I highly recommend turrets. HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend. Much more durable, cheaper and the AI doesn't auto-target them as your first buildings to be destroyed. (With all upgrades, your turrets have 18 armor btw, more than your level 10 battleship. and some great damage and range - again with upgrades)

And for turrets. STICK THEM AROUND YOUR PLANET. They cost 1 slot! One! Ring your planet and then stick some more around likely angles of attack and the locations you have your logistics buildings.

2-3 Repair bays. 2-3 Hangars. 1 Shield generator. 12-18 turrets. It works a charm (and theres no easy counter, unlike human players who can just build a huge fleet of carriers, build a ton of fighters and jump insystem and oh look, your hangar defenses just got invalidated if you built nothing but hangars.

He can't rush your planet cause of the shield generator... he can't just go after the shield generator (he'll take a pounding by all your turrets the whole time). And it takes forever to clear very many turrets. They have a LOT of hp and armor. All of which helps you buy a LOT of time for your fleet to get there and sandwhich them between your defenses and your fleet.

No, turrets won't kill ships jumping around the edges of your system, no turrets won't rape capital ships. But they aren't as easily countered, they'll hold your position longer (to wait for your fleet to jump and in smash his) and at the end of the day you'll be left with a lot more of them and a lot more money to buy more defenses.

The short version. Two turrets. Roughly 9000 hp with all upgrades. 36dps Two tactical slots. 500 credits, 250 metal, 100 crystal. What part of this doesn't sound like a good deal?

I'm talking for TEC anyway, Vasari/Advent turrets slightly different (But still follow the same strategy pretty much)

As for your fleets... don't spread them out. Keep a couple scoutships around to keep up with things but group your ships together... have a defense fleet and a offense fleet. Otherwise you'll get destroyed piecemeal. Enemies will run from larger fleets (thus you don't have to replace units) or fight it out... and lose a few/potentially all... whereas if you have just a few units and keep sending small groups of units your GUARANTEED to lose a few or potentially lose them all anyway.



Its worthwhile once you get the multiple ships affected at one time research for the supressor

Why even make hangars? Bombers are only good against heavy cruisers or capships and if your enemy is attacking with those chances are it's a fleet. It's not possible to make enough hangars to get enough bombers to even dent a decent heavy cruiser fleet. Most times the enemy can probably just ignore your bombers. That's all assuming they use heavy crusiers. If they spam light frigates hangars are absolutely useless.

Turrets are pretty useless too. Unless you make dozens your planet will have a bind spot and your enemy can just ignore them. Even then if you take them out one at a time they will barely hurt your fleet. If they are too close together to take out one at a time chances are they are less concentrated at another angle and you can just attack from there.

It makes more sense to me to use the money you would spend on defenses for every single frontier planet, spam lots of heavy cruisers, put them in a defense fleet and station them where they can get to any of your frontier worlds fast. It doesn't even have to be that fast really; killing off one planet takes a while and even if they finish the job before you get there it's cheap to rebuild. Way cheaper than building massive defenses that will at most distract the enemy fleet. Until they make turrets that can fire from one end of the system to another or hangars that hold more than 2 squads it just seems like a waste.

Why make Hangars? Well as Advent your turrets are pretty weak compared to the rest. However you have 9 bombers / squad à 3 squads / hangar = 27 bombers / hangar. Build 4 hangars, 2 with bombers, 2 with fighters as advent, have a few repair stations and throw in a Halycon carrier as mobile defense flanked by iconus guardians and illuminators. That is one hell of a pain to bust through (if your not vasari and got phase missiles). Let the bombers do their job and the fighters theirs. At the end of the day you can beat most offenses that way.
Note I am not saying it is an idiot safe strategy. There is nothing as that It all depends on the situation.