I've had plenty of opportunity to use Siege frigates, to great effect.

The effectiveness of the SF, in my opinion, entirely depends on the enemy. Every fortress, every defense has a weak point somewhere, and SFs are the best option for exploiting that.

I think most people don't like SFs because their expectations of them are too high ... most people want to have a brutal planet-slaying, but I think it's also acceptable to simply use a well-timed strike on an undefended planet to kill the population. You can sometimes accomplish this goal before the enemy has a chance to respond, depending on the dynamics of the map and where the enemy fleet is. Murdering a planet's population destroys its income, for an appreciable amount of time. Depending on the success of your attacks, and the targets, you can take out anywhere from 3 - 10 credits-per-second of planetary income. Even better for TEC if you have the radioactive fallout ability, making repopulation come to a crawl.

To make a comparison to say, Starcraft, this would be like killing all of a player's SCVs, but not the Command Center. It doesn't necessarily win the game, but it certainly gives you a temporary leg-up.

My favorite scenario is when I find a cluster of planets that the enemy has neglected to defend well. You send in 6 SFs and murder a planet. Unless the main fleet is literally next door, they'll try to take out your SFs with a small force of a few LRM frigates or whatnot. When they do, you scatter the group - send the 6 SFs in groups of 2 in 3 different directions, if you can, and hit 3 more undefended planets. Keep going back and forth like this for as long as you can. The economic damage you can achieve if you pull it off well makes the frigates pay for themselves, if you ask me.

Not only does it hurt the income, but it can usually cause the enemy to get very paranoid/annoyed about SF strikes. I find it funny to come back to a planet I've bombed 2-3 times and literally see it ringed with about 10 cannons. What's even funnier is when I use the ALT key to check the ranges on said cannons, and see that there is one little spot he missed. Hangars are definitely the better solution, though can be easily countered if the SFs are accompanied by flak frigates. The best counter, I think, is to couple such defenses with a single frigate factory, so that you can spam a few support units to counter those sorts of strikes when you need to.

5 Sieges cost more than a cap? Whoa, well that doesn't sound right esp. since this is a unit that can get easily taken out unlike the light carrier that everyone spams and abuses the hell out of.

I'd say reduce their cost slight so about 7-8 Sieges equals the cost of a Capital ship and reduce their ship to ship dmg so they literally be useless against other ships and only serve to take out structures and planets. 

Then they might be even too powerful, considering the pitiful state of the upgrade: "Emergency Facilities" basically being not worth getting I don't want it to be even less worth getting. 

Sieges shouldn't be more powerful then they are now. If anything maybe individual capital ships planet bombing abilities should to nerf to only about 2 Sieges so if he wants to speed it up he needs to get more Sieges. 

If siege frigates were a medium-late tech unit, they could be more lethal without causing issues with early game bombing rushes.

Do **NOT**, I repeat  do **NOT** even remotely consider buffing siege frigate armor, hit points, or survivability!  Period, paragraph, end of story!  PERIOD!  If anything, I'd nerf it even more!  The hit points and survivability should not be above a scout frigate!

After getting the game the first day it came out, and going through the first patch, I simply put the game down and walked away for a year.  Never touched it, never considered playing it again, never came to these forums again, had no interest.  I only came back to the game in January because I had hopes that Entrenchment would make things better, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that siege frigates had been nerfed.  If siege frigate survivability is rebuffed, I'll just pin my hopes on another upcoming game.

The most ridiculous unit that's ever been concieved of in any RTS EVER - "the siege frigate of doom."  Boy, that really took the cake, I'm telling you.

Kharma, I think you are overreacting a bit. I don't know what it was like in 1.0, but even if seiges were twice as strong as they are now, that strategy would easily be countered just by massing LFs, upgrading emergency facilities, and rapid expanding.

FWIW being new to the game since v1.12 I rarely even tech the seige frigate. Sure Advent AI can be annoying with how they send their seige frigates past your invading fleet to the gravity well you left behind. (I always thought they were clever to do that.) But other than that they just seem to be slight annoyances. As it is now the choice is a 15 supply SF or a 14 supply light carrier. SF use too much fleet supply for what they do even with the fact that 2 SF (30 supply) equals an average capital ships planet bombing.

I will have to try a game with Zwanglos stratagy just to see how it plays out and tech the SF up to rad bomb.

Hurting your economy more than having to build that many seige frigates? They are ~2 mil labs +  research + ~15 fleet points each.

I believe Advent and Vasari get their's at 1 lab.  Not that it matters, since their fleet supply is too intensive to bring them out that early.

I think the important thing is ensuring that light frigates and strike craft counter siege frigates.  Unsupported siege frigates should still get out-run and slaughtered by these units at equal cost, even if they do damage the planet.  It would also give light frigates and hanger defenses additional purpose in the early game, something they desperately need.  Another note is that investing in siege frigates will reduce the size of your army and slow down your tech to carriers, so you're trading off a lot for that offensive edge early game. 

Sorry AgentofKarma, but the problem isn't about what sieges WERE in the distant past. The problem is what sieges are NOW, and how they no longer fit into gameplay. Where before they were more deadly than Unicron, currently they are more harmless than Space Unicorns. Current siege ships are less than a third of what they once were, and it's a very ugly picture.

It's important to figure out WHY the siege frigate was so good in the first version, because that's a good guideline for how they shouldn't be. Back then ship speeds had almost no difference, so frigates couldn't chase. Capital ships were slower and could not give chase. Carriers were weaker and unable to stop much. PJIs were too weak to slow any ship down. There were absolutely none of the defenses that are now coming out in Entrenchment. A lot of changes across the board has indirectly attacked the viability of siege ships again and again, and the siege ship has nothing to show for it.

What about current problems with the siege ship? Tech level is a VERY persistent and underestimated problem with siege ships. At the starting tech levels, defenses don't exist. Players don't have turrets. Players have no established border zones to cushion a raid. Players have no PJIs to help them give chase(doesn't matter with no territory in your control). Players only have ONE planet, the game ending Homeworld. Players at the start have nothing to even SLOW a siege ship down, much less stop them! That's because all of the counters are either deep in the tech tree, or heavy investments that can only come with time.

What does this mean? The siege ship can't be built to end the game at the absolute beginning, but by flaw, it's given at the absolute beginning. There is only ONE way to balance that in the grand scheme of things. Players have nothing when the siege frigate can first be fielded, so the only balancing solution is to allow players to counter the siege frigate with... NOTHING. That is exactly how the current balance of the siege frigate works, and that's why it is a terrible unit as is.

I've seen how the siege frigates were in 1.0 and I must admit that was a huge turn off from the game.  I had my a light fleet of 10 LF in the system and about medium sized fleet came in and totally ignored my LF and just rained hell down on that planet.  This kind of story would frequently play out in multiple games fighting AI.  It could be said that you could use hangar bays, but investing in hangar bays early could turn into a death sentence when those resources were needed to build your fleet.

As sieges are now... I don't even research them.  There definitely needs to be a change of some sort, but I can't say buffing their basic stats is really the right thing to do.  They need some bonuses or side effects of some sort.  Someone mentioned it earlier about how they can only attack planets and it didn't really make sense.  A watered down version of the Vasari dreadnought might work with bonus damage to structures.