AI Massive siege frigate spam

They have slowed down now. I guess killing (4-6) of their capital ships have made them more careful.

Siege frigates have light armor. Therefore, the best ships to use to take them out would be either fighters, or (if your enemy has a dangerous amount of flak as well) heavy cruisers.

Another option would be to build a starbase on one of your worlds - in addition to being able to quickly destroy large numbers of enemy frigates, you can also get an upgrade which prevents loss of planet ownership due to bombardment. The AI should keep bombing your world anyway though - with your starbase making quick work of the enemy fleet, your other ships can take out the siege frigates.

Also, is your game updated to the most current version? (1.33 Trinity/Diplomacy) I heard that siege frigate spam was a more common tactic before, but in my (few) recent games against AI I've rarely seen them build more than two siege frigates at a time. A somewhat recent patch changed AI build behavior so that they would only build a few siege frigates at once.

Starbases are strong against Disciples, but so are long range frigates: the LRM, the Assailant, or the Illuminator. So in addition to building a starbase you could build a fleet of mainly LRF. LRF are also relatively good against enemy capital ships.

Edit: Oh, you're playing Vanilla, lol. Well OK, then if the enemy has mainly siege frigates, light frigates, and capital ships, then your best bet would be to build heavy cruisers and long range frigates.

A strategically cheap but effective strategy is to build a few turrets, which do incredible amounts of damage to light frigates and capital ships. If you do that and can lure the enemy fleet into their range, the enemy fleet will very quickly go down.

I have the very basic version without all expansions ( I can't update for some reason.) An example of one of the fleets is on the other side of the syestem. My vasari ally's planet got insta-killed by a fleet of 43 siege frigates. 43 seige frigates. On my side is an enemy fleet of now 2 battlecruisers, 25 discipes (20 have suspicously dissapeared), and 25 seige frigates.

Yeah if you have version 1.0 of the original Sins siege frigate spamming is a very dangerous tactic. Its really quite difficult to counter, especially early on before you can get any sort of cruisers online. You really should contact support or do whatever you can to update, even without the expansions the game has become much better with the updates.

I would highly recommend getting Entrenchment/Diplomacy, not only for improved AI behavior and other fixed bugs, but also for the ability to play online against other humans, which adds a whole new dimension to the game.

I probebly will, I like the idea of Comp stop. Well, I am slowly winning. I killed 2 of their caps, maybe 3. They are just running back and forth between 2 worlds, so it will take a bit.

a level 6 radience battle ship and a level 6 revalation class battlecruiser will ruin your whole day! I also have a level 4 carrier, and a level 3 mothership. And they hate enemy caps. That is why they have killed a lot of caps (I lost track at 6, but I know it was over ten, probebly around 16. JUST THAT ONE FLEET.

Do updates allow AIs to train? I wish my fleet could face at least a level 3 cap.

Eventually the AI will buy capitalship levels, maybe even in version 1.0, but they need to have a good economy going to do that (and thus will probably only happen at the high AI levels).

Also FYI having a lot of capitalships is often not a good strategy. Capitalships are really needed because of their powerful abilities, but for their cost and fleet supply their firepower is not very good. As you'll mainly want firepower when dealing with siege frigates, focusing on combat frigates is a much better idea.

Get a single capital ship and keep it out of harm's way, if your fleet is in another part of the gravity well destroying the enemy's fleet, your cap will level up in no time.

Destroying enemy AI capital ships is simple, they'll fall to ~100 supply worth of LRF quickly.

This. As a rule of thumb, having more than 2 or 3 capital ships is rarely a good idea, except in the very late game.

Yea, I know about the capital ship's firepower< the same cost of frigates. Unfortunatly, their fleet killed all my lfs and most of my lrfs, Now I am left with my core of 10 HC Destras, and my 4 caps. The good news, it that it cost the enemy dearly. They finally stoped to do battle with my fleet. I killled every one of their caps, and all but about 10 lfs, and 2 light carriers. Also, I have cut off the enemy into 2. That fleet is capturing their homeworld, while my ally cleans up beheind it. Also, only 13 sieges remain, and know that they are unable to kill my world anymore (due to the heavy fortifications, and med fleet stationed to guard it.) Now it is a mop up of them before killing the final AI.

ps. Prevoke Histeria is Epic! Kills almost half the healt of the enemy's 6000hp Homeworld!

