Tough planet to crack

[Reality]

I'm up against a Shield Ninny and a Fortress Baron in my current game, and a lot of the planets I'm up against are fairly well defended. But there's one in particular near my home base with an ARS on it, and I'm having difficulty getting any traction.

Basically what the AI had at first was 2 ion cannons (mark I and IV), a shield booster, an AI eye, lots of guard posts, a special forces post, and a craptonne of guardians.

So far I've taken out the ion cannons with raid starships, and I used mercenary etherjet fighters to tractor out most of the fleet ships and kill them. Unfortunately, there's a fair number of artillery, laser, flak, and other guardians near the wormhole. They're all boosted with 3 times armor, and I can't just roll them over with a ball because of the AI eye. I've tried bombers, fighters, and impulse reaction emmitters (in numbers under 150 to avoid triggering the eye) as well as raid and bomber starships. An entire cap of bombers can't take out a single flak guardian before dying.

I'm considering a high level lightning nuke or some other thing, but was wondering if anyone had any other suggestions. (my starting bonus ship was shredders, but they get instaraped by the guardians).

[Sunshine!]

Build up a pile of defenses on your side of the wormhole with a military command station, and send a decently sized force through to destroy the AI command station.  You'll have to weather some AI Eye problems, but it'll probably dump the guardians onto your side of the wormhole where they won't have 3x shieldboost.

If you can't get any size force through, or don't really want to risk it, figure out how many AI ships are on that planet, get twice that number in fighters or bombers, drop a mk1 EMP through the wormhole, and then go for it.  You probably won't get your fighters/bombers back, but you should have plenty of time to get to the command station.

Alternatively, cloaker starship + transport filled with bomber starships (or whatever you want, really) can get past and hit the command station without triggering the eye.

[Red Spot]

Build 5-ish transports, send them in, order them to the edge of the planet, see how 3-ish die and 2-ish make it there, followed by about ¾ of the gate-huggers
Now send in the fleet, kill the remaining ¼ gate-huggers. Kill or send back the transports and see how the other ¾ of the gate-huggers comes back to your fleet in bite-size chunks.  

Edit: do not do step 2 if you only intend to make room/buy time for your raiders, just make that step 2. Most enemies will be chasing your transports.

[Reality]

I popped the command center, which made the guardians a lot easier to take out on the other side of the wormhole. Now, however, its just a tedious process of taking out every single guardpost with a small number of bombers (so as not to provoke the eye) while they're armor boosted. There's also a cloaked guardpost (first time at difficulty 7, so I hadn't encountered these) so I guess I'll need a scout starship! Have to say, while the AI eye change seems to have made things more tactical, it's also boosted the tedium level quite a bit, especially with defensive ai types.

[Red Spot]

Just send in a cap, even if the eye spawns a few ships .. they wont catch you. Without the CC you have or equal or higher speed on ex-AI planets. (not exactly sure how it is balanced, but I think you can outrun them, at the very least keep them at bay)
Just dont send in 1k ships or more, that pissed the Eye off ... a bit 

[Shrugging Khan]

Something I can always recommend is luring all the guardians away from the wormhole via one or several decoy transports (fast, tough, expendable), and then moving in as many starships of all types as you can muster to clear out what's left behind. Filling the transports with fighters to further elongate the decoy effect is also viable.

[Red Spot]

Something I can always recommend is luring all the guardians away from the wormhole via one or several decoy transports (fast, tough, expendable), and then moving in as many starships of all types as you can muster to clear out what's left behind. Filling the transports with fighters to further elongate the decoy effect is also viable.

Cheap and fast Youngling(?) ships do great here, you dont even have to micro them, just have a regen-chamber next door and they will auto-magicly do their best to return home ... in time for dinner
(works nicelly when you are working on several fronts and dont want to micro it all)

[Suzera]

I used mercenary etherjet fighters to tractor out most of the fleet ships and kill them

You went wrong here and cause this little planet of hell for yourself. You should have taken down the shields and stuff first before trying to clear out all the ships/posts. Mercenary ships also have horrible horrible cost efficiency so I imagine this probably took you a very long time as well, which would have been better spent sending cap bombers 1-3 and flagship waves in to blow up the FFs.

Don't blow up everything except guardians by tractoring it out of the system THEN complain that you can't send a ball in. Just don't tractor everything out of the system in the first place.

Basic AI Eye planet method:

1) Clear entry wormhole
2) Send bomber caps + flagships at force fields until those are all dead
3) Blow up fortresses also with bomber caps + flagships
4) Blow up all the posts with cap fighter raids
5) Blob system as usual

[syndicatedragon]

You went wrong here and cause this little planet of hell for yourself. You should have taken down the shields and stuff first before trying to clear out all the ships/posts. Mercenary ships also have horrible horrible cost efficiency so I imagine this probably took you a very long time as well, which would have been better spent sending cap bombers 1-3 and flagship waves in to blow up the FFs.

Don't blow up everything except guardians by tractoring it out of the system THEN complain that you can't send a ball in. Just don't tractor everything out of the system in the first place.

Basic AI Eye planet method:

1) Clear entry wormhole
2) Send bomber caps + flagships at force fields until those are all dead
3) Blow up fortresses also with bomber caps + flagships
4) Blow up all the posts with cap fighter raids
5) Blob system as usual

Please forgive me for asking about what is probably obvious to everyone but me, but what do you mean by "bomber cap" and "cap fighter"?

[Reality]

I used mercenary etherjet fighters to tractor out most of the fleet ships and kill them

You went wrong here and cause this little planet of hell for yourself. You should have taken down the shields and stuff first before trying to clear out all the ships/posts. Mercenary ships also have horrible horrible cost efficiency so I imagine this probably took you a very long time as well, which would have been better spent sending cap bombers 1-3 and flagship waves in to blow up the FFs.

Don't blow up everything except guardians by tractoring it out of the system THEN complain that you can't send a ball in. Just don't tractor everything out of the system in the first place.

Basic AI Eye planet method:

1) Clear entry wormhole
2) Send bomber caps + flagships at force fields until those are all dead
3) Blow up fortresses also with bomber caps + flagships
4) Blow up all the posts with cap fighter raids
5) Blob system as usual

You have a point, but at this point the problem wasn't the eye, it was that even a large blob wasn't enough to take the wormhole due to a large number of ships/guardians, so I was desperate. I managed to take the system with a small number of bombers (ended up using a tachyon warhead to reveal the stealth guardpost.

[BobTheJanitor]

Please forgive me for asking about what is probably obvious to everyone but me, but what do you mean by "bomber cap" and "cap fighter"?

Cap means the ship cap, or the maximum number of ships you can build at once. So bring an entire mark I cap of bombers for instance means bringing every mark I bomber that you have.

[syndicatedragon]

Please forgive me for asking about what is probably obvious to everyone but me, but what do you mean by "bomber cap" and "cap fighter"?

Cap means the ship cap, or the maximum number of ships you can build at once. So bring an entire mark I cap of bombers for instance means bringing every mark I bomber that you have.

Thanks, it makes a lot more sense now.