There's already an upgrade that makes siege frigs less effective...the emergency facilities upgrade is comparatively cheap and with it, a planet has SIX THOUSAND hitpoints.

You are correct, the core problem is the PJI, although the siege frigate is certainly ridiculous any way you slice it.

I don't really care to play a game with no strategic possibilities as far as the map goes. As it is now, you can't make strategic choices with the map, thus you can't make strategic choices as far as which worlds to develop in which way. As one guy said on this thread (oddly enough, he thought this was a good thing) "all worlds must be ringed with defenses to the max." What kind of "strategy" is this? With a real phase jump inhibitor, you could choose which worlds would be ringed with defenses, which ones would be dedicated to economy, etc.

Me? I'll wait for them to give us a real PJI. If that doesn't happen, I suppose there are other strategy games out there.

I made a mod last night and changed things a bit and it seems to help dramatically.

What I did was lower bombardment for everything but captital ships by 4/5ths, lower frigate hitpoints so that scouts only have about 75 hitpoints and others are 150-400. Then I made the range of turrets about three times as much.

It seems to make a DRAMATIC difference. Only took me like an hour. Maybe I will upload it. I also changed economy a bit and money is too easy now, but I wil tweak it more.

30 siege frigates take up 360 supply points. That's enough supply for 45 Aerias/Lasuraks/Percherons with Fighter Squadrons, or 180 Arcovas/Seekers, or 120 Jikaras, or 36 Kodiaks/Destras, or 30 Skarovas Enforcers, or...

The Advent could use Seeker Vessels in a 4:1 ratio(which would still be cheaper than the siege force) and riddle the siege ships with laser fire, with the option of using a suicide ram if the planet is going down too quickly.

The Vasari could build 10 Phase Stabilizers for the cost of 30 Siege frigs and use it to transport a part of their fleet to wherever it's needed almost instantly.

The TEC could even build a giant swarm of Arcova Scouts for the price of 30 Krosovs and completely destroy an opponent's trade network, shipbuilding capability and technology level with their bombs, limited only by micromanagement capability. Or put up a defense of 30 Kodiaks for about the same price as the enemy siege force which would obviously be able to kill them faster than they kill the planet. Or better, build 2 Novalith Cannons which make siege frigates obsolete.

The problem is that while the planet goes down incredibly fast, even if you have an immensely powerful fleet that is in position and the AI still attacks, you can only kill a small portion of them before the planet dies. Combine that with the fact fleets can just skip around and you can just rush to the capital and destroy it any time. So, yes, it is broken.

As people have said there's basically no point to strategy to the game right now, and little point to static defenses aside from beating off pirates.

Hi folks,

Just a thought here but how about a Phase Inhibitor orbital defense cannon that would destroy the jump drive of the vessels thus allowing other defenses to mop up.

The warhead would maybe have an small area effect taking our multiple ships in close proximity to each other but it'd have limited range.

What I can see from this is that you could not just send your fleet to a specific planet and busy yourself with other things until that fleet arrives at the target planet as the cannon at each world, if built, would soon whittle away that fleet BUT it'd still allow raiding as you'd be able control the raiding fleet to stay outside the cannons range.

Any use?

Cheers,

This was the first thing I played with, making the PJI fire a gravity warhead. It turns the game into a turtle fest and it becomes near suicidal to bring a capital ship along for a raid. Raiding is good and needs to be encouraged as much as possible, anything that takes away from it turns the game into even more of a housekeeping simulator.

Please please please all of you asking for something like this, try and test out siege frigate spam first against a good player, rather than asking for the game to be bent around the broken AI. I am open to the possibility that it could work at some rare point in the research/supply/time curve, but you should check and demonstrate it before you get all the way behind this. The AI is really astoundingly bad at teaching you how the game works, and the '30 siege frigates and 4 cap ships' spam is probably the single most stupid thing it ever does. It absolutely cripples itself for combat doing that. If you bring double digits of siege frigates along, you have next to nothing else in your fleet, and everybody who sees those frigates knows it.