Vasari Combat Strategy

only need Devastator and Carrier for caps (heck get 2 Carriers)

increase Assailants and Sentinels

get rid of Skirmishers

Enforcers a good meat shield, be wary of bombers

get rid of Overseers

and yeah, too much detail

Some people also like to have an Evacuator or two in the support fleet.  Evacuators can dish out a lot of damage and kill armor (nanites) and can keep the enemy fleet from leaving, but they pop quick when under fire.

I tend to keep 15-20 total subverters with fleet support maxed

Marauder has a very specific role: hit and run.  It doesn't work well in large fleets, and is good for running through enemy lines and disrupting their income, as the gravity ability negates gravity warhead and PJI for all ships affected.  once you get its ultimate, it can bring the rest of your fleet in behind enemy lines via a phase gate

Generally the size, composition, and positioning of your fleets is completely situation-based.  Often times you'll want a single "stack of doom" with all your fighting power concentrated, sometimes you'll want a dispersed set of strike forces as you describe.  In general, you deploy the units based on the kind of fighting you expect them to face.  Don't bother with skirmishers if you except a head-on confrontation, but if you expect to face off with a flighty hit and run enemy, bring out a pack of them.

Completely disagree; a Vasari player should always have overseers.  They're totally necessary to keep your capital ships and starbases alive.

The Skirantra Carrier would also work very well.  Early on it's an excellent carrier, and later on its repair cloud ability makes it the best support ships in your arsenal.

When I play Advent, Subverters and Overseers are the first thing to die.

When I play Vasari I live (and rarely die) with Subverters and Overseers, but be prepared to micro.

I agree overseers are a must for vasari fleet. If you can get 20 of them in addition with 10 subverters with researched upgrade. And get rid of skirmishers. Instead get enforcers and assailants.

Marauder against ai is completely unnecessary get egg and 1 or 2 skirantras. Egg is great if enemy is retreating (gravity warhead) and against caps and star basses. SB attacked with nanities and subverter -10% shield negation can die really fast if you focus fire on it.    

The fleet is primarily an offensive fleet for taking on an enemy fleet of equal size. After some research, does this look better?

                                                                        Main Combat

                                                                         1 Devastator

                                                                         1 Marauder

                                  Auxiliary Combat              20 Enforcer            Auxiliary Fleet

                                     20 Enforcer                    10 Sentinel              20 Enforcer

                                     10 Sentinel                                                  10 Sentinel

                                                                       Support Fleet

                                                                          1 Carrier

                                                                         1 Desolator

                                                                         1 Evacuator

                                                                        25 Assailant

                                                                       20 Transporter

                                                                         10 Sentinel

                                                                         10 Subverter

                                                                         10 Overseer

The whole idea of splitting a big fleet into four parts is to find a decent balance between micro-management and leaving the fleet to just fight. I have found this does work but whenever I fight another enemy of similar size it always becomes a battle of attrition. I can usually beat them but I have hardly any capital ships left and very few ships. Is there I am doing wrong? I have about 50/50 Fighters/Bombers and after they have no fighters left I switch to 90/10 Fighter/Bombers. I target their capital ships first and then everything else. Do I have a good fleet balance? Any advice on strtegy or composition would be very grateful.

In microing fleet fights its better if you don't have fleets as such other than same ship type fleet perhaps divide those in smaller groups.

Even those I leave loose and not tied up in the fleet. Reason being if you have fleet whole fleet will move as fast as slowest ship in the fleet and another thing is that you can select for example whole LRM bunch and go snipe his cap ships while other ships are fighting ships they are counter too. And subs need to be loose to be most effective.

You say usually you loose all caps. Solution is to set them on hold position and keep them near gravity well edge and jump them out if you see enemy focus fire on them. For my taste and experience your figher/bomber ratio should be other way around. Especially if enemy has flak incorporated in his fleet. Sometimes I go bombers only.

For MP at least all type of caps are more or less useless especially if you play vasari. I would get 1 egg 2 or 3 carriers and if you really want 1 cap that has nanities as ultimate ability (forgot the name). Ultimate ability itself is the only reason I would incorporate it in fleet.

But the most important thing is that you are flexible regarding your composition of the fleet. If you see lrm spam go carrier(fighters on them) or flak. Great combo are subverters and mine layers but it involves a lot of micro and enough subverters to at least 80% shut his fleet down......

Read about counters.... some very good threads are on this forum.

I have to agree with Greg30007, vs AI later on in the game I go heavy with bombers (or bombers only) since the AIs have mucho flak and lots of fighters always. At the end of the game if I have 80+ bombers (more as Advent) I don't care much about flak I care more to take out the key support cruisers and caps first and each bomber pass means something dies no matter what. 

