List of fleet tactics and overall strategies

[Argonic]

Big Blob of Doom
This works best when you have resources coming in at a good rate; Move all your starships and fleetships into one huge fleet and bind them to ctrl-1, then blindly send them onto an enemy planet you want to clear. Upon entering the enemy planet, put the fleet on FRD and pay it no more attention; your factories should soon be churning you out a replacement doom blob.

In the rare case that your doom blob manages to clear the planet without your attention, roll all your reinforcements into the system and rebuild the doom blob fleet back up to its original strength and roll it into another system. Down this road, gaurenteed victory awaits!

I use a strat called The Blob. It consists of every Mobile shield gen you can make (if you have that unit), engies, and everything else you can pile into it. Send them to a planet and group move them from post to post. Only time i ever really lost units is to Ion cannons. Its a mobile 160million or so shield that is constantly getting repaired. Just stop the blob in one place if you start to get hit hard and the engies will constantly repair the shield gens.

[chemical_art]

Gravity turrets and beam cannons  intercept waves well. Since the wave comes from a single point, they can remain very close together for long periods of time allowing the cannons to cause full damage. Lightning turrets and other area attacks can use gravity turrets as well.

[Bleek]

I've just seen this topic, very cool, not sure I'm going to be able to add to it though! 

[chemical_art]

Military MK III stations as defensive tachyon warheads.

Finding rogue cloaked units on own planets is annoying. One either sweeps with units taking up precious micro or spends AIP to get the process done quickly. But with a MK III station you can be quick and AIP free. If at least one building slot is saved, a planet with an annoying amount of cloacked units can be upgraded to a MK III station temporarily so that all cloaked units can be exposed and removed. Once done, the station can go to its previous state.

[chemical_art]

Turret niches:

These assume all turrets are available if desired.

To help provide a concise idea of a turret's strengths, and how to use it.

Basic: Anti missile frigate, general purpose cheap turret (in both resources and knowledge). Place between wormhole and command station.

Sniper: Maximum range instant damage. Super effective against raid starships, bombers, and melee craft. All these vessels somehow defeats your shield. Place on outskirts, unless using a single shield defense, then maybe place just outside the shield.

Spider:  Like sniper, so you can double your cap of that function. Also able to neutralize most fleetships in a single shot through engine damage. Due to cost, would suggest to always keeping them on outskirts for protection.

MLRS: Anti-fighter. Anti melee.  Can outrange most things. Ineffective against armored vessels.

Missile turret: Anti-bomber. Wide range of damage. Effective vs raid starships. Usually can cover the whole distance between wormhole and station with plenty of room to avoid passing attacks.

Laser: Anti-bomber. Anti-starship. Place where the enemy will be a while. Like wormholes or around station bubble.

Lightning: Localized attrition. The harder and longer the fight, the stronger they get. Always combine with gravity turrets or tractors.

Flak turrets: Short range. I use them exclusively at wormhole entries. The text doesn't explictly state it but I think they have AoE like grenades, or maybe an even shorter ranged version of it. with AoE they get much more powerful and can dispatch some units themselves.

Counter sniper: Never have used them. Ever.

Tractors: Can be placed at wormholes if mines aren't used much. Doesn't lose effectiveness under a shield if it can get units from outside bubble.

Gravity: Effective regardless of numbers, making it very handy as difficulty numbers go above 8. Doesn't lose effectiveness under a shield at all. Higher marks may provide a stronger benefit then first indicated as it's power increase is not as linear as other turrets.

Tachyons: I always invest in military stations, making these redundant. Can't comment.

Heavy beam cannons: Very effective if combined with gravity or tractors so as to maintain "bunchiness". Not enough in caps for my taste on their own, but if doing fallen spire then highly recommended.

[Clearbeard]

Sniper: Maximum range instant damage. Super effective against raid starships, bombers, and melee craft. All these vessels somehow defeats your shield. Place on outskirts, unless using a single shield defense, then maybe place just outside the shield.

Gravity: Effective regardless of numbers, making it very handy as difficulty numbers go above 8. Doesn't lose effectiveness under a shield at all. Higher marks may provide a stronger benefit then first indicated as it's power increase is not as linear as other turrets.

Tachyons: I always invest in military stations, making these redundant. Can't comment.

