Jump Point Attack.

[Theoatmeal2 (OP)]

Any suggestions on a fleet completely dedicated to clearing jump points?

[kilo]

Clearing jump points is a delicate subject and can be extremely painful. You are jumping vast amounts of resources and construction time into an ambush, but who am I to tell you that? It becomes exponentially more difficult the less you know about the enemy, but there are a few things you can do:

1. If the defender uses missiles bring ONLY ships with CIWS. These can defend themselves against missiles to some extend. Ships with other forms of missile defenses are undefended and get all the good news.
2. Put quite some armor and shields on the vessels you want to use. It is going to be a close range fight and hit rates and damage done by weapons will be significant.
3. And probably most important, do NOT do standard transit ever.

Now back to tactics:
What you should have done is put up some sensors in the general area of the jump point so that you can time your entry through the jump point with their maintenance time. This is out of the window now, I guess.
Alternatively, you could send some chaff through. Use your fighter factories or ground construction to build the cheapest and smallest piece of equipment possible, bring it to the jump point via carrier and jump them 5 seconds prior to your fleet. The AI is pretty good at shooting it's guns into these objects. They need to be big enough to be seen though and missile sized crap might go by unnoticed.

[nuclearslurpee]

1. If the defender uses missiles bring ONLY ships with CIWS. These can defend themselves against missiles to some extend. Ships with other forms of missile defenses are undefended and get all the good news.

Based on my own experience I am fairly sure that beam PD will work just fine, since jump shock is implemented essentially as a crew Reaction penalty which does not affect PD. At least, the last time my railgun fleet assaulted a jump point PD was not a problem for me. I am not sure if AMMs would work the same way, but they are bad for JP assaults anyways as you rarely have the necessary distance to make use of them. CIWS is bad as it only protects a single ship and is nearly useless for even a 3-4 ship jump squadron.

Generally for a specialized warp assault fleet, you want ships with extra armor - not shields, as these will not be as efficient in terms of protection per HS. Possibly for a sufficiently large ship shields may be effective due to the randomness of armor damage but generally, you will make one assault and then send the fleet back for repairs so you should prioritize tactical efficiency and accept the higher repair costs. Otherwise, you want to use high-power beam weapons at close range - plasma and railguns are effective here, lasers will also be fine, particle lances will give a powerful alpha strike if you have them. Missile fleets will struggle due to close range and impracticality of syncing fire.

You will also want good engines (here you can trade range for a higher EP boost since you do not need to carry out extended campaigns with this fleet), to make sure you can either close with or evade the defenders depending on the tactical situation. It will also help to quickly regroup your fleet after the squadron jump to concentrate PD fire if the defenders use missiles. And finally of course you want to have as much tech into jump drives as possible, particularly the squadron jump techs to allow large jump squadrons (== more effective initial PD capabilities) and larger squadron jump distance (== out of enemy beam range until your targeting computers come back online).

However probably the most important thing is to outmass the enemy as much as possible. Against an NPR this is usually possible as they will only defend with one large fleet (plus maybe 1-2 small squadrons), against a human player race this can be tricky unless you have multiple borders. Thus in the latter case an important supplement to your jump assault fleet is a robust exploration fleet to find those alternate routes, either to surprise the enemy in his flanks or more likely to force him to divide his attention.

[Zincat]

I would seriously invest in scouting beforehand. If possible it's of course always nice to leave small "spy" ships in the enemy territory, to monitor things and get intel. And yes, you do risk ruin relationships with that but...

If you are already at the stage of a jump point attack, and know very little about the enemy, I'd probably just not do it unless absolutely necessary OR you're sure you massively outnumber the enemy.

A very costly solution to get more intel could be to build a few heavily armored sensor ships, and send them in first. They will all die, but hopefully they'll collect useful info on the enemy so you can tailor your fleet for the task at hand.

Bottom line, what fleet you want for a jump assault, and in fact whether or not you should attempt it at all, depends a LOT on what the enemy has. The best solution might just be to blockade the jump point yourself on your side, and expand in other directions while you get stronger.

[Noble713]

For offensive punch: either go with box-launcher missile spam, or railguns + spinal mounts/particle lances.
For survivability: insane levels of armor + long-range squadron jumps

Here's where I had to work through a similar problem in VB6 Aurora:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8432.0

In hindsight, the kill ratio that I racked up demonstrates why size-1 ASM spam is kinda considered cheezy against the AI...

[Marski]

Any suggestions on a fleet completely dedicated to clearing jump points?

Massed squadron-jump of missileboats, even 10 boats is sufficient if they're fast. Launch everything at whatever you can reach and scatter. If the enemy takes the bait and detaches ships to chase down your boats, jump in and engage the now-weakened jump-point vanguard. If they're staying put, you either abandoned the boats to their death or commit to the assault and jump the rest of your fleet in.

Opposed jump-point assaults are always a bloody affair.