How to deal with Fortresses

[Wingflier]

The same thing keeps happening to me when I play single player against the AI on normal difficulty.

I have no trouble taking the smaller planets, but as soon as I go to assault a larger type planet with several spire starships and usually at least a Fortress or two, all my fighters get demolished almost INSTANTLY.  These are Tier 2, 3, and 4 fighters by the way.

My bombers survive practically forever, but then I have no means to destroy the remaining Starships, which just slowly but surely eat away my fleet.  Occasionally, I can get my hands on some Anti-Starship Arachnids, but even 29 of these take a long time to kill a Spire Starship or Zenith Starship.  I just have no idea how to assault a heavily defended planet without getting my fighters destroyed almost instantly and then getting molested by everything else.

Are fighters not worth using late game?  If so, what do I need to bring to take out those pesky Starships?

edit:  To clarify, it's typically the Fortresses and Plethoras of Missile Turrets that take out the fighters quickly, since those weapons have bonus damage against them, and fighters aren't hard to kill in the first place.

Thanks,

Wing

[Wingflier]

Is it possibly because I only play on 10-15 planet size maps and so my forces/technology don't have enough time to build up before making a major assault on one of the stronger planets?  That wouldn't make sense to me since the longer I deliberate, the more forces the AI is going to have anyway, but it's possibly the only thing I can think of.

Why wouldn't a maxed out force of tech 2, 3, and 4 fighters mixed with a maxed force of tech 2, 3, and 4 bombers, mixed with several starships not be able to crack a T3 planet?

[Sizzle]

From what I understand, playing on that small a map size presents intreating / hard to balance for problems. The game is balanced around the default map size being 80 planets and some of the tougher units / heavily defended systems such as core worlds are balanced around you having a fair number of planets captured for the knowledge unlocks.

Chris or Keith might have better input, but it certainly sounds like you are simply short on K unlocks.

[Wingflier]

Yeah that's got to be it because I am literally doing everything perfectly.  I've tried and retried the missions over and over and I literally can't do any better than I am without resorting to some sort of cheese like taking out Orbital Stations with Raid Starships and waiting in ambush at my wormhole.

I'll try it with 40 and see if I have better luck.

[Trezamere]

Eh, I don't see how frigates are worth the costs, knowledge or otherwise.  At best they're useful in a defensive role but turrets and fortresses are far more practical, even much better.  They aren't really reactive (IE you can have them on defensive and move them around depending where the enemy is) because they are so ridiculously slow and for the same reason they are utterly worthless on offense.  By the time they catch up the damage has already been done, one way or the other.

I'd say their biggest drawback is speed, they are just entirely to slow (same reason I hate dreadnoughts).  I mean force fields are as fast as them and its not like they do significant damage

[x4000]

"Nothing is Impossible , Everything is Possible" -Edward

but yea , its not really worth the effort to waste half your forces on a single planet

Heh, I routinely waste 2x my forces on a single planet, I play something of a churn-and-burn style where my second wave is stepping over the bodies of the first wave.  But I still manage at 150% to 200% KTL ratio, usually.

But yeah, point taken.

[x4000]

Is it possibly because I only play on 10-15 planet size maps and so my forces/technology don't have enough time to build up before making a major assault on one of the stronger planets?  That wouldn't make sense to me since the longer I deliberate, the more forces the AI is going to have anyway, but it's possibly the only thing I can think of.

Why wouldn't a maxed out force of tech 2, 3, and 4 fighters mixed with a maxed force of tech 2, 3, and 4 bombers, mixed with several starships not be able to crack a T3 planet?

Yeah, playing on tiny maps makes the game vastly harder than you otherwise would see.  And it doesn't really make it any shorter, most of the time.  I'd suggest 30-40 planet maps as a better alternative.

But, I think also it's a problem with tactics in this specific example.  If you send all your ships in as one big blob, and there's a fortress nearby, most stuff beyond the bombers will get eaten.  So what you want to do is have some of your ships hang out outside the range of the fortress, then kill the fortress with the bombers, then have the other ships come rushing in.  If you just send stuff around in big blobs, that works, but you have to do a lot of rebuilding of some ship types.

And, in general, fighters need to be rebuilt more, anyway.  They are insanely cheap, but also have pretty low health, which makes them easy to churn-and-burn.  Fighters can be very effective in the late game, but not just a single build-out of fighters.  To really make use of them, you have to expect them to die, and constantly be building replacements right on the heels of the ones that do.

These two videos I did talk about survivability via tactics a fair bit:  http://www.arcengames.com/aiwar_videos.php#tactics1

[Wingflier]

Thanks for those links, they were very interesting and even though I had been doing most if it already, it was fun to see it work in action.

I think the main problem I was facing was playing on a 10-15 planet map on normal difficulty.  It is so extremely hard by yourself, that without some serious force building and micromanagement, it probably isn't possible; and for several hours, extremely boring.

On the 40 planet map I've been having no problems so far.

Something I want to bring up is your "3/4 Player Co-Op Midgame Tour" video on that page, which demonstrated a huge campaign with you and your 3 friends on a massive map.  You guys had done pretty badly, losing 2 of their bases (3rd guy didn't have a base), and having 500+ AI Progress with only a small portion of the map taken.  You said you were going to create a follow-up video but I didn't see it.  I am very interested in knowing what happened with that game.

Thanks again,

Wing

[x4000]

Sure thing.  With the 3/4 player co-op game, that was from a long time ago at this point... I've played another 4 games since then, and don't even have the saves (or much memory of that game) anymore, unfortunately.  I don't recall promising to do an update, though I might have said I'd try to.  I'm pretty sure that game ended in us losing, though, but I don't remember 100% clearly...

[RCIX]

I have a suggestion:
 * Get 1TB hard drive cluster
 * Install fraps and set to record to that hard drive
 * Turn on with starting AI war
 * Forget till you either need a video or the space starts getting full.

[x4000]

Heh, yeah, usually I do the videos not while actually playing, though.

[soMe_RandoM]

i dont know if this will work know but i used 1 science lab then sent it out on deep space mission. will having space planes sending it on a wild goose chase. then once it realy far out i scraped space planes and it followed the space lab. when it was about 1/4 thier i started an beach head with 170 snipers all built before it reached and killed the lab. then when it came back it was about 1/4 visible in long veiw then it dies from the snipas. dn if it will target labs but it might work with regular units