Planet bombardment is not nearly as important as general fleet composition, so getting the Revelation only for Provoke Hysteria is a tragic waste.

I didn't. The Revelation was my 2nd. I got it for planet bobardment and fleet killing. A mothership (now in my defence fleets to protect against invatsion from the star) was my first. My 3rd was a radience to assist my Revelation, my 4th was a carrier to provide strike craft support, my 5th was a mothership to colonize destroyed worlds, and to help heal shields.

Also, I think you might call me crazy when I made a 6th (Rapture) for my defence fleets (Voice's homeworld). And a 7th (same as 1st mothership). But when I saw an average of 2 vasari seige caps, and a revelation battle cruiser in the star, I knew I needed a strong defence in that area. I also needed a quick defence for Voice's captured HW, as they were very frequently attacking.

Now I need to capture a planet to resupply my main fleet with frigates. (reminder I lost all LF, Guardians, and almost all of my LRF.)

Meh. While it's somewhat useful in bombardment if you can get it up to level 6, it's very marginal otherwise... if I were you I'd normally get a Halcyon instead, which has much more firepower. Not as much as a comparable cost of frigates, but the Halcyon is also capable of bombing, like all capital ships.

Carrier capital ships are often a great balance between planet bombardment abilities and firepower.

Taking strategic advice by copying the AI is not really a good idea. Capital ship crews cost a whole lot, and past the first 3 or so it's rarely worth it.

I had plenty of money, but I think you mis understoon why I put defences near the star. I was afraid that they would launch an invasion with the capital ships, or later the massive seige frigate fleets prowling about the gravity well. I saw a lot of worlds get invaded by those fleets from the star.

Now, I am resupplying my fleet with 20 lf, 15 Hc (I managed to get them to do 30 dps each) and about 6 LRF (Only 6 because I ran out of $, I will be leaving with much more LRF.

Also, before you ask why I did not build frigates, I needed to get massive firepower in quickly (a normal sized fleet of seige frigates were already in the star's gravity well.) A capital ship was the quickest way to do that.

If you happened to have a spare capital ship factory already built there and no frigate factories, go for it. But as you know, frigates are generally much better if you're trying for firepower.

Actually, I just had an idea which might work to mitigate AI-controlled siege frigate spam. It works on the militia, at least... if you start building a turret in the range of the siege frigates, often they will scatter and attempt to regroup in some other section near the planet so they can bomb from a safe distance.

If this behavior happens in whichever ancient version of Sins you have, you can buy yourself a very long amount of time this way (allowing you to build frigates to increase your firepower to destroy the siege frigate swarm). Start building a turret in range of the siege frigates, then stop construction, move the constructor close to the next area the siege frigate swarm moved to, start construction on another turret (but don't finish it), repeat. Scrap your unbuilt turrets, you won't be losing much money at all from the scuttle costs.

Now, this strategy requires extraordinary micromanagement and is a blatant exploitation of the dumb AI, but it might work. Just make sure the siege frigates' weapons don't kill your constructor.

Unfortunantily, That does not work. However, the best tactic I came up with is to have a colony frigate right next to the planet with colonize on manual. As soon as the siege frigates leaves, recolonize, and build more turrets to help kill them next time. It also helps to have a frigate factory building frigates as much as possible.

Well that works.

To be honest I'm not all that sure about what siege frigates are like in your version, apparently they used to be extremely overpowered...

I just updated it. I went to the update page, clicked it. It failed due to an error, I clicked it again and it worked! But in my version, seige frigates Are overpowered. 12 can storm a well defended 3000 hp world and kill it with horrible losses. When a 30 seige frigate fleet attacked my world with 6000 hp, ~ 8 beam defences, and my main fleet, it still killed it with only about 8 or so losses!

While that many siege frigates can still kill worlds extremely quickly, they're nowhere near as durable as to stand up to a decent-sized fleet plus defenses...

What version did you get? You should be at version 1.192 or something like that. To get that you need to use the impulse/gamestop program, for the moment at least. If you didn't install that you still don't have the most recent version of the game.

When I was talking about the overpowered seige frigates, I was talking about version 1.0, now I am on the latest version. Strikecraft look weird, and I also accidently spent $ on bounty.

Ahhh... a brief look into Sins where the Advent ruled, siege frigates were feared by the mighty and where the Radiance could give you a bad day... good times.