatively new to this however) only wormhole guard-posts go away when you build a command center on a planet.
Any of the guard posts that would normally influence an AI Eye (best way to describe it?) remain as nuisances.

Again, as far as I can tell. Newbie 2 cents must be taken with a grain of salt.

[Shrugging Khan]

Drive a Golem on top of the thing.

Otherwise just mass bombers as per usual procedure.

Edit: If you can't afford to deploy all your bombers for that, just take half of them and let them fire until the sun goes dark. The thing will go down eventually, as long as it remains under fire.

[Entrenched Homperson]

Pick chameleons as your starting ship. 

[Ramsar]

From what I've noticed as I've played (I'm relatively new to this however) only wormhole guard-posts go away when you build a command center on a planet.
Any of the guard posts that would normally influence an AI Eye (best way to describe it?) remain as nuisances.

Killing the AI command centre indeed only destroys the wormhole guard posts. Building a command centre of your own then destroys the remaining guard posts.

[fiorenzospa]

From what I've noticed as I've played (I'm relatively new to this however) only wormhole guard-posts go away when you build a command center on a planet.
Any of the guard posts that would normally influence an AI Eye (best way to describe it?) remain as nuisances.

Killing the AI command centre indeed only destroys the wormhole guard posts. Building a command centre of your own then destroys the remaining guard posts.

It doesn't seem to work like this.
But if you kill CC on connected planets you can cut support and posts go off.

[Ramsar]

Do you have experienced a case in which they didn't automatically self-destruct when you built a command station on the planet?

These are the steps I took in my current game to kill some shield sphere guard posts without directly attacking them:
1a) Destroy the other guard posts
1b) Kill whole/the majority of the enemy fleet
2) Destroy the enemy command station => now the wormhole guard posts self-destruct
3) Build a (military) command station => now the remaining guard posts (?and normal force fields?) self-destruct

(I'll test this again tomorrow if I find the time)

[Red Spot]

I think .. think .. it may be that when it is the last post it gets removed when you take the planet, having 2 on a planet might break some of that logic .. if that is the logic in play here.