Question about destroying planets with weapon platforms

What sort of WPs are they? If they are mostly missiles you could send in a load of bombers.

Do you want to keep the planet? You could have a planet destroyer, tell it not to get hurt, then place it in the same sector and destroy the planet.

* point defense guns
* Fighters with missiles
* Heavily armored ships with large mount bombardment weapons
* drones

Lots of possibilities!
But important are point defenses and regenerating shields.
Unfortunatly you'll need numbers though! You're probably going to lose ships, no matter what.

~Myrath

I just attack the planets with big fleets.

i like to use a few (7 - 10) fast frigates. lots of armor, lots of pd and a few cargo holds to catch strong defended planets.

the cheap frigates usualy die in the attack, but mostly after they have landed their cargo (troops and fighters)

The troops and fighters destroy the weapon plattforms. Once i won a enemy home planet defendet by 15 weapon platforms at the cost of seven frigates. In a stock game.

If the enemy has a great technological edge, its another story. If the enemy has better weapons but your armor/schilds are quite good it works most of the time. otherwise research better weapons/armor and come back later, or use great numbers. but the last can cost you a whole fleet.

the 15 wp planet cost me 28 combat frigates, a few cruisers and some transports in my first try. cause the combat ships stopped near the planet until they were shot to pieces, the slower transports were destroyed before they landed their troops. Then i reloaded and made another try with my transport frigates.

in every game there are battles better to avoid, cause the price you have to pay is to great.
you can win most of your battles an loose the war if your losses are too great.

i am only playing stock games up to now. so i dont know if it would work under balance mod.

Watch out for bugs using huge amounts of fighters in planet combat. The only times the game has frozen on me is when I had over 100 fighters trying to take a planet.

Typically, fighters are great vs WPs when using in conjunction with capital ships using missiles. Their PDs will place your missiles in higher priority than the fighters so the fighters will last longer.

Mostly, you have to fuzzy wuzzy the heavily defended planets and will usually end up with little or no populace at the end.