novalith bombardment from fortified position

I know that a planet with maximum health and a planetary shield will hold out against a shot or two. Any other planetary recovery options are also good ideas. Keep colony frigates in orbit to get your assets back ASAP.

As far as digging the enemy out, I'm assuming you're playing with Entrenchment at least? If that's the case, you're biggest issue will be well placed starbases and fighters. That means Gardas to cover your arse, Hoshikos to repair your guys in field, and probably LRM/bombers to deliver hell.

I suggest having Ogrovs as a separate force. Bring in your main battle fleet to draw attention and engage (keep bombers docked until their fighters have madea  pass and the flak thins them out). If the starbase is close to where you jump in, then give your guys a moment to take up the enemy's attention and bring in Ogrovs to focus on the starbase. If the starbase is at a distance, then wait until the enemy fleet is on the run or dead and then bring in Ogrovs. Your fleet should be on Hold Position so that you can A) let your bombers reach out and do the work for you, avoid letting your guys drift within range of the starbase, and C) micro manage your fleet as you see fit without them shuffling off at odd times.

I'm sure there are better ways to handle this, but you've already let them build the weapons, so you're already waist deep.

This is only a good idea if you have vanilla Sins, and I don't think the AI uses novaliths in those. Novaliths can be easily counter by getting the auxiliary government upgrade on your starbases. They'll still leave a dent in your credit income but you won't have to recolonize and reupgrade the planets. And as the TEC on a large map credits should not be much of a problem.

Completely forgot about that. Yeah, haven't let the enemy get a hold of those beasts in a long time. Out of practice in such a situation.

Build a starbase on all your planets you care about and get the Auxilary Government upgrade, and think about sending in a raiding force of Ogrovs/Hoshiko/flak (hold position) to harass the enemy shooting Novalith warheads at you.

As for your main battle fleet, if you're still having problems rolling the Easy AI in a reasonable amount of time, just spam bombers along with a bit of flak... the AI has no idea how to deal with large numbers of enemy bomber squadrons.

I eventually "convinced" the enemy to "donate a large ammount of funds to my cause, the ai is now friendly with me and we negotiated a cease fire, now i have wiped the other ai out of my system and have 5 novaliths bombarding him from afar, ui have three starbases covering the star at my system aswell as a fleet of light carriers. i think ill be ok. but thanks for the help

I was curious, is there much turtling in this game to build up for an ultimate weapon, such as the Novalith? 

For example, Rush to a choke point planet next to their home star system (or close to it anyways) and then build up a fleet there and force him to attack you when you are strongest. In then mean time, you can work on the planets you skipped and colonizing them.

Then from there the turtling strategy would be to setup your novaliths and lob them at the enemy while you continue to build your fleet. I understand that Auxilary Government would mean that he wouldn't lose the planet, but there would be income loss correct? And when your fleet is sufficiently ready, go in and wipe him out?

Turtling really isn't a great strategy to Sins. At the least you have to expand quickly early game to get say six-eight planets to be able to have enough logistics space to get all the labs needed to research novaliths while supporting a big enough economy to be able to afford them and enough of a fleet/defense to keep bigger empires from defeating you. It can be done but its not as easy in Sins as in many other RTS games.

Novaliths and super weapons in general are rarely used in ICO since games rarely get that long to even field them and frankly they really arn't worth the cost. But if it does than the only situation where it is probably "acceptable" to build one would be in the eco slot since you have no worries of the emeny jumping in on yah as soon as you attempt to build one.

Turtling works well against AI. Actually almost anything works well against AI since for defense they just throw themselves againsts the SBs.

Tis true, the AI is not the smartest cookie in the world.. or universe for our purposes. But they say in Rebellion they will get smarter, so here's to hoping that instead of throwing themslves at starbases, they throw cake... I like cake.

Not really; the problem is that turtling tends to result in your economy being smaller than the enemy's, so they will probably reach superweapons first if you do this.

The most deadly way to use Novaliths on large scenarios is actually to spend everything on economy and rely on allies for defense.  Build up to a safe income (say 150 credits per second) and then start spamming novaliths.  Once you have 4-6 novaliths to shell enemy planets, switch your production to light carriers with bombers to go for the kill (either that or just send your income to an ally).

Yes; the problem is that while you are spending money on defenses and superweapons, he's spending it on military power.  Unless you thoroughly outplayed him in the early portion of the game and have your opponent boxed in with few options (he should just surrender at this point, and conventional military victory would easy anyways) he will be ready to attack you before you're ready to attack him.

In games against the AI? (I assume that's the context because that's what the OP was talking about) Yes, that's a strategy that works if you don't mind long games.

A bit. At that point in the game you should be getting oodles of income from many sources and it shouldn't be that significant, especially compared to the cost and fragility of an AI's Novalith.

All this said, the non-insane difficulty AIs (Unfair and below) can often easily be taken out just with plain LRM spam in less than an hour. No need to turtle.

I suppose I didn't quite make clear what I meant by "turtling". It's not true turtling in the sense you build up defenses around your planet and sit there. I would call it more aggressive turtling, in that you push out and colonize a planet close to their home system, preferrably at a choke point system and then backfill the other colonies while building that planet, as your fortress world. And I wasn't talking about rushing Novalith, but more building an nice big white picket fence and throwing nuclear goodness accross space. Anyways, I suppose that idea has been busted pretty well.

On the other hand, I was curious how aggressive player should be throughout the game. I understand that in the beginning, being aggressive with colonization can certainly pay dividends in the mid and late game. But does the average MP match come down to whoever get's the best position (i.e. a choke point world where he builds a fleet and a starbase to dare his opponent to come) and the other player trying to find a way to counter that position or at least spread out his fleet through the use of raids that weaken the fortress planet?

So passive-aggressive pressure game?  Yeah, that's totally different.  Novaliths can definitely be used as a coup-de-grace in that case, but there are lots of great tools at your disposal for achieving the same thing.  Knocking on their door with a force of 20 light carriers all loaded with bombers would be just as devastating.

Aggressive ploys are very important to gameplay.  If the enemy invests heavily in starbases to fortify key worlds, you need to get under his skin.  That starbase only protects one gravity well, so you want to find a way to attack other locations and take advantage of all that money he has tied up in an immobile battlestation.