What's the counter to an AI starship swarm?

[AlexV]

Can anyone tell me what the best way to deal with large numbers of defending AI starships is?

I'm at the end of a 14 hour campaign (AI level 5, 50 planet map), I'm at the last AI's homeworld, and the rest of my empire is reasonably well defended - at hour 10ish I fought off at 2k ship cross planet attack and rebuilt the damaged areas.

I've destroyed all of the core guard posts, and used leech starships to steal a whole bunch of core ships, and destroyed the others. I sent a couple of raid starships to ping the command station and tempt all the core ships defending that to attack me on my planet and I can reclaim or destroy all those. Now it only gets Mark IV reinforcement ships there (for reasons that aren't clear to me), so the occasional nuke takes care of them.

However, the AI seems to have got wise to these strategies, and the planet is now defended by 6 spire and 11 zenith starships that can't be nuked or tempted to follow me individually.

So, what kills starships in bulk? I've got a captured anti-starship arachnid fab, but the full cap of those, plus a whole bunch of assorted ships up to mark IV, plus the captured core ships (mostly drones) still get wiped out by the starship swarm all reinforcing each other.

[RCIX]

Dreads, fighters, and anti-starships do well.

[x4000]

Dreadnoughts being a line of starships you can unlock, fighters including all the smaller fighter variants, and anti-starship Arachnida being something that you can only find from captuable fabricators sometimes scattered about the galaxy. Lightning warheads can also do well against starships if you can catch a whole cluster of the at once, but that can be tough.

[allmybase]

Starships follow transports blindly at unlimited range. Send in some transports, attract their attention, and run off to the edges of the map, then kill the command station when they're too far away.

[AlexV]

anti-starship Arachnida being something that you can only find from captuable fabricators

Yes, I had those. They didn't seem to that specially effective, but it's hard to tell. I didn't have dreadnoughts, though - I'll unlock and give them a go and see how they do.

Send in some transports, attract their attention, and run off to the edges of the map

Strangely, they didn't seem that interested in the transport ship. They *loved* the mobile repair station, though, and it's cheaper than a transport. Thanks!

[Doddler]

I think the 'attraction' to transports was fixed, the AI seems less willing to abandon posts to attack them and they seem to ignore them when attacking now.

Fighters though really do wreck starships.  If you have a full complement of Mk 1~4 fighters, you can probably drop even the largest starships in a few quick volleys.

Edit: According to the wiki, Zenith starships use missle type ammunition.  It might be feasible to unlock anti-missile defenses to block them from taking out important structures, and then concentrate on the Spires first.

[RCIX]

Dreadnoughts being a line of starships you can unlock, fighters including all the smaller fighter variants, and anti-starship Arachnida being something that you can only find from captuable fabricators sometimes scattered about the galaxy. Lightning warheads can also do well against starships if you can catch a whole cluster of the at once, but that can be tough.

Sorry about that for some reason i assume everyone who posts here is an AI war nut who's been playing for a year or so

[x4000]

No worries.