Just using 2-3 Siege frigates to clean up behind you is viable, freeing up your caps to push on.  This has been pointed out many times.  I prefer using capitals as well because they are more multipurpose, but it is still cheaper and faster to get a couple of siege frigates in play than it is to get another capital ship.

Also, it doesn't happen much anymore, but every now and then when someone has completely undefended worlds and their fleet is busy, I have seen raids of siege frigs take out several planets...even wiping people out occasionally.  It isn't a strategy I use for all the reasons people hate siege frigates, but it still works when someone is already losing and their worlds are undefended and you need to speed up the end of the game.  That is what the point of the siege frigate is...to speed up the end of the game against undefended worlds.

That is why they aren't tougher and cheaper....they become too attractive a strategy to wipe out someone without even fighting their fleet.

Of course, this Horse has been beaten to death....and beaten some more for good measure.

I wouldn't mind seeing something like a shield upgrade to be honest..... They don't have to be cheaper or more powerful... just last a lot longer when being hammered.....  Like an old B-29 that could take thousands of rounds and still fly home with missing parts of tails and wings.... excellent survivability is all that really is needed... maybe the sieges frigates shields could extend in a radius from the ship.    If those "extended range shields" could also stack with each other, you could have a single siege frigate not being worth a whole lot, but a committed expenditure would give the fleet enough overlapped shields stacking that the fleet could have a very good siege engine that ONLY does one job but does it exceedingly well.  Also this means current hull/shield points would remain the same as they are now... (for normal shields)

The idea to add bombers/fighters isn't bad, but then you'd be making the seige frigate a cruiser.....But truthfully maybe that is what it should be....

Couldn't have said it better.

Then your point is taken, and there is absolutely no need to adjust the siege frigate at all.

I totally agree.  Properly fortified systems would not be threatened.  The question is how cheap would a siege frigate have to be to cripple your opponent before he has defenses up.  You wouldn't have to get all the enemy worlds, just knock out a couple expansions and you have a big economic advantage.

pretty sure hangar d and squadron hangar upgrades on SB's are the way you defend a whole grav well with stationary defense. there's no amount of micro in the world that saves a Siege Frig from fighter squadrons. seems like one hell of an oversight on your part, considering you've put your left testicle on the line. 

...Bet your right testicle too. It'll do us all a bit of good.

You think you're gonna cover *ALL* your planets with these fancy expensive starbases, mines, and hangers?  In the early stages of the game, no less?  Perhaps you should put your testicles on the chopping block, too.

Ask Cykur how many starbases he builds in an average skilled game.  Then ask him how many games he would expect to win in an average skilled game if he endeavored as a priority to ring every planet he owned with starbases, mines, hangers, etc.  I don't know the answer to either of these questions, but if I'm betting in Vegas (testicles or no testicles), I'll bet 1) he doesn't build many SBs in an average skilled game, and 2) he wouldn't expect to win too many games spending all his resources covering all his planets with SBs, mines, hangers, etc.

If you think it would be anything approaching cost-effective, or even possible, to defend against siege frigate spam by ringing all of your planets with starbases, mines, hangers, etc. then perhaps you should ante-up your brain as well.

I win most games without building a single one.  Static defenses are more powerful than fleets and don't incur supply penalties, but static defenses can't move, so you go around crippling the other guy or blocking his expansion until you are strong enough to take out the Entrenched worlds.

Sometimes, however, when my team isn't doing well and a game starts to drag out, there are too many defenses for me to make headway, and I'm forced to start building starbases everywhere too.  Once a game goes long enough, everyone kind of gets dragged down into trench warfare because starbases are very powerful for their cost.  You need your full fleet on offense and you need the starbases to guard your borders from the enemy fleets.  These games take forever.

The point is to give it a niche without making it a game breaking unit or even one you would mass, just supplement  a fleet with.

The idea of it is to make siege frigates usable in combat via its tiny pelts (I didn't mention this before but ship to ship weps would cost no AM)since it wouldn't die fast and/or actively bomb a planet while the fleets are engaged instead of relegated into uselessness or to the point where you just mass them for victory since once a planet was wiped out by them it would take a quite substantial amount of time before they could do so again

I don't think anyone would  whine about that

It currently does not fulfill that niche as others pointed out (the whole entire not surviving long enough to do what it was intended pretty much ever causing a high failure rate/extremely situational uses yet has a incredibly high cost), and when it does that niche is gamebreaking as others have pointed out

Obviosuly it needs some tweaking in its purpose.

