engineermdh

now that is a huge fleet Dominator not to mention super expensive in both time and credits. Granted if you protect your freighters right and have enough money is a non-issue but throwing that much time into just building and researching boggles the mind. Though it is a huge amount of firepower which looks awesome. my question for you would be which to you hyper in first since the Preators take 40 pop each and the Executor is 80 pop and then which ships are reinforcements ?

Alpha Centauri is only 3 minutes away at flank speed, so moderate fleets can easily cover several nearby systems and still respond to a major assault.

This is correct and realistic. Also, the value of the planets in the sector would determine how the fleet would be deployed.

right now in game the fleet has to be at the planet to be available for the battle. the problem is that if you have a fleet that covers say 5 planets, you have to split it up to be able to intercept everything. for example, if a sector is "worth" a fleet consisting of an ISD with support from a couple light and heavy cruisers a frigate or two and a carrier, to split that up denies it most of its strength simply because most of its strength comes from their combined use and not their individual strength. and putting the fleet in the right place requires a planet that recon

I think that it might be worthwhile to equate the star colony level to the relative value of a system and have its garrison reflect that. Or to include some way for any planet to determine if a fleet is incoming. The way this was modeled in the vanilla was the sensor platform while gave you a few seconds warning that a fleet was coming and to move your defenses. The main problem with this was how the message was displayed, its was easy to miss it or cover it up by mousing over anything. one thing that might work is enabling all planets to see the pancake stacks with ?s from space and then planets with sight bonuses to see the content of the stacks.

In addition to what TB said, I'm pretty sure that shields are not operational until the ship has completely reverted to real-space which means that all damage is done directly to the hull. I have also noted that most of the time the shields do not come online after a ship reverts and takes damage. One good reason never to hyper a ship right into the primary firing arc of ships unless they are already swarmed with targets.

The XQ5 station has minor defenses and provides income through customs. in my own games I have found that this is calculated based on the income of the planet and not the number of freighters in orbit.

attempting to be a emp minelayer, ambusher and pocket carrier would definitely qualify as not average.

@Tropical Bob
Yeah I have done the pathfinder thing too and sometimes i can pause right when I find how I want to deploy so I can set my formation up how I want without having to track each unit as it comes in. But, like Shas'la I agree that it is super cool watching a huge fleet revert to real-space.