Quite, you know not what you say

(refering to original poster)

With Vesari, 10 Purge Vessels and a Rapture Cruiser with 1 or 2 Domination Auras usually seals the deal on planets for me before anyone can act.

And since the Purge Vessels are being "focus fired", why don't you try some kind of backhand strategy where your main purpose isn't really to siege the planet, but to destroy other things or escape easier. This is a game about tactics. Come up with something crafty.

That's lovely but i think you missed the point of siege frigates which is to secure planets after the fighting is over, not to play chicken with fighters.

"hay guys halp my colony ships are getting destroyed, next time i guess ill just use the colonize cap instead because it doesnt die in one LRM hit"

Actually he's right, more often then not I'll have my cap kill the planet while my fleet kills the rest of the buildings. My fleet will finish killing the buildings like 45 seconds before the planet goes pop, so seige frigates simply aren't needed.

You make it sound like you should have all your forces at one planet per time, neh, that is not tactical, I say.

Siege fleets are as useful as they've ever been, even after the cost increase.

There's nothing like attacking one planet and sending your siege fleet to another one not on the border. If you send enough siege frigs, you should be able to take out 2 or 3 planets before the enemy can get a strong enough force to kill the siege fleet... and in the meanwhile, your main fleet is doing dmg elsewhere.

If you manage to outmaneuver your enemy with a siege fleet, you generally get a win win situation. If he focus on your main fleet, your siege fleet will do serious dmg, if he goes for your siege fleet, your main fleet has an advantage

wow, am i the only one that uses siege then? with all the defenses removed, 8 purges start to work on the planet i left behind. takes just as long as 2 cap ships doing nothing but. in fact, i think its faster. i dunno, i'll have to test it out now that i'm thinking about it. but you move your fleet on instead of trying to destroy one planet. its what siege is for. if we are gonna talk about sucky ships, how about the advents hysteria? or whatever that is. that power sucks. or was it a percentage? damn, can't remember now. oh well, cheers.

First everybody complains that they are too powerful..
Then they got a tiiny hitpoint nerf.
Now you complain that they are too weak?
LOL, is what the devs must say while reading this

20 of them can destroy any homeworld no matter how upgraded it is, within minutes.
As long as you have normal fighting ships to take the heat, OBVIOUSLY.
You wouldnt send just 20 catapults to lay siege to a medieval city, they would be burned down in under an hour.
You bring armies as well.

Humans use them, not just the AI.



3 hanger defenses will not dent a siege frigate raid - you will lose your home planet, even after buying bomb shelters. I have the video to prove it (I even played Advent, with teched up hangers for more fighters), and these are the nerfed siege frigates, not the original ones before the patch.

The last thing siege frigates need are a rebuff. If anything, their survivability needs to be nerfed down even more.

The problem with siege frigates is that a bunch of siege frigates can completely level the planet before your defenses can do anything about them: Even if you have a massive armada of ships, 60 siege frigates will likely wipe out your planet before you can kill them. This led to massive siege-frigate-spam. Personally, I think the problem is that siege frigates are too hard to kill, not that they took up too little supply: They should be made more crunchy, less supply-intensive. The 12 supply costs kinda makes them a questionable purchase, as I'm not certain 3 siege frigates do as much damage as a capship for the same supply cost.

Staticguy, it sounds to me like everything in the scenario you described is as a result of you expanding too fast, having too little mobility on your defensive screen, having too few recon assets, neglecting planetary defence, and concentrating your forces too much.

3 siege frigates is only going to be a danger to a planet(oid) with 1500hp - no planet upgrades or bomb shelters or hangars or similar. A single hangar with two groups of fighters should be able to deal with that, if that is all there is, extremely easily. Fighters love running into unescorted siege frigates. Don't depend on static guns - static guns are best at defending orbital structures in a big tight ball shape and a repair yard buffing them. Use hangars to cover the whole gravity well.

If you have lumped your entire fleet into one group and have nothing operating as a fast picket line for defense in back, why on earth wouldn't another player take advantage of that? You left this big tempting target out in the open and defended it with a wish that someone wouldn't come and do something horrible to it. Can you see why that would not work well as a defence? If your fleet is on the far side of 3 jumps away from a fresh planet, you have taken them too far away to be useful as a defensive force. When you say 'fleet', you mean you lumped every ship you had into one group and sent them all off to the front, don't you? That is a super bad idea.

What is the state of your reconnaissance that someone is able to sneak those ships up on you? Not good, I'll bet. Once you have the first fleet cap upgrade you should try and make about 5-10% of your total fleet in scouts. Good intelligence is critical. If you are in a fight somewhere else they are nice and fast and can assemble and hit someone in their back territory, harass strung out rally pointed reinforcements as they are mobilised, etc. Scouts rule.

On SFs generally - I think a small nudge downwards in upkeep would make siege frigates a bit more useful online. I haven't found much reason to ever build more than a couple. In a few games I have not even bothered researching them. They just do not look like a good deal as compared to the siege-specific cap ships (evacuator, marza, the advent one with terrorise, etc). The problem with them offline is more to do with the AI being completely stupid and making whole fleets out of them and a cap ship, which is half the reason it plays such a terrible game of Sins. It does not understand fleet composition or the underlying economic game well at all. Siege frigates have very low bang for buck right now.

so fighters do more damage to SF's than bombers? I can never remember all the armour types, i wish it would tell you (I.E WC3 or something)