Gordian Knot of a problem...

Go around it, or use ability disables/antimatter drains.

That said, getting a cluster of 3 repair platforms surrounded by batteries *and* ships is not really an early-game setup for any planet that's not the absolute choke point

Also, the different races get varying mileage out of their repair bays. TEC's with the upgrade are the best in terms of repair amounts, Vasari are the worst, sitting at a paltry 15hp/s if I remember right. Advent is in the middle

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Go around it, or use ability disables/antimatter drains.

Which abilities would you suggest?

That said, getting a cluster of 3 repair platforms surrounded by batteries *and* ships is not really an early-game setup for any planet that's not the absolute choke point

Well, if we forget about the batteries (neither of the two situations I had last night featured them) we've just got the cost of three repair bays. The fleet is there anyway; it's just the battle-line at that stage of the game, in a defensive stance.

Also, the different races get varying mileage out of their repair bays. TEC's with the upgrade are the best in terms of repair amounts, Vasari are the worst, sitting at a paltry 15hp/s if I remember right. Advent is in the middle

I dunno- I agree about the TEC version being best, but the Vasari version turned a dozen Assailants into a wall'o'doom.

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Which abilities would you suggest?

The Advent Radiance Battleship has an ability to do damage over time that also disables ability use. Disciples also get Steal Antimatter with 3 military labs, so that's pretty handy also.

Vasari Kortul gets a passive that has a change to disable abilities on anything it hits, which is pretty good since it's always on. I forget now if the Antorak can phase out structures, but if it can then that's 2 (or all 3) mostly out of the fight. Since Vasari is more about brute force anyway, the Vulkoras gets a passive for a lot of bonus damage against structures, so you can just plow straight through their repairing.

TEC Dunovs get an EMP bomb that depletes antimatter en masse, and their scouts get an ability to make antimatter go boom, tailored specifically to structures.

Obviously there are also some later game support ships that can disable repair stations, but since we're talking early/mid game I didn't include those

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Siege the planet.

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Siege the planet.

An interesting solution. Two questions-

1) How do you get the seige units past the LRMs without them getting shot all to peices?

2) How does this help you against the Repair Bays? They don't leave when the planet goes up.

Sure, if you dodge the LRMs (not at all easy in a small system) you can kill the planet... but what if the planet's a next-to-useless (or entirely useless!) asteroid? What have you gained for the loss of your seige frigates?

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The classical thing I see people coming in from the single player game doing, is they build this magical defensive ring of turrets all the way around the planet - it's strong everywhere and usually they'll do it so that any two turrets in the ring can hit the same point. It's truly the bees knees for killing all those siege frigate raids the AI loves so much. But it's useless against anyone who thinks to stay out of range and fairly useless against pirates.

By the time people have a few online games down they realise the repair bay is probably the most useful tactical structure, and they build - as you say - a knot of them around their orbital structures and some turrets, and this is great for keeping out pirates, delaying someone intent on raiding your structures and making a light defensive force hold out until something bigger can be brought up. But it's not strong everywhere anymore, and the planet is now vulnerable to that same blind spot siege frigate raiding the turret ring is designed to kill. They are going to have to move their ships out of the repair zones and turret coverage to get a good shot at something around the blind side of the planet, or limit their real DPS microing them in and out of the bays.

In the case of an asteroid - you will get cases where since the asteroid is smaller than a planet, the turrets and ships can shoot around it from cover. Fortunately, asteroids tend not to last very long under siege even if someone goes to all the expense of upgrading their health all the way and putting a mass of tactical structures on it - money that could have been spent on something more mobile and dangerous than a turtle lair. You can always skip their asteroid and go for their home base making the entire defensive ring irrelevent. That's another thing I would love to see more of online - it is often easier to 'retreat forward' deeper into enemy territory than it is to stick around and break against a big defensive array and then go backwards to your territory, but hardly anyone ever seems to do it.

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Send in a mass of LRMs and take out the Assailants, then the turrets, retreating or repairing LRMs as needed. With enough time, the repair bays will use up their antimatter. Also could send in a few flaks first to pester the assailants and keep them off your own LRMs. Flaks have good resistance to LRMs and generally good hull strength. This puts the enemy in a dilemma: Start losing assailants to flaks, or focus on the flaks with the turrets and try to ignore the missiles inbound. Your advantage is that the enemy can't retreat once in this hidy-hole, but you can.

Then again, if the enemy has spent this cash updating defenses, you'd probably be better off ignoring them and maxing out your empire to come back later game and wipe the floor with them.

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The classical thing I see people coming in from the single player game doing, is they build this magical defensive ring of turrets all the way around the planet - it's strong everywhere and usually they'll do it so that any two turrets in the ring can hit the same point. It's truly the bees knees for killing all those siege frigate raids the AI loves so much. But it's useless against anyone who thinks to stay out of range and fairly useless against pirates.By the time people have a few online games down they realise the repair bay is probably the most useful tactical structure, and they build - as you say - a knot of them around their orbital structures and some turrets, and this is great for keeping out pirates, delaying someone intent on raiding your structures and making a light defensive force hold out until something bigger can be brought up. But it's not strong everywhere anymore, and the planet is now vulnerable to that same blind spot siege frigate raiding the turret ring is designed to kill. They are going to have to move their ships out of the repair zones and turret coverage to get a good shot at something around the blind side of the planet, or limit their real DPS microing them in and out of the bays.In the case of an asteroid - you will get cases where since the asteroid is smaller than a planet, the turrets and ships can shoot around it from cover. Fortunately, asteroids tend not to last very long under siege even if someone goes to all the expense of upgrading their health all the way and putting a mass of tactical structures on it - money that could have been spent on something more mobile and dangerous than a turtle lair. You can always skip their asteroid and go for their home base making the entire defensive ring irrelevent. That's another thing I would love to see more of online - it is often easier to 'retreat forward' deeper into enemy territory than it is to stick around and break against a big defensive array and then go backwards to your territory, but hardly anyone ever seems to do it.

