Stealth and being faster are good counters to it, if you maneuver yourself to 21 away from them, then speed up and rush, they get maybe 1-2 turns of long range fire on you before you're in their face. And look at the cost of range 30 weapons, those handful of bombardments will not make up for the volume of fire you can get for the same cost at close range with smaller range brackets. Cloaking with faster ships works as well, infact you can try to remain cloaked for an additional turn (free rush if it works, and being harder to hit if it doesn't). Deal with these ships in the same way you would deal with a sniper, by getting in its face and making all the advantages of its range superiority absolute moot. And as Cricket pointed out, fighters fighters fighters.

On a side note Cricket, I'm not sure floating board would be a good idea, the last thing this poor fellow needs is his enemies making all his weapons EF and L arc, facing away, and flying away and firing his butt lasers while Goji struggles to close the range gap. With the map the current way it is, his opponent is stuck in the corner with nowhere to run.

Even better than fighters, is using strikers.  These are much cheeper and while you are charging at the horde, these weapons are also doing the same.  Have them in flights of four.  Make sure to put level one shields on them because these cause one sixth of the hits on them to bounce off while not costing one sixth more.  All of my drones (Strikers)  have level one shields.
[We rarely use fighters down here, because they get shot down so easily, which makes them not too cost effective.]
Also, we have reserved any weapons that shoot farther than 18 to be for bases only.  Remember that weapons that shoot farther than 18 hexes are OPTIONAL. 8-)
Just do what we did:  Shipboard weapons in your games have a maximum range of 18. Period.
When you close, if there is still a horde with range 18 weapons, make sure you are close to a hex line/firing arc line to make it more difficult for single arc weapons to be able to keep firing.  Their player will have to guess which arc you will be in when you get to range 18 & Less... :geek:
Hordes Can be delt with effectively...

Gotta go with strikers or seekers (which are even cheaper than strikers) and if designed with the bomber trait, tend to ignore anything but their target. Have some smaller ships with high shields and stealth to act as incoming magnets while your missile carriers unload...

If he likes to cluster his ships, then use the AoE trait as well. A bit pricier up front, but that may be traded off by a force multiplier of more ships hit for the bang.

It takes up 10% of the available space, so it should be 4 SU/ship.

Thanks, all!  Happy hunting!

The more you curtail weapon ranges, the more interesting maneuver becomes. We've had some very fun games with the upper limit at 9.

You might try stacking up the defenses on your superdreadnoughts. 5 shields, 20 hull, armor, countermeasures, regeneration, stealth ... sure, they'll get some hits on you, but a lot of their firepower will be wasted.

If the enemy takes the "thousand points of light" strategy to an extreme, area effect weapons are your friend. If they dare not be adjacent, a large fleet must be spread over many hexes. You'll be able to attack the fringe of this fleet without being in range of all of it.

Oh, and certainly use the explosion rule.

If the maximum range of weapons is nine or even twelve, speed 15 fighters and drones(strikers) will ravage your fleet and you will not even get a shot before they make their attack...
We have found 18 to work well...

A good way to get around it might be make a rule that says anti fighter batteries fire before the fighters attack. That way anti fighter batteries aren't useless vs strikers and seekers, and don't start shooting down fighters when it could be "too little too late".

I've been pining for AFBs that shoot first and ask questions later for a while now. I have taken to adding point defense to all of my high priority and "sniper" type ships to do that job, as much as they can, but I would still rather "pay" for AFBs that could shoot down missiles/strikers/seekers whatever like "point defense" is typically depicted.
Erik
Edit: I think that the Trekmada Anti-Drone shooting is a step in the right direction...

Except me.   

Have to agree would be good for AFBs to be some use, but that would disadvantage fighters/seekers/strikers further, which as they are an antidote to the dull sit there and shoot everything with lots of long range guns tactic, would be a shame.

Another way to tackle these issues is to contextualise the Starmada games - if they are part of a campaign that has objectives, such as bases or planets to capture, I don't see a problem.  As mentioned above, the tactic of sitting in the corner with lots of guns is a good one if you want to defend, and that's why defensive forces usually have a slight advantage.  If the scenarios force one side or another to attack, and allow forces that are imbalanced, the issue vanishes.  Its only a problem in one off fire fight scenarios where there are no goals.

How you generate these objectives - could be through a campaign system such as VBAM or something simpler, or you could add in an option that gives one side an objective to capture/destroy worth VPs - if destroyed/captured the attacker gets the VPs, otherwise the defender gets them.  All the defender would have to do is sit there.  The attacker could have maybe half the objective's VPs in extra ships.

There is a very nice method of balancing things out in nearly every tabletop game you play. Tip came from an old White Dwarf issue I think regarding terrain: One player sets-up all the terrain then the other player chooses on which side of the table he wants to deploy his forces.

This method can also be extended to the forces itself. One player designs the forces and the other players choose first (roll dice to determine the order among them) after giving them some time to analyse the ships. The designed forces have to be sufficiently different. If this is still not working try to restrict key features for each faction. Faction A only builds hulls <6, Faction B cannot have Shields >3, Faction C uses only weapons with ranges <=12, Faction D has all Tech Levels -1 and so on.

If the factions are fun the designer may modify his creations for the next battle to adress weaknesses and no player may choose the same faction twice in a row. This technique can even create a healthy metagame where your pick is based on the picks other players took before you.

@EDIT: Another method often used with imbalanced scenarios in wargames is paired games: Players agree to always play two games, the second one with switched sides. In this way minmaxers have no choice but to be beaten by their own minmaxed fleet and will hopefully design balanced ships.