How to deal with insane enemy Federation-Fleets

[baryonischer]

Hi,

I'm just wondering, I'm just a couple of years away from winning my actual match, so I tried as a last action to kill the fleet of the one federation who's left and found out it's just impossible.
I have 9 fleets everyone at a power level of around 230.000, per fleet about 25 battleships, and the rest ships from every category.

The Enemy is a 3-member federation with 28 fleets, ranging from 10k to 100k power, but they always move in one block, they never split and if I attack, I get destroyed.

How is the game plan to deal with these never-splitting blocks, half of the game they are moving and acting as one.
while my allies don't give a ♥♥♥♥ about my fleetposition, they never move together with me. The only way I survived the last war with the Federation was to just move in circles avoiding the enemy fleet and retaking in an endless circle all they took before, negative fun for sure...we never actually battled each other in a fleet fight.

How to deal with that, just killing every federation right after they formed or what?

[Geoff]

Originally posted by baryonischer:

How to deal with that, just killing every federation right after they formed or what?

If you can do that, yeah do that. Don't let hostile federations coalesce on your doorstep. One way to torpedo federations is to start several of your own, then abandon them. That can give you a bunch of smaller federations which then can't diplomatically react with one another as much as they could before.

The easiest way to deal with the Federation Doomstack is to flow around it. Let it come into your territory, then swoop in behind it and cut it off from reinforcements and, if you want, gradually drain it down.

Alternatively you can use it as a "practice crisis" fleet, which means - figure out how much firepower (and what kind of firepower) you need to bring to the party to get the fireworks you want to see. If I have to bring down a federation fleet with swarms of smaller fleets, I pay pretty close attention to who enters the system first. I like to enter with a wall of battleships to absorb that first volley and then the titans and smaller ships arrive in a second wave so they get a chance to get their licks in before they die. And then just.... trial and error. If nine fleets doesn't work, bring ten.

[Unimportant]

Use "take point". So allies may follow your fleet.

[Cellar_Cat]

Did you set your fleet to 'take point'? It's supposed to make your allies follow. I don't typically bother with AI allies to know how well that works in practice however.

My initial thought would be, have one fleet back-cap them like you were doing before, but send another (or more) to capture their own stuff. If you aren't going to win a fight anyway you don't need all your fleet power in one place. They might be unstoppable but if they stick together they're limited to doing one thing at a time.

If you have the time to prepare, you could try some eccentric builds meant to counter them. Like piercing weapons. If they're so big, they might be willing to jump in on top of you at close range, negating the range penalty of a disruptor fleet. Be sure to throw on every applicable fleet buff edict before the fight.

Or else a very artillery focused build for raw alpha-strike damage with every range bonus you can stack. The AI build quite evenly spread arrays of weapon types in a lot of cases so if you're engaging from extreme range (or right up close) they may never get to fire a lot of their weapons.

You could also, if you have made any, hire a few mercenary fleets to join in. Try to time it so you only have to pay the energy upkeep briefly and use them as a meat-shield for your better composed personal fleets.

[Cellar_Cat]

Oh, and, there are also static options, like setting up a fleet buffing starbase with loads of artillery defense platforms, so that while your mobile fleet is fighting them the L guns are firing over its shoulders. Or building for oddities like a system that strips shields, if you have one you know you can get them into.

[Malkuth]

Take point is amazing. And it works too if you have allies. I use it all the time, and it saves my fleets lots of losses.