[Puke]

yes, high level phased shields might give a bit more strength than organic armor, but when you can have twice as many ships with the organics... with high tech levels you can have your cake and eat it too, but starting with lower levels or when rushed for construction, you have to prioritize. regardless, this probably isnt the place for such a debate.

Another tip is to guard your side of wormholes as a chokepoint. if you control the choke points, you can pretty much hold off the AI indefinitly. if you guard THEIR side of it, they can see your fleet and might build up one to match it. if you guard YOUR side, they cant see your fleet and will toss in more piecemeal forces. plus, guarding your side starts you out at close range and gives you the advantage of fireing first.

one advanced tactic is capturing planets instead of bombing them, which reduces the ammount of effort you need to put into your own infrastructure. capturing a fully developed planet saves alot of construction time, and capturing spaceyards and resupply depots gives you places to refuel and repair.

If you have time to develop loads of technology before a war, you can build dedicated repair and/or spaceyard ships, and supply ships with Quantum Reactors (no reason for every ship to have a Quantum Reactor, a single ship in the fleet is good enough) to support large fleets of fighting ships, and then basically sweep through and destroy everything in sight.

If you are using stelar manipulation, warp openers deep into enemy space let you strike anywhere anytime. also, building monolith facilities from the stelar manipulation research area will give you better long-term resource payoffs than simple resource extractors.

a simple tip for developing worlds is to stick a spaceyard on any planet that has more than 5 facility slots. it will save time when building expensive facilities like monoliths, or when upgrading large numbers of facilities when better technology is available.