Meh, counter with mass small tiny frigates of the missile / pewpew variety and use phase inhibitors at strategic points then stack on turrets in the general area where they jump out.

I wouldn't bother with hangars as much as gauss turrets that are fully upgraded (the cool down reducer is pretty hilarious ) and as a last resort for outer defense colonies don't upgrade the planet's infrastructure and leave a colony ship hanging around.

Cap ships will probably be doing most of your killing escorted with siege/other crud or perhaps you can harass while having a near perfect defense with siege spam back.

If you have 30 minutes of existence in the game, you should have 20+ siege frigates of your own or 20+ missile frigates + turrets left and right. If you are playing against many AI or just one do the missions and play it safe. Against a human, the massing should be fairly obvious(sensor upgrade perhaps?). Regardless, scout a lot more and only take planets that are easily defendable (like one that isn't linked to ten other places).

IF ALL FAILS - DO IT BACK TO THEM! =p

Random suggestion: In the event that your home planet falls and you have manage to destroy some of their fleet, pursue them and destroy them then camp their planets (20+ siege frigates isn't that light on the economy) while you rebuild.

Phase. Jump. Inhibitors . At . Key. Points.

Leave it, please! I don't want the enemy to only use predictable attacks; when I was playing earlier I never expected him to do that. For me, it happened about an hour into the game; so I could send my secondary attack force to deal with them.
By the time I was able to react, jump 3 planets and jump them I had like 2 planets (and losing the third). It wasn't hard to kill them off :/

So leave it; it's fun!

Ok, maybe the siege frigate spam strategy is viable. But the AI could use some improvement when it's targetted by such strategy. I made a test today, spammed as much siege frigs as possible right off the bat and sent them to the neighbouring enemy capital.
The poor thing sent a handful of light frigates that were easily dispatched by my carrier capital flagship that was supporting the siege frigs. Then, instead of trying to build up a force of missile and flak frigs, it built up a small fleet of siege frigates that it sent to my world instead of taking care of the attack against its capital. Needless to say, I had the whole time in the world to build up my defense before the AI could build up a sufficient force.
I fail to see the logic in that. Well, it was a 1v1 match, so maybe it took a wild gamble (somehow) trying to bust out my capital before I fried the AI's one. But in any case, it was much too late.

It is a predictable attack though, every game the same tactic is used.

Just a note...yeah I've been battling the siege on a small game for a while. Problem is that I have wedged myself between two powers. They aren't getting along but they aren't in direct contact to knock heads. So I beat back their main strike force...and try to wipe it, the other guy sneaks his siege behind me so I fall back. Using 2 repair stations, jump inhibitor and maxed bomber squad hangars...i can't beat enough out of them to regain planet health I lost. And in this game cannot get time to research the planet shields.

So it appears to be a losing battle which I can resolve by adopting the siege tactic, but I reeeally don't want to. I think they are just too tough. 16 bomber squads should make short work of large fleet of them. There just doesn't seem to be a paper for this rock. You can just make siege frigs and just on pure survival time ignore any defenses. Ships take too long and a hole can be found easy in stationary guns.

I do say though the target priority AI in this game is very impressive. I find myself needing to just let the AI pick its targets unless there is one guy that I want dead in particular.

It appears my argument about the gun platforms being to limited in range and firepower are still valid. In the beta some of us modded the hit points (HP), rate of fire (RoF) and range and things seemed to work out well at least in my opinion. For what it is worth the settings I used were:

HP: 10% +
RoF: 15% +
Range 20% +

With intelligent placement and interlocking fields of fire four gun platforms and two hangers could hold up to 20 moderately advanced siege frigates (SF) reasonible well with full planetary infrastructure.

BTW: The AI is fairly smart and that is a good thing methinks. In my last game (before it crashed) I left an opening in my rear arc due to no money and the pirates flew around my defenses and attacked via my open back door. Shortly after the AI player somehow knew or timed things perfectly and launched its fleet accordingly and arrived just as my planetary defense fleet was arriving on the other side to hit the pirates and it focused fire on my gun platforms. It was a pretty sight to see up until it crashed that is...