Perhaps you're right. "Go around" may be the best solution to this, at least until you get some mobile healer-ships.

Still, that does leave a pile of LRMs just looking for something to do... at the very least, a threat in being. I think I'll continue with a couple of repair bays at important or pirate-prone planets, just in case.

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Of course a hangar bay or two with some fighter squadrons works wonders against seige frigates, dont they?

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If they have hangars too I am going to have to ask:

a) what asteroid is this that has repair bays, turrets and enough hangars to stomp your fleet and kill siege frigates

how early on in the game we're now talking about.

c) what the budget is for making this fantastic turtleroid

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would be the key. Repair stations and a small number of ships would qualify as "early game", but stations + hangars + turrets + mass of LRFs would likely not

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would be the key. Repair stations and a small number of ships would qualify as "early game", but stations + hangars + turrets + mass of LRFs would likely not

Bingo. I'm not talking about a turtle approach, really- just a forward fleet base. Two repair bays (three max), plus the LRF fleet that always seems to pop up at about that time (because the counters to LRFs all seem to be Miltech 4+). Park next to a choke-point, perferably as in-your-face to your opponent as you can get.

But yea, "going around" seems to be the consensus here.

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If they have hangars too I am going to have to ask: ...

boxox has a good point. To get all this planet infrastructure/tech/crystals in place to create such a defense, it will take time. Time/resources that are not used in expanding, ship spamming or investing in other techs (econ/mil boom types).

I would venture to guess, that all the while a defense such as this is being put up, a good counter that could be created with the same amount of time/resources would be a large balanced fleet to overcome a sturdy defensive perimeter with a few LRFs. (how much can one afford after spending so much on infrastructure and static defenses?)

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If they have hangars too I am going to have to ask: ...boxox has a good point. To get all this planet infrastructure/tech/crystals in place to create such a defense, it will take time. Time/resources that are not used in expanding, ship spamming or investing in other techs (econ/mil boom types).I would venture to guess, that all the while a defense such as this is being put up, a good counter that could be created with the same amount of time/resources would be a large balanced fleet to overcome a sturdy defensive perimeter with a few LRFs. (how much can one afford after spending so much on infrastructure and static defenses?)

It really can't. Repair bays offer a very significant increase in your military ability. Combined with the Marauder, it's really mean. For example, you can have the 3 repair stations repairing a unit that's in red health getting focus fired then phase it out. While it's phased out, it keeps healing. When it comes out of phase, it will have 80-100% hull back again.

If they have a bunch of repair stations up, probably the best thing to do is to go attack a different planet. Mess up their economy on other planets - they can't have them all defended. Force them to come to you.

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Go around it to the next planet, duh..

Antorak can phase out all 3 of them non stop.
AM disables work, drains work (disciples can drain 25 per 15 sec or so).
Or simply overwhelm the repair rate with lots of damage. Yeah tons of things work..

Of course defended planets are going to have a little advantage.

If this was so omg unstoppable then wouldn't games never ever end since no one could attack? Yeahhhhh.

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Vasari Kortul gets a passive that has a change to disable abilities on anything it hits, which is pretty good since it's always on.

disruptive strikes:
doesn't disable, only increase the cooldown and depletes antimatter, which in this case against repair bays with 5 to 6 second cooldowns doesnt come close to disabling them.

anyway some exact info
chance to trigger: 35% and only from the beam/wave attacks, not all attacks.
mana depleted: 8/12/16
cooldown increase: 10%/20%/30%
lasts 10 seconds.
can stack.

basically under max power surge and level 10, the beam/wave each hit every 2.25/2.47 seconds and have 35% chance trigger this.

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Well most of this has been covered but anyway:

Just go around and attack another planet, the cost of 3 Repair Bays, the tech to use them and a tactical slot upgrade costs roughly 2050, 450, 325. Sure it'll stop someone from rushing and actually nuking your planet but it'll leave you with less ships, (5 LRM for Advent/Vasari and 8 for TEC if that's the spam of the day).

Considering that at the start of the game its more about map control/colonisation and building an economy. This money could be far better spent of spanking your opponent in the middle of the map or researching econ upgrades. Both of which will lead to a stronger economy and more ships and essentially, dominance of the game. Tactical structures are more something that I build in the mid-game or occasionally in the early-mid game to protect a key planet, a choke point or Gateway for example.

As to actually getting around somebody using mass repair bays early in the game. Just leave them, always attack the weakest planet of interest and if there's no weak planet because the person is spending loads on defence then just take the rest of the map and sit back and box them in with your stronger economy until you can overwhelm their defences. Its generally a bad idea to attack a planet with an weaker or equal force anyway.

Alternatively you can just send in your fleet, move outside the range of the repair bays/turrets and hit any structures that are left, even extractors will do. Since your opponent will probably have the weaker fleet, they're left with the choice of letting you trash their structures or engaging you and losing, in which case you can take out the repair bays anyway. Once you've taken out any vulnerable structures, just move onto the next planet. If you do have an overwhelming number of ships, just nuke the repair bays and get started on the frigates, they're great for supporting a fleet and certainly worth building but they're not invincible.

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Gordian Knot of a problem...

...and I'm having trouble of thinking of a sword sharp enough.