Tips for defeating a devouring swarm?

[Exanthos]

So my friend and I are in a multiplayer game with two devouring swarms. Between us and those two, we pretty much cleaned the galaxy up. Our fleets were recently ground down to almost nothing in our latest conquests, and now one of the swarms, which holds about a third of the galaxy, is targeting us for integration/extermination. Our closest defense stations have been wiped out by two 40k fleets, a 50k fleet, and they have a 30k fleet coming.

So does the community have any tips? I already drained all of my sector resource pools to rebuild my fleet, and their fleets are currently being held off by some fortress planets.

[Shinzor]

Let them push in till you rebuild your fleet(or you are wasting ships) just use your stations to hold/weaken/slow them down till you rebuild OR if you have a fleet that could match them with the help of a station then turtle at a chokepoint till you have the ships to fight back, I ALWAYS leave one fleet behind in order to defend my stuff so this does not happen to me, they can normally hold on there own but work especialy well with defence stations and a gateway so my fleet travel time is down I also always place one gateway at all my shipyards and frontline chokepoints, since the L-cluster came out I sit them at the gateway I build in the L-cluster so enimes are less likely to come through and attack me through my own L-gate since they can use those gateways as a shortcut to you while at war unlike normal gateways

[Botji]

Devouring Swarms can be kinda hard to beat if they manage to grow large, usually the AI around them gang up on them so this rarely happens though.

Aside from the general advice Shinzor gave I can only give you a tip that weapons that have bonus damage against HULL is very useful against a DS since they have a +25% hull bonus on their ships which is a huge bonus.

So plasma weapons and proton/neutron launchers combined with something to nuke their shields quickly, giga cannon/kinetic artillery tends to be effective but smaller weapons might be better if they have tons of corvettes.

[Hat8]

The benefit of large empires is space for time. You can drain them through attrition to a white peace or hold out until you're reorganized for a major counter attack. I recommend trading research agreements and active sensor with any other remaining powers for resources. You have a friend so you should find a way to unify (follow command) your fleets to create a death stack. Rampaging through their empire, ignoring planets, to draw them away from your systems is a good bet.