Forcefields on offense?

[Zeyurn]

So I may or may not hate myself for posting this, because it's a great strategy in our current game and it may be unintended.

Lately when we've been attacking AI planets, to avoid a lot of pain we've been sending all 5 of the Mark 3 Forcefields I have researched into the breech right before our fleets.  Even though we take a pretty nasty hit to damage under the forcefields, we frankly aren't losing any troops and it gets all the AI really mad enough to come fight so that after a few sorties back to our own planet for mobile repair goodness (and repairing of forcefields), the majority of enemy forces are pretty much done for.  We constantly move our fleets on top of the wormhole to keep them from expanding, then retreat them before the five forcefields wear down enough to get the fleet unprotected.

It's double good because my Spire Maws will eat enemy ships through the force fields, at which point I make off with them into our own planet.

Is this kind of behavior intended?  It is a lot slower, but the Maws thing almost feels like cheating (although, to be fair, their Starship Deconstruction Guardians made off with a few of my starships from outside the forcefield by picking up my 'protected' Starships inside before I noticed this too.)

[BobTheJanitor]

Sounds like they're working as intended, although maybe that wasn't foreseen. The damage reduction is probably supposed to make this undesirable, but with 5 fields stacked I guess it's just a matter of patience. I suppose damage from under a forcefield could be nerfed even further if this really is game-breaking. Or the damage reduction could be made to stack so that under 5 forcefields you'd be doing a 75% x 5 reduction. Then you'd need the patience of Job to use that tactic. What difficulty is it on, out of curiosity?

Also makes me want to share my fun time feels-like-an-exploit tactic. I've been putting a small to mid-size fleet on one side of a wormhole and send in a spire attritioner to rile up everything on the other side, and then warp it immediately back. As the AI ships start to group up around the wormhole, I send a spire martyr over just long enough that its tractor beams activate, and then have it warp right back. It drags back a manageable chunk of the enemy forces, which my fleet can then chop up. Repeat 3 or 4 times and there's usually nothing but a skeleton crew on the other side of the wormhole, which my fleet can now take with minimal losses. I'm not entirely sure that this 'fishing' tactic should work. I was kind of surprised that martyrs could drag ships back through a wormhole with their tractor beams. But since it works for now, I've been abusing it quite frequently.

[Zeyurn]

The force fields themselves are kinda okay, I imagine the strat won't hold up under really high AIP.

The maws eating things through forcefields both ways is really what I'm curious about.

[TechSY730]

This tactic has been severely nerfed in the upcoming patch, as you can no longer send FFs through wormholes. If you want to try this, you have to send a mobile builder in and build the FF in hostile territory, not an easy task.