1 VS 2?

Here's a couple things (there's a lot more but I'm short on time).

1) Expand early. It's critical that you have at least a third of the map under your command by mid-to-late game.
2) Build lots of defenses at your chokepoint planets. This means turrets, regeneration bays, hangars, and the incredibly important Phase Jump Inhibitor. Lure them into your gravwell, and then bash them hard when they try and leave.
3) Manage your economy wisely. If you have thousands of cash sitting around doing nothing, build and research stuff quickly.
4) Use scouting abilities to tell what they're actually up to.

-- Retro

AIs are not difficult because they have flaws. If your fleet is bigger than both of their fleets individually, they will both retreat even thou their combined fleet is bigger than yours. Facing 2 competant players however is nearly impossible.

theRetroboy has excellent advice. Fighting under the protection of 6 or 7 hangers, a regeneration bay, and a few turrets is a tremendous help. A smaller fleet can hold off a superior foe for quite a while.

My only addition would be having enough fleet left to FOLLOW anyone that gets away and make them pay with a planet/roid. You might keep a minimal fleet at your choke, and counter from another direction while they rebuild.

I had this situation just the other day...

The real trick here is scouting. Analyze their fleet and build the hard counters to it. If it's balanced try to take out their DPS as fast as you can. I try to make a set up of 2 repair bays and 4+ static defense plats. and set your fleet to tight and smaller engagement range. This will force them into the range of your defenses.

I do have a third of the map. But I think the defenses are pretty useless. I have 5 hangers, 1 turret and 2 repair bays. The defenses get killed very quickly. The enemy has like 75 Advent drone hosts.

I do have a ton of cash, but research is so slow, and I can't seem to speed it up with cash.

75 DRONE HOSTS ?! Wow... this is obviously very late game then. Yeah, static D won't do much against that.

Two Options.

1: Novalith them into submission. If you can manage 4 cannons, start dropping thier planets. Beware thier rush when you do, though. Fire two cannons at the same time on a single world, just to make sure it's nuked. Might take a while, depending the resource reserves they have built up.

2: Out produce them. One hop back from your choke point, build as many frigate factories as you can. Max what you can on your fleet cap. Start spamming huge fleets and just drop wave after wave on them. with that many drone hosts, make sure you have a bunch of Flaks..

Well, I had like 18 kodiak and 15 flaks and 18 missile ships and 12 hoshikos and 6 command crusiers and a bunch of cobalts. That topped off with 8 battleships, 3 kol 2 dreadnoughts and one each of the rest.

But they had like 75 drone hosts, plus a bunch of other ships, but mostly they are drone hosts. And 2 capital ships, I had problems taking one of them on, I was winning, but then the other side came too, so now I face 2x the size of the force, and I got wiped. Capital ships die fast when ganged up on, even at level 10.

I used a custom map where there is only 1 path into enemy territory, it's a live asteroid, so I massed all ships there.

But maybe it's because I chose slow research speed that's the problem. Because you can't use money to speed up research, so I had a bunch of cash sitting there, and I already maxed my fleet cap, because it takes time to research fleet and capital ship caps.

With 1vs1 I can win easily though, it's just with 2, I get wiped out when both of them come at the same time.

3 Kols should plaster any number of carriers, Flak Burst is crazy.

You may have better results focusing your dps ships to all Kodiaks, 18 won't kill 75 carriers very quickly and the range difference vs missile ships will split them apart, making it harder to use Flak Burst. A ~30-40 count is where heavy cruisers start to become a fleet grinder. Use the Dunov antimatter bomb on their carriers, and keep the flaks to take care of the stragglers.

I'd also recommend changing your static defense to 1-2 hangars, 3 repair bays, 1 pji, and as many turrets as you can fit with the rest. Neither will really keep you safe, but the turrets have far more collective hp to buy time, and seem to have more 'intimidation factor' against AI.

Should the Javeils be abandoned? They seem to die too quickly. Should I focus all of my ship caps on kodiaks and hoshikos? Are the command crusiers important?

I have a problem microing the battleships, because in a battle it gets very messy, and the capitalships are so slow in turning and moving, that it's going to take a long time for them to focus on to the target you want them to, I just use auto cast.

Turrets are good, but a problem is that they have a range, and if the enemy stays out of the range, they are powerless. Should I use hangars at all? They get shredded so quickly by the enemy bombers, and I already have planes launched by the 8 capital ships. And are the light carriers useful? The AIs seem to use them a lot, but one squad per carrier seems a bit less.

Edit: Regarding the flak bursts, radiation bombs, and anything that has splash, don't your own ships get caught in them too?

If you're against AI, all frigate based dps should be phased out soon, other than flaks. Long range frigates have their use, and Illuminators might be good enough for late game fleets, but LRMs especially are quite poor. It's hard to even monitor their DPS progress due to the goofy trail of missiles and their travel time. The second command cruiser ability with +25% damage can be good if you micro it, but they're kind of tertiary priority.



Yeah, the turn speed can be annoying, especially in the case of ones such as Dunov that have a forward firing main ability but turn on their side to attack. Many abilities are easy to micro, though, such as Flak Burst. Put the cap ships in the same hotkey group and use the tab key (and shift+tab to go backward) to cycle through the capital ships and use their abilities. This is a lot easier if you've played WC3 before



The nice thing about AI is they're too stupid to avoid them. Just put them on the side of the planet that they'll be warping in from. Hangers are rather useless for actual defense. I tend to use 1 per planet to chase off scouts/single frigs. You just don't get enough space for them in tac slots to keep up with the heavily carrier based ai fleets.



They have their uses. Bomber fleets are great for razing orbital structures, and fighters are honestly better against strike craft than flaks. However, especially against some capital ships, strike craft can become completely negated within 1-2 minutes of a fight starting. You'll probably have an easier time not bothering more often than not.



No.