Well, PJIs obviously work for trapping ships of any kind and forcing a longer fight/exchange. Why do you think that the bombers can't take out any structures in this setting if they could get to the Halcyon? Does it regen AM so fast that they can't just ignore it? What level was the Halc? An initial save game would help. Also, you could allow the attacker to bring a capital ship as well since the defender has +50 fleet supply advantage here. (Attacker: 40*14=560 supply. Defender 187*3+50=611 supply.) What about an Akkan for instance to shut down the Halc? Besides it's not clear to me what was the purpose of the SB here and why the attacker bothered to bomb it (instead of the PJIs for example). Neither Mass Disorientation nor Meteors work on strike craft... so the SB poses little immediate threat to the attacker. If the purpose of the SB is to deplete the AM of the carriers when they jump out, then you need to have some realistic goal in pursuing them outside the well, e.g. their actual target is in another well or they are trying to retreat to a friendly well (e.g. one with an Argonev with Docking Booms). And you need to play that scenario with and without the SB to see what difference it makes. But it seems the carrier player doesn't have a clear goal in your scenario. Attacking the toughest nut in the well (SB with one hull up), when it's not much of a threat to the carriers, doesn't sound like a worthwhile objective. If the SB was down to 2K hull (from 6K) that kind of damage would have taken out one shielded structure, e.g. a PJI, even in range of shield bestowal.

Also you should probably change the thread title to something more descriptive like "Countering bombers [with corvettes and a Haclyon]". Your Deathbattles posts are generally interesting [including this one] but sometimes lose focus by testing too many [varied] things...

And as a general note: defending vs. carriers [just] with corvettes is probably not practical in the long run because the carriers can switch their squads to fighters; I guess you know you can scuttle just the strike craft squad[s] by right clicking on their icon in the carriers' panel and then build different one[s]... So defense with an all corvettes fleet would probably only work if the carrier attacker didn't scout beforehand. (My quick test in the other thread was simply to see what happens when a large formation of bombers passes through a large formation of corvettes--for those that din't read it: results differ dramatically in bombers' favor compared to the small scale test I had ran previously because in the large scale numerous corvettes overkill the same bomber squad[s].) I'm guessing given the flexibility of the carriers in choosing their strike craft, a 50/50 (or thereabout) mixture of corvettes and flak might be more prudent for the defender if you want to make this a more realistic fight as opposed to a quick test of game mechanics. I've heard that on ICO fighter spam is more common than bomber spam these days, so that also might be fun to test counters for; mixtures of 50/50 fighters/bombers [for the attacker] are probably interesting as well [if the defender isn't also spamming carriers].

And frankly, I think that the designers' idea of making flak only counter fighters well was kinda lame given that carriers can switch squad types with only a relatively minor time/AM cost. At least the flak should get some sort of research upgrade that would make them more effective against bombers' "thicker" armor, e.g. call that research "armor piercing flechettes" or "neutronium flak rounds" for TEC (both names are a hat tips to SotS). But let's not discuss modding fixes any further in this thread, and instead focus on what counters are possible using the stock game.

Yeah, but presumably you can move back or forward with one [or more] PJIs dead, i.e. you are no longer discouraged by it. Being cheap does not mean easily replaced (in combat in particular if you kill the constructor frigates, something that most human attackers do). Also, the PJI might be cheap but it has a very long [re]build time, equal only to superweapons.

SBs do little damage to capital ships. Their power against a fleet comes from their multiple weapon banks (4 on each side for every weapon type/upgrade they have, i.e. 16 total; some [e.g. Vasari] allow +1 extra bank per side to be researched.) But the way the Sins engine is coded, a SB will fire at most one bank from each side at a cap ship. Against an immovable star base, that's exactly one bank [per SB weapon type] firing, unless the attacker is careless, in which case it's two. Try it in the dev exe with the targeting lines and weapon state enabled [in Entity Info menu enable options "n" and "q"]; the consumer-oriented graphics can be extremely misleading in this regard; you may see a torrent of fire coming from the starbase against a single ship, but the damage actually registered by game's logic [against a single target] is much, much less than what the fireworks suggest. The visual effects don't get cut to 1/4 when there's a single target on a SB's side, but the damage registered is cut that way. (As an aside, this is one of the reasons why titans waste SBs so easily, even if the SB is max upgraded with everything; most titans have a high-powered single-target attack [via some ability], an order of magnitude or more powerful compared what the SB can hit the titan back with from a single bank per weapon type.) Presumably approaching the SB with the Akkan would be dangerous if the SB had Meteors and/or Mass Disorient; how dangerous remains to be tested. Alas the Akkan only gets some kind of ass-saving ability at L6. If you're willing to try the (OMG OP!) Vasari instead, then an L3 Kortul will probably survive much longer even against all those corvettes, but will also take longer to nix the AM on the Halc.

