With the youngster, is the first wave that hits me meant to have 1000 odd ships in it? Just checking, because although he is meant to do bigger waves, 20x bigger seems a little steep. If it's meant to be like this, I'm fine, I'll just change my tactics a bit or something. Thought you should know incase it's a bug.
Yea, 1000 sounds about right. I was aiming more at 800 but it depends on difficulty.
They just die. so. fast.
So they're really, really dangerous to your harvesters because they numerically overwhelm tractor beams, kill harvesters before normal defenses can kill them (exo shields help!), and are too fast to "train wreck" with a mobile fleet. If you manage to hold them down into a proper fleet engagement, though, it will be over very quickly. There are ways
AOE is another solution, though without micro-low-powering your lightning turrets they'll generally be on reload while the majority of the enemy wave runs away. Electric shuttles, with their auto-staggering, are probably the hands-down hard-counter to a youngling fleet of nearly any size.
But when all's said and done, even 1000 commandos aren't a huge threat to any truly hardened target, and they'll die to a decent defense before they crack an ff.