Your WP defence: Mines, satellites or bases?

[Combat Wombat]

Mines always for warp points, and maybe stations and sats once I have Wave Motion Guns.

[StarShadow]

My strategy is based (at least in part) by my own personal mod. Mainly (in this case) that I modded armor so that it's a viable choice instead of shields.

My usual staregy is to cover each WP with a shield-killing storm and station ships to guard. If I don't disable mines, I usually use those for a while in the beginning, to give me time to build and use training facilities.

[Suicide Junkie]

The simplest way to make stock armor competitive with shields is to simply remove the weapon mounts.

That way, Normal armor with one or two emissive plates is better than shields vs mesons or long range APB, but weaker against point blank APBs, or WMGs and other high damage per hit weapons.

[capnq]

My defenses vary depending on the stage the game has reached when I need to place them. In stock, satellites can be built from day one, but tend to obsolete once your opponent has enough Point Defense to clear them. For mines, you need to research Construction and Mines first, but run into the minesweeper problem you mentioned. Bases need Ship Construction 5 to get a hull large enough to build a Shipyard Ship. Although bases can't move, you can send a SYS out to scrap obsolete ones, if need be.

[StarShadow]

Suicide Junkie said:
The simplest way to make stock armor competitive with shields is to simply remove the weapon mounts.

That way, Normal armor with one or two emissive plates is better than shields vs mesons or long range APB, but weaker against point blank APBs, or WMGs and other high damage per hit weapons.

My intention was to make armor a viable replacement for shielding. To that end my (best, lvl 8)armor has 80kt structure, starting at level 4 armor becomes 'self-healing', not enough to help during battle, but after battle the armor plates will all regen (if any are left). Finally, I changed emissive armor so that it's no longer an armor and will negate (eventually at lvl 9) up to 40 damage.
Both to make it more useful in the late game, and to simulate that a well armored ship also armors it's internals as well.

It might sound over-powered but it's offset by the fact that crystal and other armor-skipping weapons become an extremely major threat. The Ionic Dispersor (engine killer), also becomes a major threat (shields block it, armor doesn't). Repairs can take longer due to large numbers of armor plates requiring replacement (if ships get stripped of armor in battle).

Personally I think it works out pretty well, and adds a bit more variety to the game. I got pretty tired of everyone only using shields all the time. It also made the (AI)crystal races into cannon fodder, with no one using armor their main weapon was practically useless.

Oh, and I wanted to keep weapon mounts....I like them too much.

[bearclaw]

I like using Sats for warp defense. Once I get sat layers in enough numbers that I can pick up and/or deploy 100 in a single shot, they make for an amazing defense. At the very least, they'll deal heavy damage to a big fleet, and can take out medium to small fleets. No maintenance, easy to build and relatively easy to replace with newer versions. They make for a quick defense which I usually support with a fleet of ships and in areas where the border will maintain for a while I sometimes build fighter-launching bases, but that's usually only in locations that I have no intention of expanding for the forseeable future.