PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

What do you think is better? The Modiferers seem to lean towards smaller ships. If you consider build rates. Has anyone tried Escort and frigate missile ships, and DD and light cruiser direct fire ships. The combination would work early game. I think even mid game they could work as a picket, shealding the larger ships.

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

I find LC's work quite well up till the point the enemy starts bringing out DN's. You will lose some, but you can build them pretty fast. Endgame I usually stop at BC's myself. They can stand up against even baseships unless they are close to even numbers.

I think the concentration the modders give to small ships is not that they think they are better, but because they think they are worse and are trying to fix them.

Geo

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

Defense modifiers do favour smaller ships, but there are more features that favour large ships.

In unmodded SE4, you need 6 engines to move full speed. Period. Obviously, the larger the ships, the less space and money you spend on engines vs weapons.

The larger mounts available to large ships give more firepower per $ and per KT.

In most cases, larger ships have more survivability than smaller ships.
Take a pair of LCs (400kt) vs a Battleship (800kt). The BB will have about twice an many shield points.
As the ships slug it out, the BB will fall to half shields, while one of the LCs is totally burnt out. The BB is now facing less firepower, and gets an advantage.

Lastly, specialty components are much easier to place on large ships. Where 160kt of electronics and support components can take up most of a small ship, they are only a small fraction of a large ship.
You get cloaking, quantum reactors, full sensors and ECM (including armor ECM) on large ships without sacrificing as much firepower.

However, if you are facing an opponent that is using alternative weapons (non-slugging match), then the larger ships will suffer greatly.
Engine destroyers (but not in the next patch)
Null space
and Allegiance subverters
are the main weapons of this sort.

[ July 17, 2002, 03:00: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

I think in most of the times it is better to use the larger/bigger ships:

- better mounts
- cheaper and faster to build compared to the smaller ones (big<->small = same firepower)
- more firepower if you reach max. ship limit
- are not so fast destroyed in combat (you can repair)
- I simulated many rounds and in most cases the bigger ships win the battle (big<->small = same cost)

'Baseships' are another thing because they are to slow for combat.

---------------

No, I think in the unMODed-game smaller ships are weaker!

Seik

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

If you use smaller ships, LCs are the lowest for reasonable survival rates. Ships without mounts just don't deal enough damage, and are usually too small to carry shields. They can get blown out of the water to the tune of 1/turn per 2-3 enemy BBs or DNs.

I do use small ships for special-ops. An escort with 90kt C&C and engines, 10kt ECM 3, 30kt Stealth Armor 3, and 20kt Plague Bomb 3 is nearly impossible to hit (60+40+15=115% defense plus before the 25% racial modifier http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif ) and work great even deep in enemy territory.

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

I have to agree that the modifiers alone are not enough at present. Smaller ships are too easily outclassed by heavier mounts and weight of shields and other equipment. We need a larger combat area so speeds can be greater, and speed differences can be greater. And heavier mounts probably ought to inflict a penalty to hit rather than a bonus. This would make them more like 'heavy' mount weapons in MOO, where you couldn't target fighters with them for example.

If only a mount could change ALL of the characteristics of a weapon, targetting, damage types, etc. With the new ability to restrict mounts by technology we could cook up some amazing tech trees.

Other than more speed and greater 'to hit' protections I think that detection needs a major revamp in SE. Sensors need to stop working unconditionally over an entire system and actually have diminishing accuracy at greater ranges. This would require the system window to be expanded too, to make more room for ranges. If we have to use a 'windowed' interface like the combat system to access the system map, then that's they way it will have to be done...

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

In my Proportions mod, I tried to address the straight "bigger is better" factors with several logical advantages for smaller ships. I think the result is that the biggest ships are still the most powerful, but smaller ships have many other advantages, so that a mix is often best.

1. As the Baron suggests, I made larger mounts less accurate than smaller ones.

2. I increased the defensive modifiers of smaller ships, and gave negative defensive modifiers to larger ships.

3. I gave offensive modifiers to the smaller ships.

4. My quasi-Newtonian propulsion system gives smaller ships a higher maximum speed, and required far fewer engines than larger ships.

5. Ship size also determines maintenance costs, in favor of smaller ships.

6. There are smaller auxiliary components available than in the standard set, and small weapon mounts, which coupled with the lower engine requirements make smaller ships more viable design-wise.

7. The supply and propulsion system changes mean that large capital ships will either be quite slow or quite short-ranged (unless accompanied by tankers), in addition to being slower than small ships in general. This and the reduced rate of colonization tends to lead to small ship operations on the frontiers, with powerful defensive fleets more limited to developed areas.

8. The reduced rate of resource increase from the other changes means that fleet expense and maintenance costs are more important, so keeping smaller more efficient ships makes even more sense, particularly in peacetime. Players may want to mothball many of their larger ships during peacetime.

PvK

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

I think the trick is, the smaller ships weren't -meant- to be used against the bigger ships, at least not at the MM end. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

I'm working on a few ideas for my mod, intended to expand -both- ends of the spectrum ... bigger ships, and more viability for swarms of smaller ships.