I've seen a few comments suggesting sniper turrets are good against raid starships.  Thing is, don't raid starships have good radar dampening, meaning sniper turrets seldom can engage them, especially if placed on the far edges of the system?

As for gravity turrets, higher marks are definitely improvements, with max speed reduced from 8-->4-->2 with each level, giving you 2 or 4 times as long to kill with your longer ranged turrets and ships.  Since relatively few ship types ignore grav effects compared to tractor beams, they're doubly useful.

Cloaked tachyons are good, regular ones, meh.  The level 1 ones are low hp and tend to get targeted early, but the cloaked version are superb.  Personally I prefer the stealth tachyon/logistics/grav turret combo to military stations, which are just too chaotic for my tastes.

[chemical_art]

I've seen a few comments suggesting sniper turrets are good against raid starships.  Thing is, don't raid starships have good radar dampening, meaning sniper turrets seldom can engage them, especially if placed on the far edges of the system?

Raiders don't have radar dampening unless this has been added. But even if they do sniper turrets ignore it readily.

Snipers are best because they both pierce the raiders very heavy armor and can't be outrun in system.

[aordy001]

yess Ok Thank For you SoMuch info! 

[Nodor]

Turret niches:
Counter sniper: Never have used them. Ever.

Counter sniper: This is how to shut down Sentinal Frigates and Sniper guardians.  Place 1 on important command stations and in turret balls.

[Rainbowsand]

How to clear hundreds of high mark fleets in ai system with no unlocks
Raid tachyons ions and snipers
Sneak in cloaker ship, mobile builder, raider ship and reclamators
Have raider aggro everything and kite it to the edge
Build lots of mark 1 turrets and engies on the opposite, and tractors in the middle
While they slaughter these build a lots on the opposite
Rebuilders
Repeat
If you can get some sort of mass engine dmg in it improves efficiency

How to get huge high mark fleets with no unlocks
Abuse leech starships and mercenary parasites and dont suicide
Hack a mark 5 fabricator

[undefind]

I am pretty new at this game, but I will share something that has worked very well for me.

Want to clear a high level planet without losing too many ships?

Set up:

1. Get ship caps for everything you have if possible (you need as many starships as you can get). You need a few Leech starships preferably at least MK II and as many leech type ships as you can. Riot ships fitted with long range guns and force fields are also recommended
2. Enter AI planet and select all ships and blob them together
3. Move the ships around the map with group move (Hold "G") marking a path that avoids incoming ships (if things get dicey and you notice your starships are all that's left, get your starships out of there. They take far too much time to rebuild.)

The result is a massive blob that engages a minimal amount of ships by avoiding the majority of other ships on the map. The leech type ships convert the frontline AI ships (the AI tends to halt in the face of these newly converted ships and targets them) and the Riot ships halt others. This makes it easier to place more distance between you and the massive amount of AI ships on the map.  If it works right, you can move your blob right on top of these ships to let your short range clean up the mess. Rinse/repeat.

This of course does not work when you are largely outclassed however, it does work on AI homeworlds exceptionally well and I like to use this strategy as an alternative to beachheading especially if deepstriking.

WARNING!!! I just started a difficulty 8 map for the first time and have yet to try this out on that difficulty, but it works very well for the beginner scripts

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, kiting + riots can be amazing.  Emphasizing parasite support is a smart idea too.  I imagine if you toss in a mobile space dock that could help, though probably only if the enemies leave you alone for a few seconds here and there (which may be unlikely).

You may find that the overall tactic doesn't work nearly as well in games where the AI gets Spire Blade Spawners, Tackle Drone Launchers, Zenith Bombards, etc.  True sniper stuff would hurt too, but you have a ready counter in the form of scout starships and so on.  And in theory you can counter the SBS's and TDL's with mkIII Riots with grav modules.

Then of course there's the Speed Racer AI Type, but you can't win 'em all

[undefind]

Yea, kiting + riots can be amazing.  Emphasizing parasite support is a smart idea too.  I imagine if you toss in a mobile space dock that could help, though probably only if the enemies leave you alone for a few seconds here and there (which may be unlikely).

You may find that the overall tactic doesn't work nearly as well in games where the AI gets Spire Blade Spawners, Tackle Drone Launchers, Zenith Bombards, etc.  True sniper stuff would hurt too, but you have a ready counter in the form of scout starships and so on.  And in theory you can counter the SBS's and TDL's with mkIII Riots with grav modules.

