What is there against snipers and deflectors?
I'd use counter-sniper turrets to protect your ships from enemy snipers (if you just need to protect a small area), or I'd use sniper turrets to take out their snipers. Neither requires a knowledge upgrade, and you can give explicit targets to your turrets (sniper or otherwise).
For deflectors, cruisers or other things like that should work fine. Basically anything but lasers should do the trick, as long as it has a long range (like cruisers) or can get in there quickly (like fighers or other smaller crafts -- I don't remember off the top of my head exactly what deflectors are weak against, but the in-game game hover will tell you).
You might say they don't do a lot of damage, but i have seen snipers decimate my 500 ship fleet to 300 just while i was research raiding!
Yeah, they'll definitely whittle you down over time. Sniper turrets are much stronger than most snipers, though, so using the sniper turrets can really put a stop to that.
The only way for me to even destroy my targets (spec ops posts/gates for now) is to send in massive amount of MK1 and MK2 tanks (god are those heavy hitters) and snipers seem to do little against them, usually at least my mk2 tanks come to the gate and spec ops.. but getting them *back* is impossible ;p
Bombers should also work -- they are faster, but have less health. Or if you have some cloaked ships, sometimes you can sneak those in and take out a warp gate before they know what hit them. Usually you want to take out specops posts with cruisers rather than bombers, though, or else the bombers will get smacked around by the specops posts. You could probably also you a lightning missile on those if you are careful and lucky with them, but that increases the AI progress a bit so might not be best.
Ehm, help? What to best do against the Fortify type AI ? DIF 7
It really depends on the map, but you might also consider trying to hop over some planets with transports or just by flooding through with a lot of ships. Usually there is a weaker selection of planets behind the harder "crust" right closest to you, but not always.
Also, does the handicap also change my damage values? Because i was playing at 50% recently and it all seemed to die much faster than now (the anti-blob function does the rest ! ~.~)
Nope, the damage values are not affected by handicaps. The handicaps affect resource inflows only. It's possible the ship mix just isn't as good now, or maybe you were playing on Fast & Dangerous before, and Normal mode now? But yeah, without your blob tactic that exploitative strategy's lack might make things seem harder (like they normally should), too.
Also my first ADV Lab gave me.. Snipers.. i rolled on the floor - Now i can do a sniper battle but sadly that doesn't really help me much (they die like flies ;p) and they do nothing against spec ops posts ;p
Actually, that can be really helpful. If you outnumber their snipers and target them individually, you can really decimate them. Especially if you have higher-level snipers than them. Also, you can hit stuff under force fields with snipers (or sniper turrets), so that can be a
huge advantage against a fortified foe.
Just scrolled a bit up - That answered the rest of my questions already ;p
Always nice.