The boring back and forth chase

Have to agree, also need to reduce their hp ammounts, i'm sick of losing colonies to swarms of 15-20 bombers who just run in,kill the planet,then move onto the next one.

please make phase inhibitors stop all outgoing traffic!

simple solution: don't chase them ...

have decent tactical defenses and some ships at the planets they are coming to... the only ships i chase are cap ships cause i can gravity beam/ion cannon them from jumping and destroy them...

remember the enemy will stop running when you've chased him back to his home planet and are bombarding it

Having played a few random huge games with unlocked teams against hard AI, successfully, I can safely say it's not a problem. If you ever lose a planet to less than 30 siege frigates in the late game, you're really blowing it.

Hangar bays and max infrastructure. Every real planet should have 16-20 tactical points of hangar bays in with a healthy spread of turrets backed up by repair platforms to cover them all. You can get by with marginal 360 coverage from the turrets and focus them on the most likely lines of attack, but the bombers will give you the biggest force at any point. The ai is presently too dumb to take advantage of it, you can go all hangars and do even better, you'll drop a lot faster against a real fleet though.

You'll still lose the occasional asteroid, and if they really hit you with a big one, you might even lose the defenses rapidly enough to have to redo the whole thing. Playing ping pong with destructor fleets though? That only poses a problem early on, before you can afford to upgrade your planets.

Keep one small fleet at the battle site and use another one to chase them down.

I don't think it'd hurt to remove all shields and shield mitigation when the phase jumping is in progress. Seriously, that alone would let you do tremendous damage to them.

You can already tremendously damage them...

... Bombers are not a problem at all, especially after the patch. Just need a few frigates and don't skimp on the static defenses.

If its a human player, the fact that you fell for a distraction so easily doesn't bode well for you... and if its a computer player well... Your getting outplayed by a computer. Enough said.

as for massive bomber fleets: on my last medium map i had trashed around 4 or so siege fleets already (with about 10-15 siege frigates in each), when suddenly a fleet of ~40 siege frigates (from the same AI) launched for me. i mean, seriously, why does the AI sometimes build nothing else? is it a specific AI personality that thinks "hey ill just siege him into oblivion"?

i agree with most, that its really annoying to chase them back and forth, and always just scraping a few off every phase jump, BUT, as much as it annoys me, obviously it works as intended, i mean, is there a better tactic than annoy your opponent to keep him occupied while you can do what you want? so as much as i hate it, i have to admit that it works :/
AND, since the patch it is really not much of a problem to transform a large siege fleet to scrap metal. just change most of your hangars (if not all) to fighters, and build 3 or 4 on your frontline planets, problem solved.