Want strategies for seiging a planet

[Silent Sorrow]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
There are no such thing as massive defenses in this game (unmodded, ofc). You can always get enough ships to overwhelm any planetary defense.

Yes, I know that. And that's often what I do. But I find it's not all that fun. You just kind of get a huge fleet together, go in and calculate that you've got enough ships left over after you've destroyed the defences. But when you have to do that for 20 or 30 planets, it gets old real fast. And that doesn't take into account having enough ships for my own defence and battling other enemy fleets.

Just wondering if there were other finesse ways of handling this.