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.

I've taken a look at shield mitigation during my last game. I noticed that a single battleship firing at an enemy ship already makes the mitigation jump up to about 60%.

I've done a small test where I sent 2 fighter squadrons against an enemy ship and after 1 pass, the shield mitigation jumped to about 60%.

So basically... the mitigation doesn't really address the effectiveness of bomber-spam. Whether you send 1 squadron or 100 sqadrons, the mitigation effect will be the same.

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.

I doubt that, that would require a time-delay.

https://www.sinsofasolarempire.wikia.com/wiki/Shield_Mitigation

This mentions no time delay, only that shield mitigation goes up as soon as the target is hit. It basically it says "1 Ogrov is better than many" to target structures.

For bombers in a single wave attacking a capital ship that would mean that the 1st bomber will do max damage, the 2nd bomber will already face a higher mitigation, and the other 98 bombers will face max mitigation, even during the 1st attack.

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 think you didn't check correctly, the cruisers don't fire neatly in waves, but a bit at random which makes it seem like the next waves of attack do less damage than the first wave because only in the first wave they fire all at once. Or maybe the counter doesn't update regularly enough but with a slight delay. Anyway when I press attack and then just watch the health number of the enemy starbase, there is a lot of randomness (1600 - 1400 - 900 - 700 - 1200 - 500 - 1000 etc.). I think it's because of some kind of randomness in the attack because what was first a big wave of lasers becomes a more continuous rain of lasers (or maybe I'm wrong about that, but it looks that way).

When I press attack / stop / attack / stop then I get a fairly consistent result between the different attacks and the 1st attack isn't much different from the subsequent attacks. The first attack is slightly more powerful than the next ones, about 1600 and later on something between 1200 and 1500 [ 1600 - 1400 - 1500 - 1500 - 1200 etc]. It was against a starbase which regenerates health occasionaly, which might explain the variation a little bit, or maybe they don't all fire (I don't know).

I checkd that mitigation stayed around 59%.

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

Well my test showed that it doesn't work that way. First attack by a large group of ships or second attack, it hardly matters. Only 1 or 2 ships in your whole group of attackers will do a bit of extra damage during the 1st attack and that hardly makes a difference.

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

I always had have the similar experience..... back in my first sins game I withdraw my capitalships because the 4 militia took away 400 health in so short a time, I was worried it would die in no time^^.

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.

Unfortunately I had to be ill to have time to finish a game in 1 go.  

Just finished as promised 1v3 hard ais. Unfortunately my auto record wasn't turned on so all play style is lost but I do have auto save (there is 15 of them in RAR file - and file is rather large 30.5 MB) so you can see snapshots if anyone interested and try to play after whatever save you like.

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 you are right....

Here are correct ones. 

Yes those work, thanks.

Nice strategy with those starbases near the star

When you play hard or above ais allied you always need to play larger and multi star especiallt if there is more players as you need some time for your stuff...

And more opponents you have more you are dependant on map goods

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