How to survive a design hack

Question

I wanted to do a design hack in a beginner's game of AI War. I've done some hacking before to lower the AI threat, but the "expected AI response to hacking" was "Low". So I produced the maximum of all my unit types [about 4 types, 4 levels each], stationed a few cloaked design hackers on the planet and waited.

After the necessary 10 minutes [which took about 20 real minutes even when the game was sped up :], there were over 6,000 AI ships attacking me, my ~1300 ships were long dead and it seemed I had no chance of recovering.

Often when I was overwhelmed in this game, I loaded a previous position, softened the enemy with an attack [destroying the threatening ships], rebuilding my fleet and then defending against the weakened incoming waves. However I have no idea how to handle them in this case. Can it be done? How?

Answer 1

I find that softening the enemy doesn't do much to stop the main problem, which is the reinforcements triggered by the hacking. Instead I set up a beachhead on the enemy system, around the entry wormhole. I set up a force field around the wormhole, with some turrets and engineers to back it up. Keep in mind that Flak and Lightning turrets retain more of their firepower under forcefields than other variants. Then I sit my main battle group over the wormhole, set my engineers on auto-repair, and only then do I bring in my hackers.