What is the best way to deal with Tractor Beam Turrets?

[Dragon]

Personally, I find tractor beam turrets in the hands of the AI are a big thorn in my side, as they tend to die soooo slowly, compared to all the other turrets.  Sure, massed fire from a thousand ships will kill one, but on mark IV worlds there can be dozens of Mk III's to pin me in place, and prevent me from pulling back, or loading back into transports, etc.  Any suggestions as to which units or bonus ships are best at taking them out?  So far, all I have found is Raid Starships, and only because they do a large amount of damage with a 1x multiplier to almost everything.  And even raid starships will take a while if there are several of them....

What are some good counters?

[x4000]

Well, it's hard to deal with tractor beam turrets quickly once you get into range.  People have various strategies that they use, so I'm sure others will weigh in with what they like to do, but my strategies boil down to four things:

1. If I must kill something quickly but don't have overwhelming force, I might send in a suicide squad of guys to kill that, and then there's probably no hope of escape.

2. If I have overwhelming force in general, then group-moving it all into range of a turret ball will kill all the threats first, and then the tractors will die out at the last.

3. If I must kill something quickly, don't have overwhelming force, and want to get some key ships back out alive, then you can use the "vacuum" capabilities of the transports. Once your guys are ready to escape, but are still stuck in the tractor beams, tell them to get into the transport.  Then drive the transport over top of them, and it will suck them up as it does, allowing at least some of the guys to escape depending on how much health they have, how fast you are at it, and just how dangerous the surrouding enemies are, etc.

But, the strategy I use most of all is:

4. Keep my main forces back from the turret ball in general, then either have some suicidal smaller ships or some suitably long-range ships destroy the guard post.  All of the mobile enemy ships that had been guarding it then run over to fight my stuff -- away from their protecting turrets and tractors -- and I eat them for lunch.  Then I move in and kill all the non-tractor turrets (because the tractors don't really hurt anything other than my ability to escape), and then finish of the tractors when the rest are dead.

Or some variation on #4, anyway, tends to work great.

[Dragon]

Yeah, that's true.  The vacuum option is something I just learned about a few days ago, and it might solve my problem.  Sometimes, like if I'm attacking a planet at the edge of transport range, my transports die, and I was hoping there was a unit that was good at killing tractor beams, so that I could put some with bombers or the like, and take out several guard posts with the sacrificed troops, rather then just being able to take out one guard post.  Often the guard post will be dead before I even finish unloading.  Or the transport blows up right on entry to the planet, and I want to get them away from the gate, and to the specific target, like a data center or something.

On the other hand, I have been using raid starships more and more for that sort of thing, so I might not end up needing to blow up tractor turrets very much.

[x4000]

When I'm at the limit of my range, a tactic I like to use is just sending 1-2 transports of stuff to quick-raid the command station of the AI, and then I deal with the backwash of freed units.  Then I go for the special forces guard post and anything else that allows reinforcement, and suddenly that planet doesn't seem quite so nasty.  But it just depends on the planet; I should probably use raid starships more than I do, but I have teammates that often favor starships more than I do, so that helps.

[rubikscube]

well, if vacuum  sucking is so popular, might as well add a "auto target tractor sucked up ships."

[Don Carsto]

Bombers and fregates are very very bad against tractor beams.
But fighters are better.
And the best I found are z-polaryzers (bonus ship).
They are good too against special forces command post and very fast too against command stations.

[RCIX]

Autocannons are good for that. Send them in by themselves, they rip up turrets pretty good and are very tough, and plus if you do lose some you won't notice 30-50 being gone

[rubikscube]

transports that has it's own gravitational pull to suck up tractored ships would be sweet. so it will load faster than picking up 1 ship at a time.

[soMe_RandoM]

use the auto cannons, micro fighters, lazer gattaling are all use full to get your bulk of fleet through like you boombers and frigates. use them to take up the slots of the tractor beams. eventualy when you get up to the 46x per turret or similar all ur suicidal units will let the rest of the force into. if you think it an waste of units then transport but i only use these type of ships yust for this purpose.