Zroni Storm Caster is awesome for chokepoints

1600 hours in and I’ve switched off all mods to play plain old vanilla again - got sick of attack moons being the solution to everything.

Tactics are a lot more important in a flatter playing field and what has won me every grand admiral game so far is focusing on defence. Here, my zroni storm caster nullifies shields, reduces ship accuracy and fire rate by 30% and reduces disengagement chance and sublight speed by 50%. Starport buildings like the communication jammer further reduces sublight speed and combat disengagement by a further 20%. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

In mid game; with about 50 defence platforms, my bastion had about 200k fleet power and… it completely obliterated 8x 100k enemy fleets. Defence platforms count as ships so ship buffs like exotic mineral buffs or home territory fire rate helps too.

Once it backfired though. Enemy fleets went straight for the starport building instead of the cloud of defence platforms and once it went down, they had control of all of the remaining defence platforms as well (hahahahaha).

My other screenshots show how orbital rings can be buffed up as well. In the late game with around 6 strategic coordination centres (captured from enemy empires - vanilla remember), I could construct up to 150+ defence platforms per bastion or orbital defence ring.

I use 3 types of defence platforms: 1. Kinetic Artillery (I’ve observed low accuracy) 2. Hangars (scales well with repeatables) 3. Energy torpedoes (hits hard)

I could have improved further my removing shields from my platforms and making them hull only and added hardening + self repair but stellaris is already too micro heavy lol. It took me about 36 hours to get to this point.