I don't think there is anything wrong with this tactic just it is a bit cheap. I'd rather see siege frigates alot weaker so you have to deploy them as a seperate fleet once you have breached the defences. Makes more sense that way. If your sieging a castle you don't start chucking stones at the walls until you have it surrounded.

Yeah, be carefull not to sterilize this game units by nerfing/buffing the wrong thing ^^. Btw, dont you guys think that the scout units are a bit too spam efficent?

Scouts are weak, though.

well, this has been a problem since beta, and I don't think the neff is enough, as I don't really think the problem lie with the Siege Frigate itself. It's more like how defenseless planets tend to be against seige even when you have a huge defense set up.

In my current game one of my world just got blasted to hell by a whole bunch of siege frigate, the only savior is for some odd reason the AI breaks away when my planet was only has 12 HP left from somewhere around 4500. This brings up an interesting question as of why the AI don't just finish the job, I guess they'll withdraw after certain lost but common, that was so close.

Anyway, the thing is that planet is defended by 2 capital ships and a dozen Guass Cannon, the AI attacked with about 10 Siege Frigate and the Planet has Emergency upgrade, but like I said virtually the only thing that prevent the planet from being wiped out was pure luck.


The reason I think Siege Friage should not be nerfed more because if you do, you'll have to re-write that potion of code for the AI given their obssessiveness with the ship or we just end up handicap their econ and offensenve capacity. So I'll just say what I said back in beta, if anything to be done with this problem, it probably need to come from the planet itself.

In the first place, if your fleet was somewhere else, its your fault for losing the planet. However,I have been in the same situation where my main fleet was sitting on the planet and wasn't able to kill the siege ships in time, even with all that firepower on defense, plus turrets, etc.

I always considered siege ships to be "the enemy fleet is gone, begin bombardment" and not "attack with the rest of the fleet." An HP drop would fix this, and still retain utitility and strategy; you clear out the enemy, bring in your siege equipment, and drop the colony. Also, it opens up the strategy of the defender bringing a second fleet in from behind to try to knock out the siegers, so the attacker has to be paying attention too if they want to actually take the colony.

As for AI, telling them that it is a support ship and not a front lines vessel would help fix things.

I agree, too much hp there. The siege frigs should probably just have some hp and no armor bonus or shields (you'd need to couple them with lots repair boats to have a chance to pull a similar tactic off against a defended planet).
Also they should receive such high damage against planets only after some research, early in the game it's too much. If you want to take down a planet early it should require dominating the local gravity well for a few minutes, even if two people gang up on another in multiplayer.

im a experienced/good player and tbh siege frigs are currently really to strong.
You can run with em into huge planetry defences and still kill enemy planets.
It shouldnt work this way. Siege frigs should be paper tigers. Really strong against planets but with low HP and weak armor so that any opposing force can "easily" kill em.
The way its currently is defiantly not the best and pretty cheesy.

Well, I think Siege Frigates are good enough now with their armor, hullpoints and damage ratings. However, since they carry such a heavy load of bombs, they should be as slow as coloniser ships.

The game should have a "Use no Siege Frigate" achievement

I like the idea of having siege units come in after the main fleet has mopped the defenders up. That would also require the main fleet to stick around for a few minutes if the siege frigates are low-level and take a while, in case there's a counterattack.

It seems the solution then would be, as everybody else said, to give them low HP/armor. If you think about it, a ship designed only to bombard a planet is going to be specialized, it's not going to be concerned about the armor that a ship concerned with space combat would have.

How about an additional planetary development option that places a couple of mobile turrets inside the inner ring of the build area that can attack sieging units but not much else and protects the planet from sieges.

The combo of firepower sufficient to destroy a planet, and high armor/HP does seem a little odd. Maybe they should be more like siege weapons in other games, great at what they do, but quick to die when engaged in normal combat, like a Trebuchet in Age of Empires. Then they would still be able to perform their given task, but would require support to be effective.