But the main thing to try differently for a more realistic fight is to bring some fighters on the carriers. From what I've seen in small scale, probably just 1/4-1/2 fighters on the carriers will already be tough on the corvettes. (So their side will want some flak instead of all corvettes.)

That happens to me too and it is indeed very annoying, particularly that it resets the video resolution. Something the devs could easily fix... The rest [of the settings being reset] don't bother me as much. You can make a backup copy of your user.setting (or of the entire Settings folder to be sure) after using the regular exe and then just restore your backup after using the dev exe.

I do wonder if there ain't some bug there at work. Those files have internal format versions (of their own) so that when you upgrade Sins they can migrate settings as needed. But for the same version of Sins (1.82.5006), the production exe writes "Version 1241" to user.setting whereas the dev exe (of the same Sins version) writes "Version 241" (omitting indeed the first "1") to the same file. So when the normal exe then loads, it thinks it needs to reset/ignore the video settings and so forth. I'm not sure if this is by design (i.e. the first "1" in the user.setting version is supposed to indicate being written by the production exe) or if it is a bug that the dev exe writes a Version field that is 1000 less. I think I'll better ask in the Technical forum.

Did you read the topic? I believe I stated that this was a test about the viability of jumping in, sniping something valuable, and then jumping out. In another topic RespawnedTitan mentioned that in a scenario he tried a bunch of bombers were able to kill all the structures in a test gravity well despite 100 corvettes being present, so I wanted to try it for myself. It was never intended for a fight to the death.

I read the topic, and I understand what you are trying to do, but just bringing your carriers when there is a larger defending fleet is simply not realistic...if you are Advent, TR, or VL, you would almost certainly want to bring your titan (and possibly a cap) -- the combination of your titan and your bombers would wipe out the Halcyon far faster than the enemy could threaten your titan...much more of your bombers would survive, allowing you to wipe the SB much faster...even if your titan just sat there, it would kill some of the corvettes should they try to attack the carriers nearby...if you are lucky, your enemy might even focus fire on the titan instead of the bombers...

This would be easiest as VL or TR, but even Advent could do it...I never said you have to fight to the death, just use some more realistic fleet compositions to do your sniping....an immense strength of carriers is that they are very durable per ship, and they benefit significantly from having support ships...replacing even two carriers with 7 hoshikos could cut your losses significantly...and with a titan or cap, you are in much better shape to handle the Halcyon...a ragnarov, a dunov, or a corsev would all be really useful in that situation....

The TK push is an instant ability, not one that's channeled over time like repulsion. It's not like you can wait for the Halcyon to "turn it on" and then run. And I wasn't hitting more than half the bombers with each use anyways. Even without any micro, with that many bombers, they don't bunch up enough for that. Running around the grav well with your bombers trying to avoid the halcyon is quite pointless since they're doing nothing while your carriers take damage. I haven't tried ordering the bombers to attack and then immediately ordering them to turn around after firing, so that they don't fly past their target structure into range of the ability, as they do normally; I don't know if that would work but it would be worth trying out.

No it's more of a middle case which is why I chose it. Good luck killing Vasari structures with this if they have 3-4 hangars up around their buildings. TEC however I believe would have a harder time defending than Advent.

Even 30 seconds of your fleet losing all weapons capability I would hardly call "minor" in an engagement of this size.... If you switched all the carriers over you might have some success in a shoot-out against corvettes, but you're not a threat to any structures or capital ships, at all, and given that it does take time to build the fighters your opponent has time to retreat his corvettes if he doesn't want to lose many of them (or just cluster them around the halcyon and wait to use TK push). Attacking a planet with PJIs and a starbase with nothing but fighters doesn't seem like it would accomplish anything..... If you can't damage structures or the planet itself the opponent has nothing to actually defend himself from.