What's Your Favorite Ship Type?

[Antonin]

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.

[Suicide Junkie]

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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[Atrocities]

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.

[ZeroAdunn]

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.

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, as a practical matter your 'favorite' will be the size that tends to win the most often. 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.

[Phoenix-D]

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