What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

Which type of ship do you consider to be your workhorse? I notice the AI tends to build *lots* and *lots* of either light cruisers or dreadnoughts.

Me, I rely on destroyers a lot. Relatively cheap to build and maintain in numbers large enough to have a military presence in a number of systems, big enough to do respectable damage, but not so valuable that losing some will cost you the war.

Frigates are also a lot of fun. A small flotilla of 2 destroyers supported by 5 or so frigates can be a fun instrument for long-distance raids.

I tend to have trouble building up a resource base large enough to support lots of huge ships, so the smaller ones tend to carry the load for me.

I like to use the Klingon ship set I downloaded from New Age Shipyards, so even the small ships look incredibly cool.

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

Well, in regluar SE4 and P&N 1, I build BattleShips & Dreadnaughts, optimised for defense. To see what I mean, check out the Ubernaughts and the $100,000 "BlackHole Combat Fortress" (DN) over at my homepage's story reference.

In P&N v2, I haven't gotten too far up in techs, but I currently feel that Frigate is the optimum size for a frontline warship. I also use LCs because of the LargeMount weapons, but they are expensive to operate (2x the engines of a FG).
When I get the tech, I will surely try out a BlackHole style ship, since that type of design makes the increased engine costs pale in comparison to the internal armor costs.

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Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

Battleships, and Baseships. I use them extensively. I then rely upon destroyers and light cruisers for the bulk of my fleets.

Cheep, and easily built with sufficant fire power and in greater numbers, these ships can kick arse.

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

It depends:

Regular tech, I stich with battleships, I've got a battleship design that can take down almost any ship design you can throw at it, even a baseship, however if it goes against a missile ship it's pretty much screwed, but it will probably take down the enemy as well.

I also go with light cruisers when I use organic tech, they make great gunboats.

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

Well, as a practical matter your 'favorite' will be the size that tends to win the most often. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif So, I bet most people will like battleships and dreadnoughts because the current design of SE favors larger ships. Only at the baseship level does size start to become a liability.

Personally, I'm partial to battlcruisers. They are large enough to pack some punch but still relatively maneuverable not too horribly expensive. It usually turns out though, that you have to build the battleships along with everyone else when the time comes.

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

Except of course that you can throw a great many small ships for each large ship.

This also has the effect of reducing the damage done when ship insurrections "happen".

Plus if the other race is using large ships with large (WMG, Null-Space) guns, smaller ships may stay alive longer. Take one of SJ's battlemoons. Mount 5 core-mount Null-Space projections and a multiplex tracking. Now, any ship that gets hit with 3k of INTERNAL damage is in serious trouble, yes? But it can only fire on 5 ships per 3 turns, and chances are you can field enough ships to overwhelm and destroy the moon.

Oh, and they make lovely suicide ships. Mount up enough boarding parties to take over a ship (probably max), knock out the target's shields, board. Chances are he'll have a SSD and both ships will blow, BUT if he's using a large, powerful ship the exhange will be more than worth it.

Phoenix-D

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

For me -- late-game, mostly Battleships, since they can attain the top speeds (DNs are 1 lower) due to rounding rules, and they've got enough space for stuff like a space yard or lots of cargo (for invasions), and still be able to be survivable with heavy shielding, QR, PDC et al -- I like having large, amorphous fleets that can split temporarily and still be quite viable. Certain speciality ships may be BC (My biowarfare ships don't need the additional space, for instance).

Standardizing on hull also enables refits between ship classes -- I'll often have a DN combat type, because even if I don't build that many of it (compared to BBs) I may CI-capture enemy DNs. So there'll may be missile ships, PPB ships, APB ships, tractor/NSP/repulsor ships, bombers, invaders... a variety pack, but mostly the same size. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif



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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

Dreadnaughts and battleships usually make up my warfleets, and my support vessels are often battleships or battlecruisers, or at least whatever my highest ship tech is at the time. I don't usually make Dreadnaught-class support vessels, as I usually re-assign them to other various tasks.

However, I also make use of frigates quite often, in a role I had previously used escorts for (you heard me, escorts), the role of terror weapon. Using a combination of stealth armor, scattering armor, and ECM, the frigate has a total defense bonus of 110%. Add in ship training facilities (and fleet training facilities) and the end result is a ship that is almost impossible to hit for any but the most pious of races. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif

Now with two solar collectors, a solar sail, a master computer, and 6 quantum engines, there's not much that can be put on this ship, so I just slap on my highest level plague bomb. And it can hardly ever be hit, even by planetary defenses, and it only needs to hit a planet once to be effective, so even if weapons platforms or defensive fleets get in a few lucky shots, it still has a very good chance of infecting the planet below.

