One quick note:
Regarding the siege starships in .065: they are good for hitting large and dangerous structures. IE, guard posts, guardians, and all sorts of things along those lines (various special weapons, etc). Also starships, spirecraft, the big spire ships, the list goes on and on.
What they are NOT good for is striking force fields with impunity from a range far exceeding whatever is under the force field has. That's also why the snipers lost their ability to strike under force fields. Both made AI force fields rather pointless, as the smartest move for AI ships was to just fly out from under them. Additionally, it wasn't exactly good for player forcefields either, and made counter-sniper turrets basically a requirement for any games with snipers in them.
In the past, we had these interesting situations where players would encounter this tough nut of AI ships under an AI forcefield, and they would have to get close enough to hurt it with bombers while protecting those bombers from adjacent ships that would eat them up. That made for pretty interesting tactical decisions depending on what was under that force field, and if two were close together, etc.
In recent versions, it's simply been a matter of "bring in some ultra-long-range anti-forcefield stuff, and wait." That was soo lame. While I appreciate Keith's desire to have a big glass cannon type unit, and in fact the siege starship has become perhaps my favorite starship, it doesn't have any proper place in dealing with forcefields or fortresses. Those two units are about having to cleverly attack a deadly short-range adversary while guarding that which is able to attack the adversary. Anything that is able to violate the range of that completely invalidates that scenario.
This was a case where I noticed that some interesting tactical situations were getting subsumed by some ships that were getting a bit too big for their britches, so to speak, so in order to preserve those tactical situations the offending ships have had their roles segmented. This makes siege starships still extremely useful, but their no longer a "jack of all trades against anything large." In a lot of respects, that makes the bomber starship have a bit more of a unique role, too.
I am surprised by the folks lamenting the usefulness of siege starships now, as they are still incredibly useful against a huge range of ships. I mean, half the AI's firepower is massive stuff that the siege starship is basically able to hit with impunity from incredible range. I mean... that's basically win.
