No. Siege frigates are only worth bombing specific planets that are easy to take out.

Homeworlds have too much health to bomb, and those are almost solely responsible for a player's credit income.

But, you get kudos from me if you can show me a replay where you sieged a home world to death without having a fleet to fleet confrontation at the homeworld (I mean like.. in multiplayer against a human).

However, if you could siege rush a player's frigate factory asteroid and therefore cripple his production base that would be shmart, but because this only works in very specific situations and basically relies on your opponents incompetence, it is a bad plan. Siege ships are very expensive and so producing enough of them to "take out" your opponent's planets means you will produce significantly fewer ships for your main fleet.

MAIN COUNTER - SIEGE FRIGATE ARGUMENT:

If you are producing ships that do not embolden your main fleet you will instantly lose your entire main battle fleet against a skilled opponent. Which is better.. taking an asteroid out and losing your fleet, or not losing your fleet. Hrmmnn.

In this game once you've lose your fleet you've lost the game so.. focus on weakening and taking our your enemy's fleet first. Everything else comes second. Get siege ships only after your enemy's fleet is dead. Period.

Oh but, on another note, this dude above me is right about the siege caps. Still though better to get more long range frigates, but siege caps are fun; it's your call. Just don't complain when you should have gotten more functionally cost effective frigates.

You don't have to take the planet out... just the people

^ pretty much....

i'm the #1 siege hater...

i will not say i 'never' build them, but they are basically useless IMO 85% of the time. i can sit here and theorize crazy situations that i would like to have a chunk of them (the best of which is i have a fleet advantage i want to capitalize on to keep the pressure going), but unless i'm 250+ total supply or w/e, i don't want any sieges in my fleet. they are useful past this point to allow your main force to move on and continue expansion (i usually play multis).

the marginal advantage of bombing someones base just slightly faster for 525 cred/12 supply (i play visari) is way too much risk when compared to keeping fleet parody, or better yet, fleet advantage.

i played against an AI while i was having some probs connecting yesterday due to patch issues, had 4 sieges in the ai's homeworld... and it still took them a good 5 mins + to nuke its planet. thats 48 supply to still take forever to clear a planet. only reason i bought them at all is i had the compus planets cleared and just needed to bomb it out of the game and was trying to speed that process up.

i'd much rather have a siege cap that has some use in ship to ship combat any day of the week. i think by the time 4+ sieges are purchased, its pretty close to the credit/supply cost of a siege cap when compared to the double duty that a siege cap does...

i'm not 100% on how much better sieges are at clearing structures, but in all honesty, normal fleets do this just fine on their own.

Just so I'm not being confusing about my position, I'm not advocating getting extra capital ships just to siege; just that if sieging planets quickly is a priority for you, you might consider a siege cap instead of a battleship. Truthfully, I find that the siege caps are somewhat misnamed. A better description would be 'battleship optimized for long range combat with additional special abilities for planetary assault'. But that's far too long to put on an info card, after all.

The problem with siege frigates (especially if you are tec) is that it's more useful to build a sieging cap ship (especially the marza) instead of 3 siege frigates and a single light frigate in terms of fleet capacity usage.

Lately I've been toying with twin marza's and they can take down a reinforced planet in a very ridiculously small amount of time. Now, I have actually smashed someone's home world with two marza's (level 4 and 3) while my fleet was holding off my enemies fleet at one of my border planets. Gotta love repair bays though.

But this of course is a bit overkill anyway since a single marza can rain hell down on an unreinforced world, and I'd rather have more ships and research instead of a second super expensive floating bulls eye.

Siege ships use their normal laser to take out structures. Their normal laser does junk for damage. So I'll have to say that siege ships aren't made to destroy structures at all.

No. You're wrong.

Compare them to a siege cap.

But if you use scouts and find undefended planets, this can be a good way to distract an opponent while he attacks you. Send two or three to his planet while he attacks. It is important to note that you should not do this if you are near full fleet capacity. Otherwise, they aren't really too expensive.

To kill a planet quickly enough you need at least 10 siege frigs. That's 150 supply. So the enemy will have twice your LRM and he will totally own your fleet and win the game. But you took out one tiny planet (if, and that's a big if, he didn't bother to defend). Yay!

I may be strange, but I found these ships to work just fine against CPU's...just not for what they are designed for. If you phase in a small group of siege ships, the CPU who owns the planet instantly diverts its forces to fight them. This really helps, especially when you are about to lose a capital ship.

On another note, if you don't like them as they are, just mod the ships. This is easy, unless you are playing online...the download is small and easy to use.

This issue is bolstered by the fact that few artillery/bombardment weapons in any RTS are worth anywhere near their cost. However, SOSE is a frontline-style RTS without the ability to use terrain to protect certain ships, so this problem is extremely noticeable here.

I would also like to point out that it is extremely unwise to attack your enemy with all of your fleet and to not rebuild in the middle of the fight. You can quickly replenish your fighting forces in the middle of a battle within a few seconds while your ships are assaulting the enemy. (They are reasonable at choosing targets, so don't worry!) Leaving a few forces (I leave at least one Capital Ship and 5 frigates behind), since the enemy won't have all his/her forces in one location unless it is a pinch point of some sort. That would mean you need to same that enemy for last or get a few allies.

Fixed that for you!

20 purge vessels is 300 supply. If you turned that supply into 6 Mara's you could drop a 1500 planet in a single cast of their raze planet ability. Hell, I've had two level 3 marza's take out a 1500 planet before I could move my fleet to defend from the adjoining system so six would be hilariously overkill. 6 desolators would do it better than the purge vessels as well since they could also, you know, fight your enemy fleet.

Heck, the level 6 evacuator ability does 1300 damage to a planet and gives you a pile of cash/resources. And then you could spend those supply points on heavy cruisers or something.