I also think that nine total turrets in a fleet probably is a bit small, unless your fleet was small.
I had 37 ships in that fleet. Out of those, 18 had defensive priorities, the 9 ships with quad gauss cannons I mentioned earlier and 9 AMM ships. I also had 9 missile cruisers (ASM ships), 4 light cruisers (laser weapons), 4 carriers and 2 sensor ships. And yes, in the heat of the battle I forgot to deploy my fighters aboard the carrier to help with the PD.
How do you manage your fleet compositions? How much PD do you allocate for your fleet?
Armour is also a pretty good way to soak AMM as well if that is your intention... but that works best on really large ships who can afford many layers of armour.
You also can keep some of your own AMM in store and shoot them at the enemy ships rather than their AMM, that will force them to shoot at your AMM rather than your ships and you will eventually drain their AMM storage. You also can withhold firing ASM until you are really close of you carry ASM which also will keep their AMM busy shooting at them instead.
Their ASMs out-ranged my ASMs, but by the time I reached my ASM range they had depleted their missiles without any damage to my fleet so my intention was to get as close as possible before starting to shoot the ASMs so they'd get the least tracking bonus and have less time to react. Since they ran out of ASMs I assumed I'd be safe at about 2m kms to fire my ASMs. That's when their AMM bombardment started, my thought was: 'Hmm, if I was able to easily destroy all their ASMs why shouldn't I wait for them to deplete all their AMMs as well and then I'll just go in and destroy them with my laser weapons, or even better board them'.
That was wrong, even though their AMMs only had 1 damage, they were much faster than the ASMs and I had to use 2 missiles instead of 1 per missile which made my ammo run out even faster and then the escort ships holding the gauss turrets started failing due to lack of MSP and more and more damage was coming through. By the time I realized that I'm in trouble and started launching my ASMs some of my ships were already damaged and a couple more of their volleys were underway as well. It was too late.
This was the first big combat engagement I've had in the game, and it caught me unprepared. But I've learned from it and I'm learning even more discussing about it now on the forum. Thanks for your input!
Personally, my fleet design is as follows:
Cruiser Squadron (CruRon)
- 1x 24,000 ton Jump cruiser (Jump drive with 4 ship squadron jump, 6x dual gauss-67 turrets)
- 3x 24,000 ton Cruisers (30x 0.3 size 6 missile launchers, 2 dual gauss-67 turrets)
Destroyer Squadron (DesRon)
- 1x 12,000 ton Jump Destroyer (Jump drive with 4 ship squadron jump, 2x dual gauss-67 turrets)
- 3x 12,000 ton Destroyer (10 AMM launchers, 4 particle beams)
I try to always pair a CruRon with a DesRon, so a total of 14 dual gauss turrets per fleet minimum, with the gauss cannons being the 67% size version.
So excluding carriers, if I had a fleet of similar size to yours, that would be 4 Cruiser Squadrons and 4 Destroyer squadrons, for a total of 56 dual gauss turrets and 120 amm tubes (3,756 AMMs in magazines)
Admittedly, even that many gauss turrets wouldn’t have been enough to totally stop that many AMMs.