but the initial point of the OP is wrong.
I know from expeariance.
an orky is PERFECT for the senerio where an enemy is so entrenched, that your fleet simply cannnot take on the enemy fleet+starbase... and the enemy cannot sally forth and defeat your fleet in a fair fight.
I was playing a game 2v2... my ally dropped, and it became a 2v1, and I was tec, and the 2 vasari simply could not take me on. (I got so close to destroying one of them.... ARRG....) but... eventually, it was 2v1, and they pushed me back to a very very hard chokepoint. I had 2 kols, 3 donovs, a lv6 marza, and an akkan, and a starbase that was max upgraded. They, of course, refused to engage my fleet (hehe, marza), and their strike craft were useless (hehe, kols).
what they ended up doing, was camping out on the edge of the gravity well, and building 2 orkys. I could not approach thier building sites because they had subverters, when i tried to attack them, they would just completly shut down my fleet... so eventually what happend is that they had 2 upgraded orkys attacking my stuff.... which, with the 3 donovs I was able to tank rather effectively... but the issue was, they had a good number of overseers that were able to heal thier orkies, so I couldnt do anything to them either.
basicly, instead of my hard choke point holding them back, it turned into thier 2 starbases holding me back.... and that was only one system. It would have taken everything I could ever have to take out those 2 starbases, and it was only 2 starbases... which left their fleet to do whatever they wanted to do.
If they didnt have pacts, I think I might have been able to do much better, but between the pacts and the mutual threat (omg... the ammount of resources they had was not even funny... I practicly had to station ogrovs on every single world because of the constant streams of colony ships they were sneaking around to annoying places.)
meh. nothing annoys me more than the thought that I cant figure out what i could have done differently... I think i needed more donovs to emp their subverters.
wait, what was the thread about again? oh, ya, right, orkys work. at least vs TEC.