tech up the fleet and build several capital ships?

Keep your fleet defending your planets and send a few shining new battleships to blast their homeworlds... they will definitely feel that.
3 level 3 or 4 (if you have the tech) battleships suddenly popping in and taking a homeworld - big ouch... even if they COULD fight them off it will occupy their fleet (I have seen the enemy recall a fleet from my planet to defend their homeworld... I was fighting all their ships at the homeworld with only a few bombers left on my outlying planet).

I find weapon tech to be much less significant then fleet tech... 3 KOL capital ships have a base of 38 gauss, 11 laser, 11 laser... I can upgrade it to 43, 13, 13 (5+ research projects).... or I can build a second capital ship... the second one obviously makes more sense...

The Novalith Cannon can shoot pretty far... On a medium size map it hits any planet i want... It only damages planets... so its great to put a bump in their economy

The TEC super cannon is worth it if you find yourself boxed in and unable to go offensive. Its range is the entire solar system, and i think a 1 1/2 hour delay to reach another solar system (takes about 1 minute to reach the other side of a medium solar system). Asteroid colony = 1 shot, ice/fire planet = 2 shots, terran planet = 3 shots, this is assuming they are fully upgraded with bomb shelters but no planet shields.

Note that below is for single player maps.
Repair bays make a HUGE difference. 2 overlapping your defenses will keep a turret alive for a few minutes even if a fleet is hell bent on killing it. Here is how i set up my planet.
1- 4/7 hangers
2- 2 repair bays with overlapping fields on your defenses. Also try and place them where your fleet will engage the enemy as they will also repair your ships. Some antimatter research makes them more effective (can keep going longer).
3- Turrets. Which way will the enemy be coming from? Place your turrets in that direction with enough range to reach the surface of your planet and with overlapping fields of fire. The number depends on whatever space i have left over.
4- I don't bother with phase inhibitors if i'm going purely defensive.

Repair bays will reduce your losses considerably, and allow a underpowered defense fleet to be effective if fighting within the repair bay-s- range.

I don't find frigates of any kind good in fleet combat as you lose a lot of them. Heavy cruisers are a bigger investment but they last a lot longer and if supported by capitals/support cruisers with shield/hull repair they will last forever.

Before you launch a attack, fortify the the planets furthest away form the direction you're sending your assault fleet. Make sure bomb shelters is maxed out on all front line planets.

You should advance in the direction that will reduce the number of choke points first. This kills 2 birds with one stone, you are advancing and strengthening your defense line at the same time.

I would imagine so unless a seriously large fleet comes in.

What I do is set a rally point and pump out cheap replacement ships (say 10 long range frigs) that slowly bolster a defensive position while my main fleet goes about its business raising planets and destroying valuable infrastructure.

I then keep checking back to micro the battle while I can (normaly outnumbered) and keep replacing (in akward positions) fixed defenses. This ties up the enemy for so long I can normaly get my main fleet back after doing everything I wanted before I lose my planet. The AI is particuraly easy to trick with this, humans wont be.

Binksy and zzz give good advice.
The planet shield really does stop most bombardments cold, and even a determined force won't be able to bring down your planet before reinforcements arrive from a few jumps away. T
he repair bay is something you should always, ALWAYS have on front line cities. The only excuse for not having them is if you're trying for the all-civic no-military research achievement. Even then, once you've got the achievement you can research military techs in the same game. As zzz mentioned, repair bays will vastly improve the longevity of your planetary defenses. Even if stationed at a planet that never gets attacked, they can be used to regenerate heavily damaged capital ships quickly. A single repair bay in the early game is great if you prefer to level up your capital ships on neutrals rather than paying any cash.
Lastly, the novalith cannon is very worth it, especially if it's on a 1-star map or is in the star system where the fighting is. If you've got 2 firing on their capital you can deal a serious blow to their economy fairly quickly most of the time. Even just 1 is useful for greatly reducing or eliminating the time it normally takes to bombard an enemy planet before capture.

My overall recommendation would be this: build planet shields and repair bays, (2 repair bays per planet, maybe 3) and max out your defenses, as zzz said, that are far from where your fleets will be. Then send a majority of your force up a flank that will allow you to decrease the number of chokepoints as soon as possible. Keep the rest of your fleet in the middle, so that they're an equal distance from the front lines of your assault and the undefended planets that you fortified.
Also, consider increasing the number of support ships, especially repair ships, that you have in your assault fleet and watch out for the enemy doing the same. I've noticed the AI tends to have a high ratio of repair ships to normal ships, which can make them very frustrating to kill. Sometimes you have to blow up a dozen repair ships before you can start going to work on the rest of the fleet, so you'd better make sure you have the repair assets to keep yourself in the fight that long.

