Small ships vs Big ships

[PvK]

Heh.

Probably a mix is best for most purposes. For example, ideally, the enemy might be trying and usually failing to swat your smaller ships, while your bigger ships pound them.

Smaller ships are much cheaper to maintain, and can be very difficult to hit, especially if the enemy only has big clumsy ships. The smallest (scout and escort class) ships usually can't hold strong enough weapons to effectively engage larger ships, but they can be used as raiders, nuisance ships, and support ships.

Frigates and destroyers can both be useful in fleets. They still lack the punch of larger ships, but can do meaningful damage, and are good platforms for PD, seekers. They can also serve well with regular weapons, giving the enemy the choice of either trying to hit them, or ignoring them and getting hit by them. They can distract a lot of enemy attention from your bigger ships. Their natural attack bonuses from agility mean they don't need as much ECM/sensor expense.

Bigger ships are still the most powerful, but in Proportions they cost more like what they're worth, or even more. Although they are more expensive, use lots of supplies to move, and are even more expensive if you try to make them fast, having the best and most powerful heavy ships can make the difference between victory and defeat in a large battle. The trick is deciding how big and how expensive you need to go to get an advantage, catching the enemy fleet with your superior ships, and making it all not so expensive you win one fight but lose several others.

There are also decisions to make about what level of components to use, and how much space to devote to protection verus weapons. For example, armor gets better and better at higher levels, but the cost goes up even more steeply. You may want to try large ships with cheap components, or small ships with expensive ones, in some cases. Unlike the unmodded game, armored structure makes a large difference in a ship's ability to absorb damage. A ship with 1/4 to 1/2 its mass in armored structure will tend to be able to take several times the amount of hits of a ship with just weapons.

Another approach is to have cheap and small ships on patrol during peace time, with large and expensive ships mothballed. Or, just keep a large resource reserve, plenty of shipyards, and build a new expensive fleet when a war breaks out. Then win the war before the reserves run out.

PvK

[ March 22, 2004, 21:24: Message edited by: PvK ]

[Suicide Junkie]

I haven't played enough proportions to help, sorry.

Some mods restore some uses and effectiveness to smaller ships, though. See Proportions mod and AIC mod for example (and probably P&N and Adamant, I would guess - any mod with Quasi-Newtonian Propulsion will help at least somewhat).

The new SJmod has a unique system for ship value...
The little ships get you way more bang for your construction buck, but the maintenance costs on all ships are about the same.
The 400kt "Frigates" are pretty good for quickly mustering up some cannon fodder, or 200kt "Escorts" if you have a lot of slower BSY.
With construction time rising proportional to size cubed, 800kt of 1000kt ships are probably the best you can hope for in your main lines.
However, if you have lots of time on your hands, the biggest ships are the best, since every ship costs about 1000 in maintenance (scaled to stock-minerals) no matter what size it is.

[Yef]

Thanks for the responses.

Another question, do you you think it may be worth it to go fighters instead of ships?

In the unmodded game, fighters were too powerful, IMHO, and in Proportions, despite doing a damage of only 4 per gun, I have taken on Heavy Base ships with 200 fighters. Talk about X-wing fighters and the Death Star.

I'm fighting the Dopplenganger, and for some reason the AI insists in sending unescorted HeavyBaseships against my fleet of 3 carriers, despite being defeated time and again.
It think it have to do with the building.txt.
Maybe the dopplenganger AI its not optimazed for Proportions?

[Gozra]

I really feel that is is not a question of little ships v. big ships. Each ship size plays a role in any Empire. Combined arms are invauable and fleets that employ this tactic are hard to beat. I tried building LC's with drones and when that fleet went against a comparible sized fleet of BC's the LC fleet beat the BC's however nearly all the LC's had sustained damage in the battle but all survived. I also found that ES's make great police ships. It helps your happines a great deal to have 2 or more ships in orbit over a planet and ES make good guards in that respect. ES's and FR's also make good Kamikazi ships. And a great deal depends on how you set up your empire. All ship sizes fighters, drones, are useful. I am in a mature game right now (Last Man Standing) And The Fleet uses all sizes. Every Ship size plays a role.

[rdouglass]

PVK hit on my favorite mid-to-late-game usage of small ships; nuisance ships.

While your main battle fleets engage the larger enemy ships, send small recon fleets of smaller ships. Even if they just sit in an enemy system, they lower happiness and (hopefully) start a few riots, destroy a few unguarded transports or colonizers, etc; just annoy the heck out of the inner systems and keep 'em chasing YOU. See how quickly many will retreat to restore peace and order (and income!!!) to their monetary infrastructure.

Just my $.02

[zen.]

I totally forgot about the effect enemy ships have on a system! I've found that smaller ships are good missiliers, dishing out decent damage for their size to compensate for mounts. By using their speed, they can spread missile fire pretty effectively. The downside, of course, is they're more easily destroyed where a larger ship would only be damaged.

I usually have logistics and repair ships following main fleets, so I lean towards powerful larger ships that can multitask. Diverse forces are usually the best.

For me, anway. Guess it always depends on your style of play and the mod you're playing!

zen

[spoon]

Only thing I use small ships for later in the game is when I have to churn out a ship asap. Combat-wise, I find that a swarm of frigates/destroyer ship capture ships can sometimes decimate a much larger (tonnage-wise) enemy fleet.