What's Your Favorite Ship Type?

[Taqwus]

For me -- late-game, mostly Battleships, since they can attain the top speeds (DNs are 1 lower) due to rounding rules, and they've got enough space for stuff like a space yard or lots of cargo (for invasions), and still be able to be survivable with heavy shielding, QR, PDC et al -- I like having large, amorphous fleets that can split temporarily and still be quite viable. Certain speciality ships may be BC (My biowarfare ships don't need the additional space, for instance).

Standardizing on hull also enables refits between ship classes -- I'll often have a DN combat type, because even if I don't build that many of it (compared to BBs) I may CI-capture enemy DNs. So there'll may be missile ships, PPB ships, APB ships, tractor/NSP/repulsor ships, bombers, invaders... a variety pack, but mostly the same size.



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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Hotfoot]

Dreadnaughts and battleships usually make up my warfleets, and my support vessels are often battleships or battlecruisers, or at least whatever my highest ship tech is at the time. I don't usually make Dreadnaught-class support vessels, as I usually re-assign them to other various tasks.

However, I also make use of frigates quite often, in a role I had previously used escorts for (you heard me, escorts), the role of terror weapon. Using a combination of stealth armor, scattering armor, and ECM, the frigate has a total defense bonus of 110%. Add in ship training facilities (and fleet training facilities) and the end result is a ship that is almost impossible to hit for any but the most pious of races.

Now with two solar collectors, a solar sail, a master computer, and 6 quantum engines, there's not much that can be put on this ship, so I just slap on my highest level plague bomb. And it can hardly ever be hit, even by planetary defenses, and it only needs to hit a planet once to be effective, so even if weapons platforms or defensive fleets get in a few lucky shots, it still has a very good chance of infecting the planet below.

I can only imagine the look on an Emperor's face as he gets a report of a small group of frigates destroying his empire, and all those dreadnaughts and starbases can't do anything about it.

-Hotfoot
"Now, unleash the Terrors of the Shaderni."

[Phoenix-D]

"Add in ship training facilities (and fleet training facilities) and the end result is a ship that is almost impossible to hit for any but the most pious of races."

Talk about not having a prayer of hitting a ship..

Phoenix-D

[capnq]

My favorite is probably Cruisers. I usually need to research up to that size anyway, since it's the smallest hull that will hold a Shipyard and still have room for controls and engines.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[Marty Ward]

LC's are my workhorses. I use them for all of my support ships except SY's. For my main fighting ship I try to stay within 2 sizes of my opponent. I very rarely build Baseships or DN's. They take to long to build. Occasionally I use carriers.

[Dragonlord]

In response to Hotfoot:
I like the biowar frigate idea. To be honest I have never used bioweapons, what exactly happens when one planet gets hit with a plague bomb? That single planet slowly dies off due to diminishing population?

I use LC's a lot in the beginning. I use Cruisers as repair ships since they'll hold two repair bays. At later stages the Battleship is my favorite: it has Heavy mounts, but can still move fast. I don't like the bigger designs like Dreadnoughts since they slow down my entire fleet.
My perfect fleet has about 50 ships, 15 of which are support ships. 2 Cruiser repair ships, 4 Cruiser fuel ships, 6-8 minesweepers, the rest mostly Battleships and LC's. This way I can attack a system, split off some forces to clean up (destroy) the planets there, and send the main force on with enough minesweepers to still sweep 100 mines.

[Hotfoot]

Phoenix-D:
Yeah, it's rather frightening, I think that the total defense bonus using a race with an average ship defense stat is something along the lines of 150%. Even fighters with combat sensors are going to have a heck of a time hitting it reliably, and capships had better have a few talismans on board to have a chance.

Dragonlord:
I stumbled on the concept when I went MEE in this one game that I played, and my main fleets were off on the other end of the galaxy, and I didn't have the time or the resources to build and maintain a whole new fleet. So, the initial design for my Terror-class escort was born. The first vessel destroyed a total of nearly twenty planets by itself, most being small "buffer" colonies. The higher level the plague bomb, the faster the population dies, and the population keeps dying until a ship with a medical bay is put in orbit around the planet (since that day almost all of my space station designs have a medical bay on board over my most important planets, just in case). Smaller colony worlds usually die in one turn with plague level 5, homeworlds and largers colonies can Last for several turns with most of the lower level plagues, while level 5 usually rips huge chunks out of the population right away.

I don't know about using this tactic against humans, since it takes longer to research medical bays than plague bombs by a rather significant amount. It could be seen as cheap in PBW or PBEM, but I love using it against computers.

Another amusing note, before the emergency propulsion bug was fixed, I started a high tech game for the hell of it, made a baseship with loads of emergency propulsion, repair bays, quantum reactor, and a plague bomb level 5.

A baseship with enough propulsion to traverse the galaxy in one turn, enough repair bays to fix every emergency propulsion unit every turn...and all it needs to do is hit a planet once to doom it for all time.

It was so beautiful. If only I had remembered to put shields on it.

-Hotfoot
"Ah well, it was fun seeing something so big move so damn fast."