Getting rid of excess ships

[Grumbling Grognard]

Well...

Something I am sure I am not alone in doing is refitting my obsolete (ie too damn small) ships with nothing but engines, armor and as many colbalt warheads as they can hold. Even a small frigate packed with warheads can KO a basestation on a suicide run!

Only downside is those colbalt warheads are expensive!

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The Grumbling Grognard

[JeffM]

Frigates make good mobile miners.

I generally don't even build escorts, too small. But if I do, they generally don't survive long.

Instead, I research the frigate size ship right away and then build them.

[Machetti]

interesting.

i just went through the 100 turns that the demo allows, came in first, but i don't think i even researched anything beyond frigate. i understand that in later game tactics that you need those space-consuming peripherals to keep up with the jones', and there's something to be said for trying to get most efficient use out of those components by having lots and lots of guns on board.
but before you get to those, there's really only one difference between a big honkin' ship and many small ones: the big ship is easier to hit, easier to target, easier to corner, and is a bigger loss if something goes wrong. with a large fleet of smaller ships, if someone gets a lucky shot in, big deal. i've got a bazillion other ships there waiting to blow you to smithereens.

i should probably keep my mouth shut. someone's liable to bLast me with my own advice.

[AaronEdward]

I have played A while and what I like is A Cruiser outfitted with organic armor, long range weaponry, and close to 500 points of shields. that in a fleet along with about 3 Light Cruisers outfitted similarly, but with fewer shields, and shorter range weapons. The reason I use 500 shields is the stinkin computer uses a wave motion gun and sends them one at a time into combat. My Cruiser can take the one hit with the WM gun and live to kill about it, and the Lc's can also move in behind the cruiser and bLast the stinkin jerk out of space. The Ai only uses Light Cruisers, so this strategy works well.

That's how I help the enemy with their excess ships.


[This message has been edited by AaronEdward (edited 09 August 2000).]

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by Machetti:
interesting.

i just went through the 100 turns that the demo allows, came in first, but i don't think i even researched anything beyond frigate. i understand that in later game tactics that you need those space-consuming peripherals to keep up with the jones', and there's something to be said for trying to get most efficient use out of those components by having lots and lots of guns on board.
but before you get to those, there's really only one difference between a big honkin' ship and many small ones: the big ship is easier to hit, easier to target, easier to corner, and is a bigger loss if something goes wrong. with a large fleet of smaller ships, if someone gets a lucky shot in, big deal. i've got a bazillion other ships there waiting to blow you to smithereens.

i should probably keep my mouth shut. someone's liable to bLast me with my own advice.

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Remember, the real capital ships are not available in the demo. The cruiser is the largest thing you can get. While it's true that there are certain advantages to small ships, such as a free defense bonus and the simple fact of extra targets making for more chances to miss, there is an "economics of scale" with the larger ships. They do more damage per ton due to both less duplication of ship control and engines and the increasing power of weapons mounts. This "small ships" strategy may not hold in the full game, especially after combat sensors are fully researched. And anyway, you need larger ships for a lot of non-combat functions. Medium and large transports are much more effective for their maintenance costs than small transports, for example, and you need at least a battle cruiser to mount most of the Stellar Manipulation technology.

[Taqwus]

AE>>

I once saw an AI fleet of 10 LCs and CAs. But it was in a game with maximum starting power (plenty of resources and planets, medium tech, large galaxy...), and they were wiped out by my fleet of 6 CAs...


Mach>>

Frigates don't take Large weapons. Depending on your tech trees, Large can make a huge difference -- it appears to double the probability that an Allegiance Shifter or Mind Flailer works, for instance. So when that move-5 CA charges, the probability that it converts your best ship or battlestation is very high.

And the other beams cause more damage overall as well as dmg/kt even before counting overhead, which is important given things like emissive armor which allow you to ignore normal-size Versions of a LOT of the weapons in the demo... If the weapons don't breach my CA's armor, then the enemies' numbers are largely irrelevant as long as I can avoid being rammed and they lack specials like allegiance shifters.



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-- The thing that goes bump in the night