Thanks it's much appreciated! It's more early game - I tend to go heavy on economical research, rather than producing a fleet. Sometimes I outproduce the AI, but that's generally because I'm playing with pirates, the AI got unlucky with planetary militias, a mix of the two, or I went knocking on his door.

I understand the mechanic. I just don't see how in practice it isn't effective. It makes sense not doing it with small numbers, if you want to use abilities or if the conflict is between frigates. I guess the AI doesn't protect its capital ships as much as a human would.

But the story about the Akkan speaks for itself. (I remembered I actually retired the Akkan, surviving with 500 hull and brought it to a repair station) The Javelins did the remaining 50% hull damage to the second capital to destroy it.

"Defences that aren't used are a vast waste of resources" was exactly my point. I was responding to the complaint that human players bypass the chokepoint. But the chokepoint is just a funnel. A starbase at a Terran or Desert planet, protecting frigate factories, a trade station and a mining asteroid is a stronger investment. If the defences can be bypassed then they were a waste of resources to begin with. I'm sort of talking about it from an early development standpoint - naturally that position is imperative for you to control with your fleet, and a starbase must be placed there sooner rather than later. So my stance would be to start with an inner starbase and expand towards the chokepoint.. 

 Edit: I clearly haven't actually tested this in multiplayer. So I guess I am just being argumentative for the sake of being so. To me it just seems like at first you should use a fleet to defend a chokepoint, and static defences to defend an orbital factory powerhouse. (so that the fleet's supply line is assured.) Then reinforce/replace the fleet with static defences. 

Of course! It doesn't take a lot of imagination to realise the implications of trade routes through plasma storms and gas giants and the run past the black star, Omega 5. I did that during one of my earliest games.

Yes shield mitigation does get up very quickly.

However, as far as I know.... shield mitigation does rise AFTER the damage has been done.

So if a shot does 1000 damage and hits a ship with 15 % shield mitigation, it will first do 850 damage to the ship and afterwards the shield mitigation does go to maximum. The next shot dealing 1000 damage will likely have to deal with full shield mitigation so instead of 850 damage it will only do 350 damage.

So 100 squadrons are much more deadly, because most of the bombers will fire at the same time, doing tremendous damage against the low shield mitigation.

Things on the wiki are not written in stone. 1 ogrov will make the mitigation go to max because of the huge damage it does so basically all the time your ogrovs will face full mitigation, so this statement is wrong, and more ogrovs the better.

No. There is a time delay, I have seen in many many times, though you have to think about TEC bomber weapon type, missiles, these take time to reach, and damage is applied at a somewhat random time I think... So if one squadron releases missiles some millisecond faster than the others your element of surprise is gone, but if you can deal most of the damage  under a given time, I do think it will only face the base mitigation (15% for TEC), like when you have a bunch of heavy cruisers and you order all of them to attack a single ship, they will do 85% of the damage because of the small delay. Try it, they will hurt the opponent badly, and the second wave will be nowhere in terms of damage.

Or I am totally wrong and what I saw was because of other factors

I never tested only looked at the ship stats, and I do think the first wave is much stronger than the others if all teh ships fire almost simultaneously, after this they start to fire continuously, they lose the wave-formation of attack, fire randomly, but I still believe with a well-ordered first strike you can do huge damage. Advent bombers and starbases are the best example, they can easily sting the starbase almost simultaneously with their first strike if you placed them well, and their damage is huge, the other waves will be nowhere as powerful, though the damage on shileds and on hull can be confusing because of the effect of the armor, so I would not place my life on it..

Maybe it's better to attack stronger objects in waves, waiting for mitigation to go down, to maximize effect, so one wave of bombers, huge damage (even if not all squadrons face 15% mitigation but many will), change target, when starbase has 20 or less mitigation attack again. Though I always focus my attack on important objects, I hate waiting and like to get rid of them faster, against humans I like to do it at random times so he will not expect it and he will lose his capitalship

strange, it always seemed to me that the first attack is stronger than the others

I thought so too, at first, but the result of my first test were so inconsistent that they made no sense. Only when I did fire/ stop/ fire/ stop did the results become more meaningful. I think the first wave of lasers only seems more powerful, because of the way the damage counter works and the way ships fire after the first attack (not in neat separate bursts anymore). Thus, it *seems* like the subsequent damage done is less and less, while in fact you cannot compare the subsequent damage changes to the first major change.

But if you want to know for sure, try it yourself. It's always possible I made a mistake somewhere.

I could not load them... the game warns me, that the files are an older version of Sins and can't be loaded. Their dates are from 2012, maybe you copied the wrong files.

Yes those work, thanks.

Nice strategy with those starbases near the star

To OP. In another thread you were complaining about Vasari. Try those against AI. Much much easier....