Also, this obvious thing would be  that as far as generalities go, it'd still be only ship cheaper than a cap that bombs planets if you want to get simple like that

Edit:I suppose I could make  a mod to demonstrate it, with that being the only change, shouldn't be too hard to figure out star forge

this thread just keeps going in circles. its like people are forgetting the points that have already been made. i'm damn positive there was a whole discussion already about how the current version of sieges are so easy to kill that an undefeded grav well can beat back a gang of 4-5 siege frigs by spontaneously building one or two hangar defense and reinforcing in 4-5 light frigates. heck, even just keeping a handful of light frigates back on defense (about 25 fleet supply worth is all you need) can beat sieges. 

the complaint was and is that their is no way to use siege frigates against anything except fully subdued opponents who cannot fight back. this makes them feel lame and useless. a unit so bad you laugh at your opponent for building them. 

the nerfed state of the siege frig was to address a major flaw with a very old implementation of the game. alot has changed since 1.04 though. i honestly don't consider it a big problem in the game right now. the current balance works well enough. i do however think this particular ship is the most out of balance of all the basic frigates right now and a revision is long overdue. 

so..... arnt we confusing the devs just alittle bit here?

first we all complained that they were crazy over powered and needed to be nerfed, because thats all someone needed to build inorder to win.

and now we want to buff them up because they are too weak?

now i agree, they are verry weak and really pointless by themselfs, but you shouldnt use them alone in the first place!

you need to clear the gravity well and then bring them in, or if its a lightly defended worldcant you just defend them with some frigs? (if there are fighters/bombers use a flack/anti fighter ship, if its turrets use some light frigs and just kill enough to where there is a hole to bring them in to bombard.) and as for mines? well i havent played entrenchment enough to really know how to counter them, (i havent had to deal with that much really) but i know there is a way, and it probalby involves frigs!

the main problem is that they arnt meant to be used alone at all, no ship really is. even though cap ships can be used that way in a pinch, they are better when used with support from frigs/cruisers/fighters/bombers.

and if there is a starbase in the gravity well, dont even try to use sieges against it, they ovbiously dont want you to have that planet, and are willing to spen the resources to protect it, but if you can still bombard it (ie bad placement of starbase and no fighters/bombers) they might not have the upgrade that alows them to keep the planet under their control,(especially if there arnt any other upgrades to the starbase) so its worth a shot.

so i think thats all i have to say for now, i didnt read all the posts so im sorry if i repeated stuff or left anything out, and im also sorry about my probalby dubois spelling

now you're just making [even more of] a fool out fo yourself. look, this isn't about who's got a bigger internet pecker so i'm just gonna ignore the provocative language and go back to the thing we're actually debating, ok? i'm calling off the flame war, please don't escalate.

furthermore, petitioning the developers is not productive behavior. signature collecting threads are stupid. these forums aren't a representative sampling of the player community. we all ought to just communicate what we think as clearly as possible instead of trying to leverage some phony notion of majoritarianism to back our opinions.

what i want is a balanced game with as much strategic depth as possible. i don't think this is a controversial thing to ask for. why anyone should construe that desire as a desire to return to a previous state of imbalance is beyond me. nobody has ever made the case for that. why you (or anyone) should believe it is impossible to implement a more powerful but still well balanced version of Siege frigates is also beyond me. have you so little faith in the talents of the Ironclad developers, who have done so well with the rest of this game?

i see the following issues that might arise from stronger siege frigates:

1) it could disrupt the pacing and put an emphasis on rushing. this is undesirable, one of the appealing aspects of Sins is its pacing. this game has a very big, fun, and interactive mid-game and late-game. taking that way would be a mistake.

2) it might disrupt the strategic balance of fleets in an undesirable fashion, putting too much emphasis on siege counters (like Fighters and Light Frigates). this could cause "splash damage" on other things that are weak to those counters, which is a term i originally learned while playing another game that went through alot of balancing cycles. splash damage is where a change to one thing impacts the metagame environment in such a way that previously viable strategies become accidental casualties because of changes intended to address something else.

3) it increases the penalty of falling behind by making it easier for a player to finish his opponents off. recovery would be harder if planets died faster. less margin of error could be a turn off to players who take losses personally.

here are my solutions to the issues i have identified:

1) move the tech tier of siege frigates to tier 3 or tier 4 military research. this would completely remove the ability to rush with them. carriers are a very powerful counter to siege frigates, therefore it makes sense to me that the counter should be available at the same time or even before the siege frigs become available. imbalance occurs when a unit cannot be countered when its available. moving the tech tier solves this easily.

2) incremental changes to the damage, armor, hull/shield numbers of units could sufficiently mitigate splash damage effects on the metagame. this would require playtesting but probably doesn't require anything drastic to be done. in the early days it only took small changes the costs and movement speeds of Javelis and Assailants to balance them. this kind of incremental adjustment works very well for this kind of thing.

3) a) stop taking losses personally. losing is part of competition. learn from your losses.

    b ) a change could be made to the "abandon planet" feature in the game that would allow it to recoup credits based  on the amount of population abandoned. this way you could pre-emptively ditch a planet you knew you couldn't defend and use it to gain a quick injection of funds to try and build some defenders with. just a suggestion, i'm sure there are plenty of reasonable solutions.

in addition to those 3 specific issues i have identified and addressed i would like to see the general role of the siege frigate changed a bit. i think they would be more interesting and useful as economic warfare specialists as opposed to just specializing in killing planets outright. correspondingly, i would like to see population damage increased and planet health damage decreased. that way you could quickly kill off the tax base of a planet but would be unable to wipe it clean before defenders could arrive. sieges wouldn't be a severe game loss threat this way (capital ship bombardment should be the main technique for causing game losses) but would be a major economic development threat. this would add an interesting strategic layer to the game, in my opinion.