So I forgot that even with entrenchtment, defenses are a joke in the early to mid stages of the game. I was playing a skirmish agaisnt some comps and a small band of pirates, maybe 15 or 20 ships, tore through 4 beam plats and a hanger (2 bomber squads, 1 fighter) supported by two repair platforms in a couple of minutes. And I had a few upgrades. And during the attack I put up two more beam plats. Didn't matter. I had to keep pulling my fleet off the frontlines to come save my planets from stupid pirates. Even when I had only 1 cap and 20 or 30 frigs I annhilated the pirates in seconds while my defense didn't even stand a chance.

Yes I realize I can just turn pirates off, that's not the point. If your enemy shows up with a decent fleet headed by two or three caps, yeah, your static D should crumble in seconds (unless you have a starbase).But against raiding parties and early-game pirate attacks? 4 plats, a hanger, and two repair plats is a lot of money and should be able to slowly wear down and eventually destroy a small attack force, not dissapear before my fleet even makes it two phase jumps over to help. I don't claim to be a master at this game. Far from it. But it's just too ridiculous. I could have spent that money on ships and had some there that would have made mince meat of those pirates, rendering all defensive structures pointless. Maybe it's my style of play, or maybe I just really suck (unlikely) but I don't feel like static D does anything other than die.

Now that that's out of the way, I remember a while back when sins first came out I had this same disagreement with the game but was able to rectify it through modding. Basically I had defenses do shit damage (but benefit more from upgrades) but have massive armor, shields, and HP, so they would do what they are supposed to do; wear down and destroy a small attack force, or ACTUALLY buy you enough time to send reinforcments. So now i went to go and open the .ent files in the game data directory and drop everything along with the changed files into the mods folder and play my personal mod just like before. But when I open the .ent files with any program (note pad, word pad, MS word) all I get is that freaky half-alien looking code. I though all you needed to open, view and mod .ent files was a text editor? AM I missing something here? Can anyone help?