It's lonely here! (First post!)

[Xrati]

Religious, and Crystallurgy is a tough combo. My initial thoughts would be to "long range" them with seekers, drones and fighters. I like the combo of Organic and Temporal. Organic gives you a range 3 small weapon (EP) for your fighters. Fighters are useless (for assult) till you can get them to carrry weapons and move at least speed 8-10. They need to be able to close range and then disengage. Temporal just gives you quick building shipyards to overwhelm your enemies. You can probably just give yourself this advantage in the racial traits setup.

What traits are you running? What's your "weapon of choice" stratigy for your race?

[Hunpecked]

Bear in mind I'm still fairly new to the game and have only played against AIs. My advice assumes a simultaneous 2000 point game, large quadrant, normal tech start.

To counter the AI Tessellate without taking Religious or Crystallurgy, I'd suggest taking Hardy Industrialists, increasing Construction, Mineral, and Intelligence (research) traits, and reducing Maintenance to the bare minimum (5% per turn). This should allow the human to take the lead in weapons research, build and maintain a fleet at least twice the size of the AI's, and hopefully cripple the Tessellate before they get the Talisman.

I'm skeptical about countering the Tessellate with seekers/fighters. In theory they can overwhelm an enemy, but when the AI runs the battles they tend to come in waves rather than all at once. In a recent battle my 1 heavy and 2 light cruisers (8 PPB and 8 PDC total) defeated 3 Aquilaeian light carriers with 60+ fighters; no more than a dozen or so fighters came in at any one time. The Tessellate ships I've encountered so far seem adequately armed with PDCs.

I'm currently playing (slowly) a simultaneous 2000 point game against 5 of the top 6 Deathmatch III AIs (TDM Modpack 3.40). I play the Terran Confederation with modifications, e.g. Strength 45, Research 120, Minerals 120, Construction 120, Maintenance 119 (i.e. 6% per turn). I took Advanced Storage, Hardy Industrialists, and Propulsion Experts; culture is Merchants.

Tactically I've had good results against the AIs starting with seekers, then moving to PPBs and now to APBs. Of course, most of my tactical success (even against Berserker races) is due to a substantial lead in Combat Sensors and ECM, plus fleet training (and to a lesser extent ship training). However, my most devastating weapon by far has been the mine; in SEIV apparently one can't program a good anti-mine strategy for the AIs. At one point over half my frontline systems were held by minelayers alone while my fleets attacked elsewhere.

[Xrati]

I'm sorry, I keep forgetting that there are sooooo many options within the game that I have to remember that not everyone plays with the same settings. I love to fight my own battles and see how my designs hold up. I'm generally outnumbered and out gunned, but again it is the AI I'm fighting!
As far as fighting the battles Strategically, you need to make sure your strategy is set in the Empire options screen to get the best results. If you set your seeker ships to "max range" and try to keep them in their own fleet. They will launch a overwhelming drone wave.
Separating your fleets will yeild better results too! Keep your carrier group in one fleet and your seekers in another. You'll find that the AI does a better job of running your fleet this way.
I have seen the AI put together mine sweeper fleets, once it gets that tech. I checked my Tessellate download and found that it's the ship set only(no AI), so I'm going to have to find the complete race file and download that.

[Hunpecked]

The Tessellate race is in the TDM Modpack.

I, too, prefer to fight battles manually. If my ships have a range advantage over the enemy (e.g. PPB vs DUC or APB vs PPB), I can exploit it far better than the AI can. By the same token, however, manual combat makes it much harder to get a challenging game from the AIs, so I've learned to live with strategic combat (with all its shortcomings).

I haven't had much luck with fleet strategies in strategic combat. Using a max range strategy and compact formation, often the first row (only) is in range and the following rows can't fire. With a wide formation, a turn by the leader can put one wing out of the battle entirely and the other too close to the enemy. I've had better results setting all ships to break formation and use their individual ship strategies, though this doesn't always work well, either. Using separate fleets for different ship types may be a workable compromise.

