Wow, this game is awesome. Only have the demo currently, but have 5 hours on it so far (wait, what? I thought it was only 3. Not complaining though). I just had this epic battle for this one planet in the tutorial level (I'm completely ignoring the instructions). I forgot the name, but I went after it with roughly 2000 ships of the Rotten Armada, including 3 flagships. The tide was going our way until, well, the actual ships showed up. Those core ships are monstrous. It takes 3 direct blasts from a flagship to kill one, plus their leech ship kept bolstering their lines with my dead, causing a snowball effect. Anyways, they swarmed my beachhead attempt and forced me back into the wormhole through sheer force after I only managed minor damage to their turrets and a few large ships. I tried circling them, cutting off ships and picking them off, but eventually just had to call retreat. The AI was pretty pissed though (maybe they liked that mothership-thing I blew up? Heh), and launched a massive counterattack through the wormhole. They shredded my 10 turrets and 5 tractor beams in seconds, and proceeded to tear through the industry of that planet. I called up the reserves from the other border planets to hold off the aliens while the factories pumped out Armada V2 in record time. About 800 ships this time, bolstered by the two surviving flagships. When I had to quit, the battle was organized fronts on one side with the flagships strengthening the ships and occasionally hurling energy weapons everywhere, which was doing OK, and 33 vs 33 mini-battles on the other side, in which my ships were kicking ass. Still, the casualties are enormous, in the first retreat I lost 1976 ships, many of them level III bombers. In this somewhat-success-so-far holding off, I've lost probably more than that initial battle, but I'm constantly sending reinforcements through the wormhole. It's a battle of attrition, inleast until the AI just bring out their fortresses and blast the entire planet to pieces.
The really frustrating thing, though, is that this AI isn't clever (I know it's the stupid AI because it's the demo), it's just that the AI has goddamn good ships compared to mine. I can employ all the clever tactics in the world, like flybys with hundreds of raptors all shooting thousands of bolts, but one shot from a core ship cripple their ship's engines and knocks them down to 50% health.
Maybe I shouldn't have attacked the end-of-tutorial boss in the middle of the tutorial.
(Aso, did anyone else take the ion cannon on that one planet instead of destroying it? It took me forever to win that battle, I lost about 2000(!) ships (though they replace fast with 10 engineers), and I pissed the AI off a ton, but now I have the most awesome gun ever, and don't have to keep dodging around that planet. I still get ambushes from it to other planets, though, which is weird.)