I can only imagine the look on an Emperor's face as he gets a report of a small group of frigates destroying his empire, and all those dreadnaughts and starbases can't do anything about it. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

-Hotfoot
"Now, unleash the Terrors of the Shaderni."

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

"Add in ship training facilities (and fleet training facilities) and the end result is a ship that is almost impossible to hit for any but the most pious of races."

Talk about not having a prayer of hitting a ship..

Phoenix-D

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

My favorite is probably Cruisers. I usually need to research up to that size anyway, since it's the smallest hull that will hold a Shipyard and still have room for controls and engines.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

LC's are my workhorses. I use them for all of my support ships except SY's. For my main fighting ship I try to stay within 2 sizes of my opponent. I very rarely build Baseships or DN's. They take to long to build. Occasionally I use carriers.

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

In response to Hotfoot:
I like the biowar frigate idea. To be honest I have never used bioweapons, what exactly happens when one planet gets hit with a plague bomb? That single planet slowly dies off due to diminishing population?

I use LC's a lot in the beginning. I use Cruisers as repair ships since they'll hold two repair bays. At later stages the Battleship is my favorite: it has Heavy mounts, but can still move fast. I don't like the bigger designs like Dreadnoughts since they slow down my entire fleet.
My perfect fleet has about 50 ships, 15 of which are support ships. 2 Cruiser repair ships, 4 Cruiser fuel ships, 6-8 minesweepers, the rest mostly Battleships and LC's. This way I can attack a system, split off some forces to clean up (destroy) the planets there, and send the main force on with enough minesweepers to still sweep 100 mines.

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

Phoenix-D:
Yeah, it's rather frightening, I think that the total defense bonus using a race with an average ship defense stat is something along the lines of 150%. Even fighters with combat sensors are going to have a heck of a time hitting it reliably, and capships had better have a few talismans on board to have a chance.

Dragonlord:
I stumbled on the concept when I went MEE in this one game that I played, and my main fleets were off on the other end of the galaxy, and I didn't have the time or the resources to build and maintain a whole new fleet. So, the initial design for my Terror-class escort was born. The first vessel destroyed a total of nearly twenty planets by itself, most being small "buffer" colonies. The higher level the plague bomb, the faster the population dies, and the population keeps dying until a ship with a medical bay is put in orbit around the planet (since that day almost all of my space station designs have a medical bay on board over my most important planets, just in case). Smaller colony worlds usually die in one turn with plague level 5, homeworlds and largers colonies can Last for several turns with most of the lower level plagues, while level 5 usually rips huge chunks out of the population right away.

I don't know about using this tactic against humans, since it takes longer to research medical bays than plague bombs by a rather significant amount. It could be seen as cheap in PBW or PBEM, but I love using it against computers.

Another amusing note, before the emergency propulsion bug was fixed, I started a high tech game for the hell of it, made a baseship with loads of emergency propulsion, repair bays, quantum reactor, and a plague bomb level 5.

A baseship with enough propulsion to traverse the galaxy in one turn, enough repair bays to fix every emergency propulsion unit every turn...and all it needs to do is hit a planet once to doom it for all time.

It was so beautiful. If only I had remembered to put shields on it. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon9.gif

-Hotfoot
"Ah well, it was fun seeing something so big move so damn fast."

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

"Captain, Our gunnery systems can't get a lock on that frigate dropping plague bombs on our homeworld! What do we do?"

"Well, isn't he a tricky bugger. Well, if we can't hit him with our guns, we'll hit him with our ship! We _ARE_ twice as big as he is, after all. RAMMING SPEED!"

I'm afraid your little ship is about to get squished, hotfoot.

Re: What\'s Your Favorite Ship Type?
 

There's still a slight problem with that..

..one ship, one bomb, one planet infected. Everything else is just pouring salt. And how many of these ships could he throw for each large one?

EDIT: Oh, and don't forget about the armor. It helps some.

Anyway, I just made one of these. Only 20k of space for weapons, but two of these ships (with meson bLasters) at range one have a grand total of 1% chance to hit each other http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

It'd be better if you had combat sensors, of course, but with combat sensors, it still only goes to 20%. And that's at point-blank range.

Phoenix-D

[This message has been edited by Phoenix-D (edited 29 July 2001).]