Another thought would be to give them less HP, but more shields, but in order to siege they need to bring thier shields down. This would make them vulnerable when nuking a planet, but tough enough when engaged in normal combat to survive on their way to their target.

I like that idea. I never use them anyway so it would be an easy achievement for me.

I really haven't had a huge problem with the AI siege frigate rush. On a freshly-conquered volcanic with ~2500 hp and no defenses when they started bombing, the defenses I built during the bombing took a group of 18 siege frigates down to 5.

I don't see a huge balance problem here, even if most people don't cram their tactical slots full of turrets. >.> Siege frigates are expensive in terms of fleet points and in terms of actual cost. To put together a siege frigate rush, your opponent is seriously handicapping him/her/itself when it comes to actual combat.

I think an elegant solution would be to allow flak frigates to shoot down the bombardment missiles to some extent. Perhaps one flak would be able to knock out two thirds of a siege frigate's bombardment missiles - I don't know, I leave the fine balancing to the devs. But..

It provides a hard counter to the strategy
It doesn't make flak overpowered in any other situation
It makes sense from a realism/functional perspective
The siege spam strategy can still work on an unprepared player

Due to the fact that you have an infinite economy model (upkeep system makes it manageable) the main way to raid the enemy is not killing mines, but rather planets. In order to do this the Siege Frigate must have some survivability, otherwise they become solely a mop-up tool... Which is frankly boring.

Paradoxnt's suggestion of reducing their speed is much more apt... the siege raid will destroy the intended first target, but all the remaining ships will never escape, and it will be much harder for them to penetrate into your empire and destroy capital planets as they will have to slowly move through defended systems... this will also give your reinforcements more time.

Its a much more elegant fix than having the ship explode like so much pop-corn to the slightest laser fire.

The siege raid should be effective, but this would make it much more risky as you can only count on it taking out 1 border planet... if you press forward you will run into reinforcements you can't out run, and if you try to go too deep you will definately be harrassed to death before reaching the target.

Reduce the speed and it becomes more believable too... those nukes must weigh allot no?

I haven't been on the recieving end of a Siege Rush yet, but I have witnessed the AIs use it against each other. In my current game with Two AIs, both of them have built up large (15+) fleets of nothing but Siege frigates. This appears to have happened becuase one AI built up a Siege fleet and destroyed one of his colonies...so instead of sending a fleet to destroy this Siege fleet, the other AI simply built a huge siege fleet of his own and sent it out to destroy his enemies colonies..so in this one system we have a "musical chairs" style war where two siege fleets are simply moving from planet to planet in a cyclical fashion. I even witnessed the two fleets move past each other through the same gravity well without even engaging...they completely ignored each other. Both AIs have also massed all of their Capital ships into one fleet, which they use to chase after each others Siege fleets...but beucae of the Siege Frigates' high defense values, they can only take out a handful of frigates before their planet is destroyed (and this is with THREE capital ships) at which point the survivng frigates just jump away and attack the next planet. I am just glad that they haven't sent any of these siege fleets my way...yet.

I am not sure what the best way to correct this "problem" is. Personally, I would have prefered it if the only ships capable of bombarding a planet were capital ships. At the very least, siege frigates should really be more like siege crusiers that can't be built untill after conducting extensive research...and even then, they should be slow and lightly defended so that they have to be combined with other ships for support. They should be treated more like the Missile Frigates, which require other ships to defend them becuase they are pretty weak defensively. Homogeneous Siege Fleets feel too "gimicky" to me...

Just my Two Cents...

Everyone is listing huge changes and additions instead of realizing the simplest fix..

Just reduce their healthpoints...
Make them as vounerable as scouts, so you NEED normal ships to escort them.

Fixed And they didnt have to become nerfed in any way, damage-dealing wise..
Also, that way the defence turrets and bombers in hangar bays would be a great defence against them, since thats really what they are for too. To defend the planet.
How best to defend a planet than to take out the only ships that can bomb it?

So really you have 2 fixes, 1: it fixes the seige frigate overpowering, 2: it fixes the uselessness of turrets/hangar bays.

Counter to this strategy: A few well placed gaus canons around your planet will wipe them out.