[Saxon]

To add a few points about fleet composition and comment on ramming.

I like to have a fleet that can take care of itself. It seems that battles tend to be focus on single ships, so ships are usually either undamaged or destroyed. However, you will get ships left behind that have some damage and which you would prefer to recover. If they have engine damage, they will slow the entire fleet down, unless you leave them behind. I also hate it when you spend five turns getting a fleet into place, then have to fly it back after the first battle due to a lack of supplies.

As such, I always have a repair ship available. I find that this makes my fleets longer Lasting and less likely to get knocked out by scavengers coming to clean up a battered fleet. Some of the smaller hulls, from Light Cruiser up, can carry a reasonable number of repair components and will not be targeted in a fleet of larger ships.

I also tend to build specialist supply ships. I don’t like wasting precious space on solar panels, so I have big supply ships with a lot of room for supplies. These also add range and operating capacity to a fleet. As a side note, I don’t make these the biggest ship hull available, I go for second biggest. That way they fall lower in the targeting priority than the main combat ships.

On both of these, I throw in some point defence and a single weapon which matches the rest of the fleet. This is only to ensure that they are in the heart of the battle and knocking out missiles. I don’t actually expect them to kill anything, but a few extra PDC can make the difference against a missile oriented opponent.

Since these are valuable ships, I don’t ram with them. Another poster was suggesting all non-combat ships should be given ram orders, but I disagree. I can see putting a colony ship on ramming, as it might get jumped in open space and is finished no matter what, but the ships I am describing don’t go anywhere without a fleet.

Now, I have a question. Some folks like huge numbers of Light Cruisers, as they have a defensive bonus due to size. They say that you shouldn’t worry about building bigger ships. Others say that size is everything (no, the size of the ship) and that you should go as big as possible, especially for heavy mounts. I tend to follow the second argument, but would be interested in what other think should go into their fleets.