How are upu going to make an asteroid colony compete with your homeworlds signature?
For instance Earth thermal 54000 EM 165000 typical for a homeworld
Mars with terraformers, Mines fully set up for its 50 million pop Thermal and EM 16000
100 Auto mines EM and Thermal 500
How are you going to fool anyone about which of these is important? Not Possible except by making the colony as important as the homeworld
Oddly the best tactic is always to defend a small area 'He who defends everywhere , defends nowhere' . Which does not mean ignoring your vital colonies instead you have a fleet for that.
10 STO Lasers can be ignored, the fleet can roll over them for shield and armour damage, pit 10 lasers on 20 colonies and they will do nothing. 200 lasers kill ships fast and attacking that planet is hard.
You can sometimes certianly in previous versions bait an NPR into following a lone scout , they get better at that but ambush is hard. If you mean beam range ambush thats not happening the Ships will be detected before they get to beam range, luring someone into a position were missile ships can shoot, you can do that. But could also have done that at the Jump point , or major colony or other place were the NPR will go eventually.
Moving thousands of civilian factories and infrastructure to these asteroids, putting gigantic Orbital habitats with noisy components, putting a gigantic land army...
But yeah, it's probably better to focus on the home-world and other important colonizable planets, and put hundreds of STOs there, while asteroids might get about a few thousand tons of land forces and a single STO or 2.
It isn't about defending a small area per say - it is about dispersing your forces and trying to make the enemy do the same, which in turn makes him vulnerable, especially if your sensors are superior.
Making the enemy surrounded on all sides with numerous smaller fleets and sources of attack.
Or, at least, making the enemy overkill a target that was not exactly worth it.
Buying time for your homeworld to prepare is another potential aspect. It's more about layered semi-autonomous defenses after all.
1 Gigantic and sluggish fleet versus several small specialized strike forces, from various sides? This is the question I'm looking the answer to.
Well, with options of asteroid and planet motion in mind, if there is an asteroid between a jump point and a colony, I'd certainly like to put a small amount of STOs to make it show it's military capabilities/reduce it's missile reserves/buy time.