For one brief example: a new Racial Trait, giving a racial technology: "Microscalar Construction" is the current working name; the theme is packing more function in, per kT, than anyone else ... and specialising in very small hulls, comparatively speaking. Eventually, I hope for a Microscalar ship to be about as good, in total, as a ship twice it's size (and probably only moderately less expensive than such a ship, as well). Possibly,much of it will be an ussue of Mounts for Microscalar races, if possible to work only on ships at or UNDER certain displacement levels. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Also, hull modifiers (if it's doable) will reflect both to-hit AND to-not-BE-hit modifiers; smallers hips will not only be harder to hit, they will be more able to SCORE hits ... owing to relative maneuverability.

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

For Crystalline and Organic races the bigger is always better. The reason is the way organic/crystalline armour works.

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

PvK:

I thought of maintenance, too. I've not only increased the basic costs of large hulls, I've added maintenance modifiers to large hulls to increase even the cost of the components. And given some of the smallest hulls a maintenance cut. This makes it possible to have far more tonnage in small ships vs. large. Too bad you cannot teach the AI to use these sorts of advantages.

But as I was saying and forgot to finish in the previous post... if detection were revamped to have range effects and also take the ship size into account then smaller ships would start to have usefulness for 'special' missions where stealth is important.

[ July 17, 2002, 16:19: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

Isn't SJ making Gravitic Sensors in the next Version of P&N so they detect ships based on their size? Hmm, wonder when the next Version of P&N will be available...

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

And just how is he gonna do that? By putting inherent gravitic cloaking on ship hulls? That's still going to be system-wide and unconditional once you get the right level of sensors.

[ July 17, 2002, 21:55: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

Every ship gets grav cloaking based on their size.
Active and passive cloak require the armor components, while psychic cloak involves not having crew (master computers).
In this case, the cloaking devices overpower sensors at max tech.

In order to get undetectable grav cloak, you need frigate or smaller. When you try to apply the other cloaking devices to a frigate hull, you are left with almost nothing for engines and weapons. Larger ships can be detected by massive, base-mounted grav sensors.

So, tiny ships are the only perfect stealth craft, but can be fended off with mines.
Small to medium ships can't be detected except by a huge base, which makes a great target.
The heavier ships can't fully cloak, but can carry enough firepower and defenses to drive their way through with brute force.

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

How many levels of cloaking are you using in your mod? Have you run across any arbitrary limit or does it seem that we can have 10 or 20 levels of cloaking and sensors?

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

Currently, I have only used 3 or 4. But that is 5 separate areas, so it is either 4, 10 or 16, depending on how you look at it.

I currently see no good way to expand all of the cloaking areas equally (some based on master computers, & etc), so I am going to leave it that way for now.

I imagine it would be fairly easy to expand the active and passive to arbitrary depth, and I could have a separate grav cloak level for every hull size, but the racial scanners will still be quite shallow.

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

Baron, you can "program" the AI to build more small ships if you give them more designs. I do this in Proportions because the small ships don't become "obsolete" the way they do in the standard set, so AI's continue to build a mix of ship sizes even when large ships are available.

This also uncovered another advantage of doing this (which originally was done to get the QNP engines right on AI designs): it allows the AI to upgrade smaller ships. It turns out that the AI won't upgrade a small ship if it has a larger design of the same type that it wants, because it will design the largest ship available for each design type it knows how to make. So, if you have one design per size bracket, it will upgrade the ships even when their size is not the largest the empire knows about.

I also tried out the gravitic cloaking for small ships idea. I kind of liked it except for the need to order to "cloak" small ships. However I decided it was overly complicated to add to the standard Proportions mod. I agree though that it would be nice to add range into the detection formula, although there are higher things on the urgency list.

PvK

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

How do you 'program' the AI to build enough small ships when it doesn't have the ability to build big ships yet, and still program it to build enough of the big ships instead of the small ships later on? You can't change the AI files in mid game. Well, you can but that's a bit outside the spes for the game. It's like turning on 'human' management and editing/altering the AI empire. A crutch, not a true option that the game supports in itself.

I can't see how you can have ONE Vehicle Construction file that can work through an entire game.

Re: PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship
 

Very simple.
Two ways: First i hear Gold construction files no longer requie the class but the actual name of the design so it should not be a problem in gold.

Any way the simpliest way is to forbid from AI to research bigger ships by altering Research file and thus make them unable to build larger ships untill you want.

On the topic of the topic (lol):
I can say that smaller ships should not be counted out. I am not an expirienced SEIV player in any way but i am absolutely sure that several of the small ship strategies used against AI could work against human. Smaller ships are cheaper and have built-in defensive bonuses giving them an edge against larger ships that are more bulky.
Smaller ships swarm the enemy and give the advantage to lesser empire unable to support large ships. Later on large ships rule yet still a wize use of small ships, especialy if talking about point-blank escorts with seeker or max-range with WMG.

By that i want to say that i consider smaller ships to be just another tactical tool in the hands of SEIV players.