The Novalith cannon means you can focus all your eco onto powerful ships, the cannon'll take care of the population wiping.

I had the same stalemate problem last night using TEC going against the advent. They came by the bundles and nearly wiped my fleet out i had 6 Cap ships and a crap load of everything else. Everything change when i destryoed their capital ships and i used Armistice...(causes the enemy to cease fire)....as soon as i hit it..they tucked tail and ran, only not before i took half of them out.
At mid point of the battle i switched from fighters to bombers on my hangers AND on the Cap ships...they took out alot of frigates after that.

The Repair bays are a must if you want to save money and ships. I also used the ships that take away the Advents antimatter...sorry the names of them elude me now..im at work and cant look....but it was a huge victory for me because they owned me the first time and had to relaod and restrategize....The bundles of ships they sent at me were from the 2 neighboring planets....now those 2 planets are almost cleared of enemies and are going to be mine when i get back on....so my battle is slow but exciting and im learning along the way.
Although my Civi tech tree is still half unresearched...the military tree is fully researched and i can use it all.

Id make sure too that all the antimatter, sheild regen and armor trees are fully researched.. those seemed to help alot the second time around.

each shot does 3500 damage, so 2 simultaneous shots can kill a 6000 hp planet (homeworld).

BE CAREFUL WHEN USING THE NOVALITH

If you're attacking across galaxies especially. If you advance faster than your novalith shoots, you might end up blowing up your newly developed planets.

ya its a cap ship, i think its the support one.. so there isnt a frigate that eats through antimatter specifically? the frigate with the demolition is the scout, i believe <--- i think i'll give this one a try



so, armistice isn't defaulted to auto-cast like other cap abilities? or i just should deselect the auto-cast until their cap ships are dead or cant reflect my ability?


i like the scout demolition point.. ive overlooked it a few times, never tried it.. seems like a pretty smart investment, if its effective (in groups, im assuming)

thx!

Lots of good comments here...one thing to note when fighting AI is that it is not as good at defending its caps...if you are careful with yours, yours will get to level 10 and he will constantly be making new ones so they will have a hard time getting em up past 3 or 4. This can help turn the tide against otherwise fairly evenly sized fleets. When they do get that powerful, see if you can get the AI to shoot at em while you repair em with repair cruisers. It is funny watching a fleet trying to kill a level 10 Battleship with max armor and watch it get repaired as fast as they hurt it.

That plus Novalith sniping is a good way to turn the tide against an AI stalemate. At some point though, you have to take the fight to them and decide to chase down one of those fleets. I usually end up chasing one across a gravwell mauling it with missiles and bombers and once I get on that offensive, I keep the pressure on.

Good luck!

350 seconds I believe.

Painfully slow when you really need it.

It's a long, slow grind. I just won my first 4-player FFA (me vs. 3 comps). I had to target one of them for most of the game, while just holding off the other two, but soon I had two enormous fleets and half the galaxy under my control, with ships to spare to defend random planets (~10 ships to make a mini fleet for defense). Even when the AI used a superweapon (I'm assuming) to destroy an entire fleet (taking me from 0 fleet available to 480, believe it or not), I rebuilt in a matter of 5 to 10 minutes.

Make sure you've got lots of spare money when you start researching higher fleet caps, and spend that money on building ships right away. The fleet number will turn red and go neg, and the ships will be queued up to build right away. I usually wouldn't research a higher fleet cap or capital ship crew number until I had the resources immediately to invest in more capital ships or other ships.

Also, Kodiaks. Massive numbers of Kodiaks with a few flak frigates and other frigates as support. Kodiaks tear up the opponent's caps faster than anything, and they're fast.



I usually build two for my endgame, and start taking out colonies. I time them with my fleet so I take out three colonies every five minutes or so. It's great for the endgame.



I assume the effects scale, increasing jump time by 250% per inhibitor. But I don't know if this means each adds it's effect individually (a 10-second jump becomes a 12.5 second jump with one inhibitor, a 15 second jump with two, etc) or cumulatively (a 10 second jump becomes a 12.5 second jump with one inhibitor, a 13.7 second jump with two, etc). Diminishing returns on phase jump inhibitors doesn't really make sense, though.



I've never used them. I level up the planet's emergency facilities and build a lot of hangars.

Phase inhibitors are great for holding a group of siege frigates in the gravity well so your bombers (from the hangars) can pound on them. They'll usually turn and run after a few minutes, so often I won't even need to send my fleet to save the planet. Or just a few ships (a couple anti-siege frigates, but not the entire fleet).