Then of course there's the Speed Racer AI Type, but you can't win 'em all

Definitely not a sound tactic I agree, but given the right circumstances it does fantastic. I just tried it with Attritioners and Mini Forts. Worked AMAZINGLY! Attritioners for added damage and Forts for the healing (good tactic is to hold your ground until the 30 or so engineers finish the forts and you clear out the initial masses. Can get the forts up in just a few seconds). Then of course I got whooped on by 3 Exo waves, normal wave, and threat waves at the same time. Pretty sure the AI timed all those waves exactly to the tee. Man, this AI is ruthless...

[Malkiel]

Fleet tactics are very dependant on unlocks for me. Particular favorites are:

Translocator ball sitting on path to my station dispersing enemy fleet
Same ball splitting up to cover all wormholes when they decide it's time to leave.

neinzul only space dock set to send all production into an enemy world on FRD- effective out to 2 hops from your territory.
If used adjacent to your territory, they will seek to use the healing thing when they get below 30%, conserving strength.

Spirecraft maw: keeps it's most dangerous attack while hiding under a human forcefield.

raid engine wormhole so close to your military station that the knockback puts the enemy behind it? keep a few dozen merc parasites there on attack move so they have someone to play with! A zenith medic frigate really helps here, as do paralyzers.

Protector Starship with the anti energy weapon piece to protect a hardened force field from bombers. If using a logi station on the front lines, go anti laser instead for raid starships!

Lightning torpedo Frigate + cloaker starship.. the frigates can't be cloaked, but the torpedoes can! Great when jumping in and out of a wormhole.

Speed building a MKIV HBC to clear nearly any amount of enemies so long as you have supply. (cleared 62 riot starships with this earlier today)

Sick of their etherjet kidnappings? Riot starship with shield and tractors, leech starships and parasites if you have them on your side of wormhole. Let panic ensue!

Setting auto kite to 1000 really does help (from Kahuna's guide) but reserve a control group for when you are chasing down a target (like a combat carrier guardian) and need the ships to have it turned off quickly lest shots get wasted on drones because ship is just out of range when you go to fire.

And my personal favorite: Using the Exodian Blade to cover a planet during the showdown devices, followed by ambushing the motherships with it right before they pass through a wormhole.

Mal's dirtiest trick: putting a few needler turret mark 2 in front of my static defenses to soak the initial enemy salvo. No other turret line gets 200*tier for armor, this will greatly boost survivability of even tractor turrets.

[carldong]

You can actually kite many slow ships with a Fortress or Mini Fortress. Just be careful don't get caught by a blob of Bombers. Fortresses heal themselves even if the countdown is on: it just cannot repair other ships.

I use this tactic to clean up a planet with 400-500 threat in supply before I take it. Bring in 40 MkIII engineers and some Mobile Builders in a cloaked transport, and you should be able to put down a Fortress MkI under 10 seconds.

Beachhead if you like, build Spider Turrets if you like, just be careful of Bombers.

Works on 7 Diff Turtle MkIV world.

Notice: Mini Fortresses actually does 10 times more damage to Bombers than regular ones because they don't suffer that 0.01 multiplier. But it is still so pathetic that you'd better use them as a big MkI engineer that doesn't kill itself charging into the enemy trying to fix your Minefiled that fixes your giant 200-turret-blob at once. Treat its DPS as a bonus to its repairing ability: it is under Support tab anyway.

MFs are good if you have a huge combat engineering team like I do. OR when the AI gets Spire Maw. Lots of times my eng's just get eaten by them so I have to escort my Eng team. When I only have MkII engineers, I spare 20 of them into my combat eng team. 40 MkIIIs if I have them unlocked. Therefore, the majority of my planets only get one engineer to build stuff. I put MF's on frontline worlds, to fix turrets. Actually turrets do last longer, and Mini-Forts are seldom targeted by enemy (provided you keep the Bombers far far away).

Last note: A beachhead consisting of two MF, some gravs, some spiders, some Missiles, does not alert adjacent planets unless you put >49 of them there. You still get the one-cap-turret-without-multiplier DPS from Mini Forts, gathers scout intel, annoys the enemy, and not alerting them too much. A regular fortress by itself will alert adjacent planets, though. _{Of course, that beachhead is not particularly strong. Don't even try that on higher mark worlds. But they do spares you some engineers}