In MP if there is LRM spam I go more balanced fighter and bombers then transition back to more bombers as the game balances out (if it gets that far). And yes Skirantras are OP right now. Maybe if you make it to 4 caps then pick a Kortul, but an egg and two scramble-Skirantra-bombers is the way to go imo.

And another thing. Fleet size and type needs to be balanced with research. Hull, armor and shield go with every thing but weapon research needs to be balanced with fleet composition.

Note that skirmishers without at least tier 2 fully researched weapon wise are just fleet point grabbers and very weak ships. Also especially at start and also true in late games almost every ship you build will use phase missiles so its important to fully research them as well. 

Skirmishers only make sense for chasing down carriers, flaks, and support cruisers.  They combine speed with medium armour and anti-heavy damage.  If you don't need that, don't get skirmishers.

With reintegration, they're not bad at fighting for distant neutrals, either.  In small numbers, they'll even beat LRF due to this healing power, and scouts or lone carriers will have no hope of taking them down.  However, Enforcers work even better for this purpose.

Ok, so just a few points so I understand what is being said. Just to clarify it is assumed that all empires have full research

and all ships and all battles are late-game.

1. Divide the fleet into smaller fleets of the same types, eg. Fleet of 20 Sentinels, Fleet of 20 Enforcers etc. Is this better than a composition of many different types?

2. Ratio of Fighters/Bombers should be 25/75 or even more bombers simply to wipe out the large crafts (if they have many).

3. The best capital ships to have in the fleet would be the Evacuator and Carrier simply because of their abilities. Maybe a few Devastators directly in battle along with Enforcers?

4. Take out enemy capital ships first, their support cruisers second and finally the rest of their fleet?

5. Late-game, should you completely disregard Skirmishers? Are they replaced by Enforcers later on?

Thanks for any advice and thank you so far!

Late-game as Vasari, I generally keep one unified fighting force, and split it up on a strictly-as-needed basis.  I use phase stabilizers to quickly deploy and redeploy this force.

I generally don't maintain static groups as any faction, instead building units as I need them and moving them around to where they're needed. 

Yup; bombers are definitely the stronger of the strike craft.  Fighters aren't useless, but if the enemy has large numbers of flak they will be killed very quickly.

The Skirantra Carrier is definitely the best Vasari capital ship.  The Kortul Devastator and the Jarrasul Evacuator are also quite fine.  The Vulkoras Desolator is basically a heavily armoured siege frigate that can be safely used mid-battle due to its superior durability.  The Vulkoras is a little niche, but if you want in-combat bombardment it's worth your time.  The Antorak Marauder is very niche.  Not completely worthless, but I've never found a use for it in multiplayer.  It's level 6 ability is very good, but one ability that you might never actually reach doesn't carry a capital ship.

In my opinion, the Marauder is the worst capital ship in the game (with the TEC's Dunov a close second).

Depends on a lot of factors.  Sometimes you'll want to knock out the units first, other times the capital ships make sense, and still other times the support cruisers make sense.  It really depends on too many factors to simply give you a one-size-fits-all approach here.

Not completely; Skirmishers have medium armour, which means they take very little damage from fighter and bombers.  They're a great anti-carrier unit, and against someone who has lots of carriers with little backup they can make a lot of sense.  They're also very fast and the only unit in the game that can outrun them is the scout, so they're great at chasing down enemies. Against an enemy who is doing hit and run attacks, a pack of Skirmishers is an excellent investment, and they can chase down virtually any unit.

Where they don't make sense is in a straight fight.  They're not very good against heavy cruisers, and they're completely minced by long range frigates.  So unless the enemy is making nothing but carriers and flaks, this unit type doesn't make much sense, and the Enforcer is a much better selection.

I did find nice use in MP for marauder. If you are rushing and you are fighting on enemy planet where factories are present subversion is very useful because its stackable and most of the time non skilled players will try to chase it down so you can pick their fleet apart while they try to chase your fast marauder.

It is fun and its nice change against usual 2 skirantras start strategy.... The problem is most of skilled players will just let it be. Build factories on nearby planet, build frigates there and pick on your fleet and since they got more useful caps offset cost of 2 factories on another planet doesn't always balance with 1 more useful cap ship.

It is good if they are doubled at start and they are down to hw. They will get reinforcements much slower and even feed wont help them since their build time is slower......

Definitely this; it's a big price to bring out the Antorak and a good player will just know to pressure you with brute force since you're now effectively down 3000 credits in combat units.  You'd definitely have to distract them and let this play out for some time for it to be effective.

Now THAT makes a lot of sense.