[Xrati]

I've been using smaller fleets with varying stratigies. Early game fleets would consist of this for me. Carrier group= Carrier, ~4 escorts(PD), Minesweepers and a scout(scanners) as it becomes available. Missile Group= 4-6 missile ships. Combat Group= varies on what weapons are available. These three groups should work well in any situation. Carrier Group(Diamond formation, Fighter Attack orders and Don't get hurt movement. Missile Group (Wall formation, Max range order and Max range movement. Combat Group (ANY, break all ships out of formation and let the individual ships stratigy work for you. Remember that it's better to have ten 10 ship fleets then to have one 100 ship fleet.

[Suicide Junkie]

It is generally considered best to simply have your fleet "Break Formation" all the time.

Let each ship fly to its own optimal range, plus as a bonus you get all the fleet experience in one bigger pool.

[Xrati]

But it is soooooo unstructured!
If you want to capture planets you'll have to use the small fleet theory or the fleet will trash the planet.

[Suicide Junkie]

Actually, all you need are transports with "capture planet" strategies.
With the fleet set to break formation, those transports will definitely be trying to capture, and all the warships will oblige them.

Not long ago, I attacked an enemy homeworld with a three-pronged attack.

Two troop transports came in from the left sector, two from the right sector, and my warfleet came down from the top. (All on the same day, for a single combat)

The enemy fleet ended up in a wall formation facing to the side, which gave my warships a great flanking position at the top of the "T". The battle raged, and the troop transports swooped in from the sides, taking only a few hits before dropping about 500 units on the planet.
Almost all of my ships were crippled, but not many were destroyed. Quite a nice result, for what I was originally expecting to be a suicide mission against superior numbers

BTW; with break formation, my missile ships got to stay back and lob, my torpedo boats got in and slugged it out, and my PD ships ran around chasing missile packs. Every ship got to fire at their own best targets, and move to the proper range for their guns against that target. Staying in formation, even with small sub-fleets would mean lots of ships moving to sub-optimal positions in order to stay in formation.
I don't want any of my missile boats getting too close to the enemy guns, and my gunboats and PD ships need to hound their targets closely.

By the end that single warfleet had collected 2% experience (starting from scratch); all the ships will benefit from that in the future, and all the warships will contribute to increasing it (even though they are breaking formation, they are still part of the fleet)

[Hunpecked]

Xrati writes:

"What traits are you running? What's your "weapon of choice" stratigy for your race?"

The game I described has gotten to the point where I think it's pretty much won. I control about 40% of the quadrant, but more importantly I've captured enough aliens to populate nearly every planet with native breathers. The Narn have developed the Talisman, but I have them vastly outnumbered and have captured about half their Talisman-equipped ships via Intel projects.

The AIs seem to have a lot of trouble with mines, so I think I'll try to make a mod without mine technology. I just ran 35 turns of a test game in which I didn't use mines, set my Intel capacity to minimum, and set tech cost to High (I felt I went through the tech tree too quickly last time). I stopped the game when I ran into the first AI mines. I played with simultaneous move/strategic combat.

As it turned out, I ran into the Tessellate (again!) around turn 18. This time I directed my research to Projectile Weapons and Point Defense, while the Tessellate stuck with Missiles. With 1 to 3 PDC per ship, my frigates and destroyers were basically invulnerable to Tessellate missiles, and I won ship-to-ship battles handily. The AI also displayed a tendency to hurl its missile ships like lemmings against the DUC/PDC weapons platforms on my forward outpost.

On the other hand the Tessellate apparently did a decent job of developing their empire. Resource production, though inefficient, was ahead of mine (they traded with other AIs), research was at about 2/3, number of colonies and ships was about the same, and they had researched mines, satellites, and light cruisers before I did (I went for PDC, shields, and troops first). If I can just mod out the mines, I think the next game could be much more interesting.

[Hunpecked]

Silly rabbit! Mine tech can be removed during initial game setup! No modding necessary.

Now we'll see if the TDM AIs know how to cope with a mine-less universe.