How to deal with defended Level III Forcefields?

[Haagenti]

In my current 8.3 game, I came up quite early against a setup consisting of:
- a level III forcefield
- a SF Command Post (I play against SF Commander)
- 200 ships who do not wish to come out, including lots of cruisers
- a few anti-sniper turrets
- oodles of other turrets

Is there an elegant way to deal with this?
- bombers get slaughtered (didn't have III Bombers at the time)
- cruisers take ages and all the time the enemy fires back

I know that with Etherjets you can drag ships from the field and kill them, space tanks might also help, but if you have none of these?

[eRe4s3r]

Only way i found to deal with super entrenched enemies is to either send a emp/lightning missile and try to scratch them / nuke them or using raid starships

Raid Starships shoot through shields too - And they can FLY through them as well

They are produced in 4 minutes in batches of 3 (limit 6) so in 8 minutes you could have 6

but be warned, the enemy WILL react to being hit by them ;p

I didn't really know raid starships had a use besides .. having no use before
but now the raid ship is the *first* ship i unlock, because IF you do find shields, with these things you can kill the turrets inside and then bother with the shield itself later, or never if you feel like it.

Generally i think starships are way under-used ;p I always have each of their classes to the maximum, except scout ships (which are about as usefull as a 7th arm)

[darke]

I find Lightning Missiles are the most elegant method myself, but they do give the AI a +2 bonus for each use though.

I do find myself using scout starships quite a bit since they're useful as temporary wormhole tachyon detectors that don't take half an hour to cross the map like the drones do, and are cloaked as well. They did loose a lot of their "scouting" potential though when all the scouts gained cloaking, so they probably need a slight bit of a buff to something (maybe health?) to give them a bit more of an edge to scouting. So if you do bother to micro a bunch of them around the map you can use them as an effective scouts even on maps where every wormhole has a tachyon turret.

Also I think they're of use against the AI that insta-kills all cloaked vessels as well. Though we're really talking special, special case here.

[Haagenti]

Only way i found to deal with super entrenched enemies is to either send a emp/lightning missile and try to scratch them / nuke them or using raid starships

Raid Starships shoot through shields too - And they can FLY through them as well

Ah...that's the tip I was looking for. Use the Raids to kill the CP (withdraw for repairs when they are damaged too much), then use the Raids to kill the sniper turrets and snipers and then leave the rest to rot. 

but be warned, the enemy WILL react to being hit by them ;p

You mean by building Arachnids? I consider everything the AI builds that is not a cruiser or a fighter to be a gimme as it dies from massed cruiser fire without ever coming into range.

Generally i think starships are way under-used ;p I always have each of their classes to the maximum, except scout ships (which are about as usefull as a 7th arm)

I think this is because the Light Starships are quite non-descript. They provide a little bit of support, but have too little range to be really useful. I use them in defense: you can position a few cruisers around them to gain support, so you can spare more cruisers for the front. I also use them for breaking wormholes defended by lightning turrets, as they have lots of hit points

And the Scout ship is mostly harmless. So I haven't experimented too much with them. And never bothered to look at the better ones.

But now that I think of it, they have one big advantage: lots of hit points and repairable. Which means they are re-usable and therefore cheap.

I find Lightning Missiles are the most elegant method myself, but they do give the AI a +2 bonus for each use though.

My current game is diff 8.3 against SFC and Spymaster. I'm trying to conquer a 13 planet cluster that is connected to the rest of the map through a single planet (which will become an epic 800 turret deathtrap). I have conquered 8 of them, and the AI level is increasing at +20 per planet and another +8 or so for every SFC planet (that +1/SF command post is a pony). I had a slow start, so after 5.5 hours there is another +11. The cluster  has no Data Centers.

The (schizo) raids are getting to be quite formidable with up to 80 level II ships. Soon the AI will be raiding with level III ships. If I fight at an SFC planet, the command posts are vomiting forth ever increasing groups of ships. So, the AI level is becoming quite a concern.

Also I think Scout ships are of use against the AI that insta-kills all cloaked vessels as well. Though we're really talking special, special case here.

As I'm playing the Spymaster now, it happens to be my case, and yes, they are invaluable against it to maintain scouting info on a planet. I need more resources to build all of them, so I can send them to scout as a group. The Spymaster is much stronger than it looks: being able to scout only adjacent planets is a real pain.