I cant play this game anymore without getting irrationally angry.

[Cyborg]

A counter means, some sort of exploitable weakness. I'm fine with ship bonuses or some way of slowing the rotation, disabling beams, and so on. There are strategic and tactical decisions to be made here, if the design allows it.

Possibly hitting a forcefield (like a Riot Shield) delays further rotation by X seconds?  That way you'd have a core game unit that could do it rather than relying on getting one of the few teleporting types.

It might conceivably make it too easy/straightforward, but with all the other stuff going on during such an assault I think it'd be fine.

Sure,  fine, anything really. Just something.

[tadrinth]

What would it take for Sensor Hacks to be an effective counter to the Wrath Lance?  I haven't ever seen one,  but I like the idea of that being a counter, since cloaking used to be effective against wrath lances. 

[Vacuity]

The thing is, making cloaking effective against the wrath lance likely makes it effective against everything else, which in turn makes the homeworld, frankly, not that much of a challenge.

[eRe4s3r]

Maybe the homeworld should be split into sub-sectors with various exclusion rules that denies certain combinations of outposts/unit spawns.

Basically, I think the game can already do this by the way.

First stage

Outer defenses -> Next jump is in the center, guarded by a core forcefield, the generator is in this outer sector, protected by outpost etc.. So basically you have to kill or hack/or whatever you do to disable things and then proceed to the next stage

Inner-sector is basically you enter from the center, there are 5 protection outposts at the 5 corners of a circle centered on the entrance warp-point. You kill those and back in Stage 1 a new wormhole spawns, that leads you directly to the core command station (now unshielded). (expand with secondary security systems as you wish depending on AI type)

This way you could have certainty that nothing extremely imbalanced will be grouped together. Also NOTHING on those 3 stages will ever leave it's stages to hunt you down (unless you destroy the AI home station). But entering 1 alerts all 3 stages for eternity.

Feasible for a patch? 

Well... probably not. But it'd be nice to have some kind of structure to the assault. Currently it's more like a grind.